China may have announced a major Covid easing by curbing "Ceng Ceng Jia Ma" but its most egregious control measure remains intact -- Beijing's pop-up notification.
China may have announced a major Covid easing by curbing "Ceng Ceng Jia Ma" but its most egregious control measure remains intact -- Beijing's pop-up notification.
The announcement of the new rules on Friday have brought cheer around the country, sending the stock markets higher. But their celebration may be premature.
Shaving two days off quarantine, canceling the "breaker" system for flights, counting host country COVID tests for HDC codes in transit, and reducing to one COVID test are all postiive. However, those will affect a small number of foreign nationals who can get or have a visa and can afford airfare, mostly expat workers still based in China. Also Chinese nationals returning from abroad who don’t need a visa. The policy announcements about COVID policy restrictions are like circles enlarging, but the real environment people face is a VENN diagram of all policies and and other challenges (scarcity and price of airfare, continued difficulty of internal movement in China, etc). I don’t think the area of overlap has grown proportionally to the enlargement of individual policy “circles”.
The announcement seems like good PR with a minimal introduction of risk to the system. Understandable, especially given the current COVID infections, but agree with your assessment that market reactions are probably premature. Would be very happy to be proven wrong, though.
Shaving two days off quarantine, canceling the "breaker" system for flights, counting host country COVID tests for HDC codes in transit, and reducing to one COVID test are all postiive. However, those will affect a small number of foreign nationals who can get or have a visa and can afford airfare, mostly expat workers still based in China. Also Chinese nationals returning from abroad who don’t need a visa. The policy announcements about COVID policy restrictions are like circles enlarging, but the real environment people face is a VENN diagram of all policies and and other challenges (scarcity and price of airfare, continued difficulty of internal movement in China, etc). I don’t think the area of overlap has grown proportionally to the enlargement of individual policy “circles”.
The announcement seems like good PR with a minimal introduction of risk to the system. Understandable, especially given the current COVID infections, but agree with your assessment that market reactions are probably premature. Would be very happy to be proven wrong, though.
Great point.