Shanghai inches towards COVID lockdown exit, Beijing plays defence
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[May 21, 2022] By
Eduardo Baptista and Laura Lin
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Shanghai
cautiously pushed ahead on Saturday with plans to restore part of its
transport network in a major step towards exiting a weeks-long COVID-19
lockdown, while Beijing kept up its defences in an outbreak that has
persisted for a month.
Shanghai's lockdown since the beginning of April has dealt a heavy
economic blow to China's most populous city, stirred debate over the
sustainability of the nation's zero-COVID policy and stoked fears of
future lockdowns and disruptions.
Unlike the financial hub, Beijing has refrained from imposing a
city-wide lockdown, reporting dozens of new cases a day, versus tens of
thousands in Shanghai at its peak. Still, the curbs and endless mass
testing imposed on China's capital have unsettled its economy and
upended the lives of its people.
As Beijing remained in COVID angst, workers in Shanghai were
disinfecting subway stations and trains before planned restoration of
four metro lines on Sunday.
While service will be for limited hours, it will allow residents to move
between districts and meet the need for connections to railway stations
and one of the city's two airports. More than 200 bus routes will also
reopen.
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Underlining the level of caution, Shanghai officials said commuters
would be scanned for abnormally high body temperatures and would need to
show negative results of PCR tests taken within 48 hours.
Shanghai found 868 new local cases on Friday, compared with 858 a day
earlier, municipal health authorities said on Saturday, a far cry from
the peak in daily caseloads last month.
No new cases were found outside quarantined areas, down from three a day
earlier, health authorities added.
The city of 25 million has gradually reopened shopping malls,
convenience stores and wholesale markets and allowed more people to walk
out of their homes, with community transmissions largely eliminated in
recent days.
Still, Shanghai tightened stringent curbs on two of its 16 districts on
Friday.
The authorities "urge enterprises to strictly implement safe production,
which is their responsibility, especially in meeting some epidemic
prevention and control requirements," an official from the city's
emergency bureau told a news conference on Saturday.
Delta Airlines said on Friday it would resume one daily flight to
Detroit from Shanghai via Seoul on Wednesday.
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![](../images/052122pics/news_a55.jpg)
A woman sits at a restaurant following a ban on dine-in services,
at a shopping complex amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19)
outbreak in Beijing, China May 20, 2022. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
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DRAWING COMPARISONS
Most of Beijing's recent cases have been in areas already sealed up,
but authorities remained on edge and quick to act under China's
ultra-strict policy.
In Fengtai, a district of 2 million people at the centre of
Beijing's counter-COVID efforts, bus and metro stations have been
mostly shut since Friday and residents told to stay home.
A Fengtai resident was stocking up on groceries at a
nearby Carrefour on Saturday, uncertain whether restrictions would
continue.
"I'm not sure if I can do more shopping over the next week or so, so
I've bought a lot of stuff today and even bought some dumplings for
the Dragon Boat holiday" in early June, she said, asking not to be
identified.
On Friday, thousands of residents from a neighbourhood in Chaoyang,
Beijing's most populous district, were moved to hotel quarantine
after some cases were detected, according to state-run China Youth
Daily.
Social media users on China's Twitter-like Weibo were swift to draw
parallels with Shanghai, where entire residential buildings were
taken to centralised quarantine facilities in response to a single
positive COVID case in some instances.
While unverified accounts from residents of the Nanxinyuan
neighbourhood garnered thousands of comments and shares on Weibo, a
related hashtag could not be searched on the platform on Saturday,
suggesting online censorship.
"Perhaps... except for Shanghai people, no one will feel for
Beijing's Nanxinyuan. However, I don't actually know whether there
are people who will see this sentence," Shanghai-based director and
actor Xie Tiantian wrote on Weibo.
Sun Shuwei, a tech startup employee, told Reuters the situation at
Nanxinyuan, just 2 km (1.2 miles) from his home, has prompted him to
consider leaving Beijing.
"This has left me very agitated," Sun said.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista, Judy Hua, Laura Lin and Stella Qiu;
Writing by Ryan Woo; Editing by Richard Pullin and William Mallard)
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