Actually, there is no longer any need to prove how concerned China's leadership is about the country's situation.

But then the state media delivered it again on Wednesday: with their reporting on the most recent trade balance of the world export champion.

Henrik Ankenbrand

Economic correspondent for China based in Shanghai.

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The official Xinhua News Agency, which sets the tone of China's propaganda and receives its orders directly from Party leader Xi Jinping's office, headlined that in the first 11 months of the year, exports and imports rose by 8.6 percent compared to the same period last year.

Calculated in the yuan currency, that is correct.

However, Xinhua did not say a word about the much more decisive news about trade in just ended November: In the month, exports in dollar terms fell by 8.7 percent compared to the same period last year.

They had already fallen slightly in October.

Export growth has been "the only bright spot" in the Chinese economy this year, wrote Beijing University finance professor Michael Pettis.

If exports continue to fall, as most economists have predicted, this will put “strong pressure” on Beijing to compensate for the loss of revenue with state investments.

The President of the European Chamber of Commerce, Jörg Wuttke, called the trade statistics "absolutely shocking".

The course of the Chinese economy is "really weak".

This is also indicated by the sharp fall in imports in November, as in October.

These fell by 10.6 percent year-on-year.

Determine the health codes

The price for China's radical zero-Covid policy can be read number by number in the statistics.

For example, smartphone exports fell by a third in November.

Among other things, the chaos in the world's largest production facility for Apple's iPhone in central China's Zhengzhou has contributed to this.

After a virus outbreak at the end of October, tens of thousands of workers fled the factory for fear of harsh quarantine without adequate supplies of food and medicine - often hundreds of kilometers on foot because the red "health codes" on the smartphones did not allow the use of public transport allowed.

The health codes that determine the lives of 1.4 billion Chinese are nothing more than "slavery in the digital era" and must be abolished, according to Yanzhong Huang of the New York think tank Council on Foreign Relations, one of the best Knowledge of the Chinese health system.

The government took a first step towards this on Wednesday.

In a ten-point plan, the National Health Commission announced that the codes would no longer have to be shown before boarding buses and at the entrances of train stations and airports.

The code should no longer be necessary for access to public buildings.

The sharpest departure from the previous zero-Covid policy is the Commission's announcement that infected people with mild symptoms and their direct contacts will no longer have to be in centralized quarantine in a camp or hospital, but will instead be allowed to isolate themselves at home for five to seven days .

The PCR tests, which in Shanghai, for example, have to be carried out every two to three days by each individual resident, are to be largely abolished and in some cases replaced by rapid tests.

Chinese brokerage house Soochow Securities estimates that the mass testing will cost China's state 1.7 trillion yuan ($250 billion) this year.

This corresponds to around half of public spending on education in 2020.

The stock exchanges reacted to the news of a quick opening of the country on Wednesday with a price loss.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng index fell 3.2 percent by the end of trading.

Referring to the investor adage “buy the rumor, sell the news”, observers attribute this to profit-taking, because the markets had already bet on an easing of the restrictions in the past few weeks.

However, business representatives have also warned that a complete opening of the country will probably take until the summer.

In view of the impending overload of the Chinese health system with a rapid increase in the number of cases, Jens Hildebrandt, head of the German Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, told the FAZ that he sees a "quite a back and forth".