How is China’s economy recovering post-Covid? For a start, they have introduced a nationwide scheme to conduct regular Covid-19 tests on all of its citizens, particularly workers returning to their offices and factories, and is rapidly improving both the availability and affordability of test kits.
After a massive testing blitz, costing nearly $US127 million and involving 10.9 million people being tested over two weeks (the entire city population over the age of six), the city of Wuhan, the city worst hit by Covid-19 and where the virus started, has now been officially declared “Covid free” and China’s “safest city”.
Meanwhile, the economy is slowly recovering, with a promise to introduce extra stimulus measures of up to US$500 billion to create 9 million jobs and blunt the fallout from the pandemic. China observers have been shocked by the decision not to release a GDP growth target for this year, the first time this has happened in decades, due to the great uncertainty caused by Covid-19. In addition, China’s economy is reported to have contracted by 6.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2020, making it the first time that Beijing has reported a negative GDP growth rate since 1976.
By all accounts, Chinese people are getting back to work, shopping, eating out and trying to get back to “normal” after the lockdown. Domestic tourism is picking up again and China’s manufacturing engine is bouncing back strongly. According to a local government spokesman, “as of March 25, the resumption rate of large and medium-sized enterprises was 96.6 per cent, an increase of 17.7 per cent from the survey results on February 25.”
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