Suddenly people with thermometers are standing in front of the apartment blocks in Beijing again.

Some shopping streets are barricaded again with barricades.

And traveling Beijingers rush back to the capital before it is no longer possible.

These days, China is experiencing the largest corona outbreak since the Wuhan lockdown was lifted in April 2020. Compared to Europe, the numbers are small.

Over the past two weeks, around 400 new corona infections have been reported in ten provinces.

The measures for this are much stricter.

The capital hides itself.

The sale of train tickets to Beijing from 23 cities was suspended indefinitely on Tuesday.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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Other regions are also taking drastic measures.

Zhangjiajie, a city popular with tourists, imposed an exit ban on all residents and visitors.

Yangzhou City cordoned off all residential areas.

Only one resident per household is allowed to leave the house to buy groceries.

The city of Wuhan announced that it would test all eleven million residents after seven new infections were reported there.

The city of Nanjing suspended parts of public transport.

In Henan Province, some villages have built earth walls to prevent motorists from entering them.

Bad news for the tourism industry

According to official information, the latest outbreak can be traced back to cleaners who were deployed on a cargo plane from Russia at Nanjing Airport on July 20. The responsible authority was thereupon warned by the disciplinary commission for “lack of supervision and unprofessional management”. Among other things, the same cleaners were used for domestic and international flights. At least sixty cleaners are said to have been infected with the Delta variant in Nanjing. Most of them were fully vaccinated. The vaccination protection may have saved many from worse consequences. So far, according to official information, four percent of them are seriously ill.

Meanwhile, on July 22nd, there was apparently a superspreader event in the Unesco World Heritage Site of Zhangjiajie during a theater performance in front of up to 2000 visitors. Many of them then traveled back to their hometowns before noticing symptoms. Cases of infection in at least seven cities have been traced to Zhangjiajie. This is bad news for the Chinese tourism industry. She had recently benefited from the pandemic because the vast majority of Chinese people were on vacation in their own country. Foreign travelers are subject to a two to three week hotel quarantine upon return.

Numerous cities and provinces called on their residents on Tuesday to refrain from traveling unless they were absolutely necessary.

The next national holidays are scheduled for the beginning of October.

The so-called Golden Week is usually used by several million Chinese for vacation trips.

Xi Jinping faces personal embarrassment

In Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, there was a separate outbreak with 78 confirmed infections so far.

The starting point was apparently a traveler from Myanmar who was being treated at Number Six People's Hospital.

Almost all of the other infected people had a direct or indirect connection to the hospital.

In this case, too, it should be the delta variant.

The head of the local health commission has been suspended.

The strict measures show how alarmed the Chinese leadership is about the latest developments. She has pursued a zero Covid strategy from the beginning of the pandemic. In the past few months, there were mostly only locally limited clusters. Beijing attributed the fact that major outbreaks had been prevented since April 2020 to the supposed “superiority of the Chinese system”. State and party leader Xi Jinping has also given the low number of infections in China as his very personal track record. He is all the more at risk of embarrassment if the virus is not brought under control quickly.