China. Such is the grip of the Party apparatus on the country that it still seems in Winston Churchill’s famous words like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.
The other day Bloomberg News reported 37 million infections in a day (a number we were scratching our heads over – How was it arrived at? What was the basis of it?…). And now on Tuesday, another reputed agency AFP reports that jubilant Chinese are rushing to book trips abroad “as inbound Covid quarantine is set to end”. Talk about mixed messaging.
What is undeniable though is the impact that Covid has had on the factory of the world.
Last week, the BBC ran a video of empty streets in Beijing as Covid cases spiked in the country. With visuals like these being beamed across, Mark Williams, the Chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, had little doubt that “China is entering the most dangerous weeks of the pandemic. The authorities are…
