36 China The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020
2 news agency (see International section).
Part of the problem is that Zhengzhou, the
capital of Henan province, requires those
entering the city to undergo a 14-day quar-
antine. Migrant workers arriving at Shang-
hai’s central railway station say they expect
similar confinement.
Some places have adopted even more
draconian measures. Wuxi and Yangzhou
in Jiangsu province, which borders on
Shanghai, have barred travellers from sev-
en provinces. Yiwu, a hub for wholesale
traders in Zhejiang province, Shanghai’s
other neighbour, appears to have barred all
out-of-towners. Wenzhou, an entrepre-
neurial hotspot there, has cancelled every
train out of the city.
Such restrictions have alarmed higher-
level governments. Zhejiang’s has accused
some cities of “spontaneously escalating
control measures” and told them to stop.
The capital’s government has told districts
not to require companies to seek permis-
sion to open. But local officials continue to
err on the side of caution, for fear of being
punished for letting the virus spread.
Halted production could cause another
problem that officials fear: a spike in un-
employment. Liu Kaiming of the Institute
of Contemporary Observation, an ngoin
Shenzhen, says many blue-collar migrant
workers could lose their jobs if travel and
quarantine restrictions are not lifted with-
in two weeks. Last week the Office for Mi-
grant Workers, a government agency, told
firms that they were not allowed to termi-
nate contracts if work had to be suspended
because of virus-related “emergency mea-
sures”. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, promised
this week that the government would do its
utmost to prevent “large-scale lay-offs”.
Local governments are giving tax
breaks, waiving rental fees and postponing
levies on firms for social security. But most
businesses say they are already suffering
much more than during sars, another
coronavirus, which hit in 2003. Bernstein,
a research firm, points out that sales by
Yum China, a restaurant giant, dipped by
no more than a third for two or three weeks
back then. Now, nearly a third of its stores
are closed and sales at those still open have
fallen by almost half.
Many migrant workers are choosing to
stay put. On the outskirts of Baoding, an
area near Beijing that is a big source of
workers for the city, Chen Yixiu, a 26-year-
old who had a job at a wholesale flower
market in the capital, says she worries
about falling ill should she return to Bei-
jing—migrant workers usually have no ac-
cess to health coverage in cities where they
work. What of the government’s promises
that it will cover her treatment should she
fall sick from the virus? Ms Chen says she is
sceptical. Others might well be of officials’
predictions that many will be back at work
in the next few days. 7W
hen secretive, Leninist parties have
bad news to get out of the way, they
do not hang about. In the space of a single
day, February 13th, China’s ruling Commu-
nist Party fired the officials who run the
province and city at the heart of the epi-
demic of covid-19, announced a big jump in
the number of recorded virus infections
there, and sent in hardliners close to Xi
Jinping, the country’s supreme leader, to
clean up the mess.
The unusually brutal reshuffle saw the
top party post in the central province of
Hubei, where more than 48,000 infections
and 1,310 deaths had been recorded as The
Economist went to press, handed to the
mayor of Shanghai, Ying Yong, who is 62.
Mr Ying’s background is in public security,
the law courts and the feared discipline-in-
spection commission that roots out mal-
feasance by officials. He earned Mr Xi’s
trust while serving as a police chief and dis-
cipline inspector in the coastal province of
Zhejiang, when Mr Xi was Zhejiang’s party
boss from 2002-07.
Public anger is seething over weeks of
bungling and cover-ups by officials re-
sponsible for fighting the virus in Hubei
and Wuhan, the provincial capital. A hand-
ful of brave doctors, academics and rela-
tively outspoken journalists have been
pleading with national leaders to allow for
more openness and free debate to avoidfurther deadly policy blunders. Mr Xi and
his inner circle appear to have granted half
that request, offering greater transparency
about virus numbers, matched with ster-
ner party discipline.
State media are at pains to note that new
cases outside Hubei have been growing
less common since February 4th. But on
February 12th Hubei reported 14,840 new
infections, a sharp rise. This followed in-
structions from the central government to
count not just cases confirmed by nucleic
acid tests performed on nose or throat
swabs (kits for that are in short supply and
not always reliable), but also patients
whose lungs show telltale signs of covid-19
on ctscans.
Hubei’s new chief, Mr Ying, indicated
his preferred approach to governing a prov-
ince in remarks he made in Shanghai a few
days before his transfer. He praised “non-
sloppy” administrations that are brave
enough to endure strict supervision. Mr
Xi’s war on sloppiness will be fought in
Wuhan, a city of 11m people that has been
under lockdown for weeks, by Wang
Zhonglin, who has taken over as the city’s
new party chief. He is also an ex-cop.
After some days of hesitation, when Mr
Xi was unusually absent from state media,
the Chinese president and party chief ap-
peared on February 10th in Beijing to in-
spect a hospital and address hard-pressed
doctors in Wuhan by video link (see pic-
ture). Wearing a face mask and submitting
to a nurse who took his temperature, Mr Xi
pledged victory in a “people’s war” against
the virus, but also expressed concern about
the economic costs of nationwide quaran-
tines. His emphasis on the party’s absolute
leadership is reflected in the latest person-
nel moves. During a deadly outbreak of the
sarsvirus in 2002-03, the health minister
and the mayor of Beijing were sacked. The
reality has always been that such govern-
ment officials are outranked by party lead-
ers at each level of administration. The re-
shuffle in Hubei makes that explicit.
Other officials with experience of high
office in Zhejiang are being deployed. One
of them is Chen Yixin, the secretary-gen-
eral of the Central Political and Legal Af-
fairs Commission, the party’s main law-
enforcement body. He has been sent as Mr
Xi’s envoy to oversee virus-control work in
Wuhan. Meanwhile Xia Baolong, who was
Mr Xi’s deputy in Zhejiang, has been ap-
pointed head of the central government’s
Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, put-
ting a Xi loyalist in charge of another cri-
sis—anti-government unrest that has
roiled Hong Kong since June.
Among China’s embattled Christian
community, both Mr Chen and Mr Xia are
notorious for leading a campaign to strip
crosses from the roofs of churches in Zhe-
jiang. When trouble strikes in Mr Xi’s Chi-
na, the party sends for the hard men. 7BEIJING
The party announces big changes in
Hubei, both political and virus-relatedThe virus and politicsThe hard men
Showing who’s in charge