A growing number of imported coronavirus cases in China, where the epidemic originated in December, risked fanning a second wave of infections when domestic transmissions had “basically been stopped”, a senior health official said on Sunday.
Has the world at large and WHO particularly missed a massive elephant in China? .. To determine how large the COVID-19 epidemic was in China is information that we need urgently. The only way to get it is by careful antibody prevalence surveys, which we hope WHO will be demanding from China.
Chinese diplomats are taking an increasingly strident tone on US President Donald Trump’s favourite battleground Twitter, as Beijing works to shift the narrative away from its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, which was first reported in central China last year.
China’s decision to take reciprocal measures against several US media outlets in the country shows that China-US relations are deteriorating rapidly, and tilting into a new Cold War that the US started. The current situation, which stems from the long-term ideological conflicts between the two countries, urged the US side to correct its wrongdoings in suppressing China. Otherwise, a sharp escalation in souring relations is in sight, said analysts.
A series of grim economic numbers from China have given the world a glimpse of what might lie ahead, as countries embark on draconian coronavirus containment measures. The Chinese economy went into free fall over the first two months of the year, data released on Monday showed, with industry, retail and investment all shrinking for the first time in history, each by double-digits.
Hailing “victory to Wuhan” and saluting its people as heroes, Chinese President Xi Jinping used his first trip to the
In the post-Mao era, the Chinese people and Communist Party leaders have adhered to an implicit social contract: the people tolerate the party’s political monopoly, as long as the party delivers economic progress and adequate governance. The party’s poor handling of the COVID-19 outbreak has threatened this tacit pact.
Since the Wuhan lockdown began, there have been tensions between local government and the central organs of the state. There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’.
President Xi Jinping had warned his Chinese Communist Party cadres in late January 2019 to be prepared for unforeseen incidents (black swans) and highly probable but uncontrollable rampages (gray rhinos) in the year to come. Initially, the U.S.-China trade war and Hong Kong demonstrations were thought to be the big events of this “9” year. But the biggest disruption would not appear until December.
The COVID-19 outbreak has hit at a time of much greater economic vulnerability than in 2003, during the SARS outbreak, and China’s share of world output has more than doubled since then. With other major economies already struggling, the risk of outright global recession in the first half of 2020 seems like a distinct possibility.
