Faced with its worst Covid-19 outbreak yet, China has been enforcing an expanding number of mass quarantines, strict lockdowns and border controls. The measures may yet work, but official data released Monday show they are exacting a grim toll on the world’s second-largest economy.
China’s economy expanded 4.8% in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year. That pace was barely faster than the final three months of last year, and it also obscured a looming problem.
Much of that growth was recorded in January and February. Last month, economic activity slowed as Shenzhen, the technology hub in the south, and then Shanghai, the country’s biggest city, and other important industrial centers shut down. The lockdowns suspended assembly lines, grounded workers, trapped truck drivers and snarled ports. They confined hundreds of millions of consumers at home.
The slowdown that started in March is expected to worsen this month, with even more regions placed under restrictions.
For the world, China’s Covid shutdowns could feed inflation by further disrupting the supply chains that many manufacturers rely on, pushing up the cost of making and transporting goods.
Many workers are struggling.
Yu Yao, a truck driver who delivers vegetables and fruits from Shandong province to Shanghai, is one of many Chinese truck drivers stranded because of ever-tightening epidemic control measures. He has been trapped in Shanghai for more than three weeks.
Yu came to Shanghai on March 16 to deliver vegetables to a market. He was still in the city three days later when authorities identified him as a close contact of an infected person in the market. Police ordered him to be immediately quarantined. So he stopped his truck near a highway and began to wait.
He has been waiting ever since. No one has fetched him for quarantine. He lacks a travel permit now required to drive a truck in Shanghai during the lockdown. He and four other drivers without travel permits have slept on the ground and shared bread for three weeks.
“We can’t get off the highway, every exit is guarded. We just want to go home,” Yu said. “I couldn’t get enough food the other day, and my body can’t take it anymore.”
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