The Lunar New Year holiday kicks off in China this weekend, with hopes running high that it will kick-start economic growth stuck at four-decade lows, but fears of a COVID-19 explosion loom over the festivities.
Many people are focused on reuniting with relatives they have not seen in years, rather than spending big at tourist hot spots after Beijing last month reversed course on a zero-COVID policy that kept most of the population close to home during the pandemic.
While Hong Kong and Macao are banking on an influx of mainland Chinese visitors, the mood is not so bright in Tongli, a popular tourist spot near Shanghai, where cobblestone streets are largely deserted, scores of retail shops remain shuttered and boats on its scenic canals sit empty.
“Many places have shut down because of poor business for the past two years due to the pandemic,” a local tour guide told Nikkei Asia.
Business owners who managed to stay open are longing for tourists to return during the weeklong holiday, also known as the Spring Festival when hundreds of millions of people traditionally jam airports and railway stations in the world’s biggest annual migration.
“We hope to see more people, as the admission fee to Tongli is being waived during the holidays,” said one hopeful souvenir shop operator, who added that the shop’s daily sales are coming in at less than 1,000 yuan ($149), one-third of pre-pandemic levels.
Health authorities, meanwhile, are scrambling to prevent huge outbreaks as millions of people empty out of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other major cities bound for rural areas with poor healthcare facilities and an at-risk older population.
The government is predicting over 2 billion passenger trips over a 40-day stretch through mid-February as China celebrates the Year of the Rabbit. State medical workers, meanwhile, are going door to door in some rural areas to jab the under-vaccinated elderly.
“With the easing of the pandemic control measures, I am most worried about rural villages and farmers,” President Xi Jinping said in a New Year’s speech on Wednesday. “Medical facilities are relatively weak in rural areas, so prevention is difficult and the task is arduous.”
China’s dramatic U-turn on Xi’s signature virus-control policy caught many by surprise and stoked a surge in infections.
Beijing acknowledged that almost 60,000 infected people had died in hospital in less than a week last month, after maintaining for years that only about 5,000 had died from COVID during the whole pandemic, fanning fresh concerns about the country’s coronavirus data.
U.K.-based health data company Airfinity forecasts infections could peak at 4.8 million cases daily, with a total of 62 million in the two weeks through Friday, before declining. Deaths are estimated to peak at 36,000 a day by Thursday.
“We have two elderly parents and a young kid to care for, so we’re not travelling to avoid COVID,” said Wen Xiang, a Shanghai native.
But Gong Guohua, a janitor in China’s financial capital, has decided to head home to northern Shanxi province. “I’m planning to spend time with my ageing parents, and visiting friends and relatives in our village,” he said.
Gong is one of the nearly 300 million migrant workers who are key to supporting China’s economy, which expanded by just 3% in 2022 as repeated virus lockdowns, along with weaker demand for Chinese goods abroad, took a toll.
That was China’s weakest annual growth since 1976 — apart from a 2.2% expansion in 2020 at the outset of the pandemic — and came after an 8.1% rebound in 2021.
But many analysts think China’s hard-hit economy could stage a comeback starting in the second quarter of the year as COVID fears ease and people start spending again. “We expect consumption to rebound notably after this COVID wave passes, thanks to the release of excess savings and labour market improvement,” said Wang Tao, chief China economist at Swiss bank UBS.
CK TAN is Nikkei staff writer
