New corona rules are currently being issued in the Chinese capital almost every day.

First it was said that a negative corona test would be necessary from Thursday to use local public transport.

But many Beijingers were unable to go to work on the first working day after the May holidays, despite tests.

More than 60 subway stations and around 15 percent of bus stations remained closed on Thursday until further notice.

This primarily serves to enforce the home office obligation in the largest and economically most important district of Chaoyang.

Almost everyone in Beijing has acquaintances who are currently not allowed to leave their homes.

Either because their residential area was cordoned off because of individual positive cases or because their Corona app determined that they were in a place where an infected person was.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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Despite everything, the hope in Beijing that a complete lockdown like in Shanghai can be avoided has prevailed so far.

On the one hand, this is due to the political importance of the capital.

Many Beijingers are convinced that the Chinese leadership wants to prevent supply shortages and chaotic scenes like in Shanghai at all costs.

This is supported by the fact that the state media have declared Beijing to be the new test case for the zero-Covid strategy, to which the Chinese leadership is undeterred.

However, it has been redefined to no longer necessarily require a full lockdown.

Beijing has a "very important mission," wrote prominent propagandist and former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, Hu Xijin.

It would have to find less consequential methods to stop the outbreak or to explain to the population that deep interventions were unavoidable.

The option of protecting vulnerable groups in particular is not even mentioned in the official discourse.

"Beijing will show one thing: whether it is inevitable that corona outbreaks will spiral out of control in our megacities," Hu wrote.

Quarantine time reduced for contacts

Beijing local authorities stress that they reacted earlier than Shanghai.

The number of infections in Beijing remains at a low level.

Only about 550 new infections have been reported since the latest outbreak began two weeks ago.

Fifty cases were added on Thursday.

Regular mass tests, which all residents must take part in, are intended to prevent the virus from getting out of control.

They have been carried out daily for the past three days.

Those who did not take part can be forced into home quarantine for three days.

The test results must also be presented at the entrances of parks, office buildings, shopping centers and public toilets.

Preparations for an increase in the number of infections are underway.

Thus, the 1,200-bed Xiaotangshan "temporary hospital" was put back into operation.

Infected people without symptoms and with a mild course of the disease are to be isolated there.

The bed camp in northern Beijing became famous during the 2003 Sars crisis as the first facility of its kind. Although they are called "makeshift hospitals", they are not used for medical care, but for the isolation of infected people.

Their contact persons are taken to so-called quarantine centers.

Despite the experiences in Shanghai, the Chinese leadership continues to reject home quarantine for infected people and contact persons.

To ensure that bed capacities do not reach their limits too quickly, the quarantine period for contact persons has been reduced from 21 days to ten days in the camp and a further seven days at home.

This was justified with the shorter incubation time of the omicron variant.

That seems to be one of the lessons learned from the lockdown chaos in Shanghai.

Questions are not allowed

Those entering China who are resident in Beijing and who previously had to spend three weeks in hotel quarantine should also benefit from the reduction in the isolation requirement.

Currently, however, very few can benefit from this because the Chinese aviation authority has drastically reduced the number of flights.

One could imagine many questions that could have been asked at the press conference on the corona situation in Beijing on Thursday.

But only one question was allowed, and that had obviously been agreed beforehand.

It was about the closure of a hospital.

The spokesman explained the closure by saying that a patient had been treated there who later tested positive for the corona virus.

He visited various departments and thus increased the risk of infection.

The hospital violated the law.

Those responsible would be punished.

This kind of political lesson is likely to make hospitals reluctant to treat emergency patients, even in life-threatening situations, if they don't have a valid corona test.

Corona measures have also been tightened in other parts of the country in the past few days.

In Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, a week of online classes and home office has been decreed.

The announcement prompted many residents to panic buy, as seen previously in Beijing.

This shows how concerned there is about being caught unprepared by a lockdown.

In Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, on the other hand, there were opening steps.

For the first time in more than 50 days, subways ran in the city again.