Tag: Shanghai (China)

China Helped Raise My American Kids, and They Turned Out Fine

Chin@Strategy

When Covid was raging across the world a couple of years ago, I came across a picture online of an American woman wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I refuse to co-parent with the government” — a response to perceived government overreach regarding school mask mandates. I laughed out loud: My own kids were, in a way, co-parented by the Chinese government. My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government…

Online Anger Over China’s Covid Pivot Shows Widening Social Split

Chin@Strategy

Tao Siliang, a member of China’s Communist elite, recently criticized Sima Nan’s attacks for contradicting the party’s new direction. On Thursday, Weibo, a social media site, moved quickly to shut down or suspend more than 1,000 accounts, including that of a prominent nationalist, Kong Qingdong, for waging personal attacks against experts and scholars. “At this moment, what we need most is to abide by the 44-year-old parable: ‘Look forward in unity,’ do not challenge, tear apart, especially denounce or abuse,” the official newspaper of Zhejiang Province, in China’s east, wrote…

This Is What Shanghai’s Covid Outbreak Looks Like

Chin@Strategy

Shanghai is being gripped by China’s massive Covid wave, leading to a surge in hospitalizations and crowded funeral homes. Local health officials said last week that up to 70 percent of the city’s 26 million residents had been infected, and they expressed confidence that its outbreak had peaked. But many of the city’s hospitals are still overcrowded, particularly with older people. Funeral homes have been inundated with mourners. Infections soared across China late last year, and the government abruptly lifted its strict, but ultimately futile, Covid restrictions in early December.…

Why China’s Economy Faces a Perilous Road to Recovery

Chin@Strategy

Many European manufacturers in China have been forced to operate with about half their usual staff for two to three weeks, affecting output somewhat, said Klaus Zenkel, the chairman of the chamber’s South China chapter. As a precaution against lockdowns, many companies had accumulated spare parts in warehouses before the Covid wave and have relied on those to keep running. But to save on costs, a few small suppliers of specific components have stopped operations early for the Lunar New Year holiday, which starts on Jan. 21. “Everyone managed a…

As Cases Explode, China’s Low Covid Death Toll Convinces No One

Chin@Strategy

The hearses bearing black and yellow funeral paper flowers crept in a steady stream toward the Dongjiao crematory in eastern Beijing. Several dozen people crowded around the closed gate waiting to be let in. A man unable to get a spot in line could only watch, wondering what to do with the body of a relative who had just died of Covid. The hospital could not keep the body — there were already too many in its morgue. When he called the crematory, an employee told him he had to…

China’s Abrupt Covid Pivot Leaves Many Without Medicines

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When demand for fever-reducing drugs more than quadrupled the price of ibuprofen, a city in eastern China began rationing sales by selling the pills individually. When a popular Chinese online pharmacy offered the antiviral drug Paxlovid, it sold out within hours. And when word of the medicine shortages in China reached friends and relatives in Hong Kong and Taiwan, they quickly bought vast quantities of drugs from local sellers to ship to the mainland. As Covid rips through parts of China, millions of Chinese are struggling to find treatment —…

In FTX Collapse, Binance Sees a Chance to Become the New Face of Crypto

Chin@Strategy

Mr. Zhao founded Binance after a brief career in finance, including a stint at Bloomberg, where he built trading software. He created the exchange when he was living in Shanghai. But soon after, the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance from operating in the country, and many of the company’s employees fled. Mr. Zhao maintains an active presence on Twitter but isn’t always easy to track down, having moved between Japan, Singapore, Lithuania, Malta and Dubai. Binance’s lack of a fixed headquarters is in keeping with the trend of…

How Will China Turn Its Economy Back On? The World Is About to Find Out.

Chin@Strategy

For months, investors and C.E.O.s waited anxiously for China to ease up on its Covid restrictions, which burdened the economy and were out of sync with the rest of the world. Stock markets rallied on mere rumors of policy changes. Companies warned that “zero Covid” was hurting business. Now that China has finally started rolling back its strict mix of mass testing, lockdowns and quarantines, its economy is entering a delicate period when it will face a set of challenges that do not fit neatly with other countries’ experiences during…

China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Policy, in Pictures

Chin@Strategy

For a long time during the coronavirus pandemic, China’s aggressive approach to stamping out cases worked. It has kept deaths from Covid-19 much lower than the rest of the world, most notably in comparison with the United States. But in recent months, that approach, called “zero Covid,” seemed increasingly outdated. China’s residents were still subject to snap lockdowns, mass testing and harsh quarantines while the rest of the world adapted to living with the virus. Frustrated citizens demonstrated on the streets in late November, some even calling for the Communist…

China Eases ‘Zero Covid’ Restrictions in Victory for Protesters

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The Chinese government announced on Wednesday a broad easing of its exceptionally stringent Covid restrictions, an implicit concession to public discontent after mass street protests in more than a dozen cities a week ago challenged Beijing’s authority. The changes are not a complete dismantling of China’s “zero Covid” policy, but still represent a considerable loosening of measures that have dragged down the economy by disrupting daily life for hundreds of millions of people, forcing many small businesses to shutter and driving youth unemployment to nearly 20 percent, a record high.…