The Chinese communist regime has locked down the world’s largest wholesale market—Yiwu City in China’s Zhejiang Province, since April 27 due to a COVID-19 outbreak. Experts believe that the regime’s implementation of the extreme “zero-COVID” policy in the “world’s small commodity capital” will bring a new blow to the global supply chain.
According to a statement posted on Yiwu’s city government’s official social media WeChat account, after 3 local COVID-19 cases were found, authorities ordered all residents not to leave their residential complexes or villages. They closed schools and prevented people from entering public places, government agencies, enterprises, and institutions across the city without a negative nucleic acid certificate within the past 24 hours.
Yiwu, with a population of 1.5 million, brings together more than 2.1 million kinds of commodities, exporting everything from Christmas ornaments to U.S. presidential campaign supplies, to more than 210 countries and regions around the world. In 2021, the express delivery volume reached 9.29 billion pieces.
The city is a major wholesale hub and export center for consumer accessories. Eighty percent of all Chinese Christmas merchandise exports are from Yiwu. Nearly half of all goods exported from the city are destined for the United States.
The shutdown of all communities has already affected the express delivery of goods.
Yiwu Postal Administration stated that all couriers must undergo COVID-19 nucleic acid testing. Some couriers are suspended as they have been to the areas that have positive cases and so they have a “yellow code” on their mandatory health app. It has created shortages of manpower, which affects express delivery and the speed of shipping.
Local officials have been conducting mass testing in the city to implement “zero-COVID” policy.
Ding Xian, former head of Jing’an Branch of Shanghai Huashan Hospital, posted on April 24, pointing out that “zero-COVID” means “repeated nucleic acid testing, overwhelmed staff; huge crowds, and serious cross-infection.”
China accounts for about 12 percent of global trade. The regime’s “zero-COVID” measures have left factories and warehouses idled, hampered truck deliveries, and increased container congestion, further deteriorating global supply chains. After the major ports in east China such as Shanghai and Ningbo were shut down due to the appearance of COVID-19 cases, many companies went to Yiwu to load their containers, and now Yiwu has also been locked down.
Shen Rongqin, a professor at York University in Canada, told The Epoch Times earlier this month that many prosperous Chinese cities such as Shanghai and those in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces have been locked down, which has a great impact on China’s economy. The first impact is the disruption of the supply chain, which has affected the export industry. Secondly, China’s domestic demand has also been hit, with the service industry shrinking the fastest. That will lead to a large number of people losing their jobs.
From The Epoch Times