by Guido Santevecchi
Families gathered as the first flights landed without anti-Covid restrictions
Hugs of joy and emotion among the Chinese at Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong airports. In the People’s Republic’s capital, the international arrivals area had been ghostly for the past three years, the very few flights concentrated between late night and dawn, passengers being channeled by health guards, swabbed and immediately and by all means quarantined. Since 2020, many Chinese travelers have already shown themselves sealed in protective suits like in a horror film; even the stewardesses had to exchange their elegant airline uniforms for white intensive care suits.
Yesterday, however, the excitement of family reunions was staged at Beijing Airport when disembarking flights from Warsaw, Frankfurt and, most importantly, Hong Kong. Hugs postponed by 1,016 days: That’s the length of the obsessive policing of international travel to and from China imposed in March 2020 in the name of the now-defunct Covid-Zero policy.
Surprising, almost surreal, the presence of a group of girls with telephoto lenses on their cameras, who wanted to take a look at the seven musicians of the K-pop band “Tempest”, who had landed from Seoul for the first China tour since January 2020 “It’s wonderful to see them in person, they’re bigger and more beautiful than I imagined,” Beijing Xiny, 19, told a Portal reporter.
January 8th will therefore be remembered as the day when the People’s Republic of China ended its self-isolation. Those arriving from abroad will no longer be locked in a Covid hotel room for a week (it was 14 days plus 7 home observation, at the peak of the ‘prevention program’). It will take time for traffic to regain its regular flow: for three years, the few permitted flights were diverted away from Beijing to protect the political capital from contagion. Just eight international arrivals were scheduled at Capital International Airport yesterday.
But companies are making plans on a grand scale. The biggest concession made by the authorities affects all Chinese: As of yesterday, Beijing resumed issuing and renewing passports for foreigners in addition to ordinary visas and temporary residence permits for foreigners.
Most of yesterday’s stream was centered on Hong Kong, which has suffered a major blow to its economy, which relies on tourism and trade as well as high finance, due to the closure of travel to mainland China. In the initial phase, 60,000 arrivals and just as many departures per day by land, sea and air are permitted in the former British colony. The city’s airport has suddenly returned to a busy routine, with long queues even at reservation desks for ferries and high-speed trains. Hong Kong’s approach to reopening remains cautious, everyone entering or leaving must show a negative swab: the same measure introduced last week by a dozen countries including the US and Italy and recommended by the European Union to all member states, triggered a protest from the Chinese government, which called it “unreasonable and unscientific”.
Scenes of festive hubbub at airports clash with images continuing to pour in from metropolitan China’s hospitals, which are coping with the wave of infections spreading in December. Authorities and the state press are defending the hasty exit from the Covid-Zero line, which has become too socially and economically too costly. Beijing claims that ICU admissions in major cities have “probably peaked” as 80% of beds are occupied. But patient numbers could increase rapidly in small and medium-sized centers due to travel planned for the Lunar New Year, which falls on Jan. 22. “We are facing an unprecedented challenge,” a senior official at the Central Health Commission told national CCTV. The death toll remains hidden in the opacity of Chinese politics. The World Health Organization says China is underestimating death numbers. A euphemism for saying Beijing is hiding them: Western models predict 1.5 million deaths by March.
January 8, 2023 (change January 8, 2023 | 23:03)
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