Japan Times with a piece that fits with incremental reports being received out of China, where media is tightly controlled.
- Local officials, under pressure to implement Chinese President Xi Jinping’s strict “COVID zero” policy with less impact on society and the economy, are instead trying to stay under the radar, communicating restrictions with businesses directly, or shutting small sections of a city incrementally to avoid the panic of a blanket order. In some cases, residents aren’t even being told, coming home to find they’re locked down.
The article gives an example:
- in Zhengzhou, a city in central China that’s home to Taiwanese company Foxconn Technology Group’s vast iPhone assembly site. Officials have progressively imposed a web of small lockdowns and restrictions on areas as small as an apartment block. The effect is that the city of some 13 million is now almost entirely locked down, without the market-roiling headlines that accompanied Shanghai’s shutdown order, or the city-wide lockdown of Chengdu in September.
Earlier in the week I posted on workers escaping from the FoxConn facility to avoid lockdowns.
Check out that link to the Times above for more.
Chinese economic indicators have been crumbling, the PMIs this week, for October, are all in contraction. Looks like November might be the same at this rate.
