Thousands of workers from the giant Foxconn factory fled the city of Zhengzhou to escape a confinement deemed inhuman. Chaos scenes are in China, where households continue to appear despite drastic measurements.
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A bag on the shoulder, or pushing a bad suitcase in roulette, thousands of Foxconn workers took the road, at the weekend, to flee a strict and poorly organized confinement in the factories of Zhengzhou, capital from the province of Henan, in the center of China. Foxconn, the main subcontractor of Apple and other electronics giants, employs between 200,000 and 300,000 employees according to the seasons, to assemble more than half of the iPhones sold worldwide.
These workers, from surrounding cities, decided to go home on foot, sometimes on hundreds of kilometers, cutting through fields to avoid checkpoints, according to shared videos on social networks days. They denounce inhuman conditions of containment, the lack of food and responsiveness of the company and the authorities.
These chaos scenes are now familiar in China, where zero covid policy is still applied with the greatest firmness. According to the Japanese Bank Nomura, on October 27, 232 million Chinese were subject to forms of restriction, against 225 million the previous week. In all, 31 Chinese cities representing 24.5 % of GDP are affected.
Despite three years of experience, local authorities seem regularly exceeded as soon as a home has more than a few hundred cases. Through the country, confinements are currently taking place in the Xinjiang, some of which have been confined for more than three months, in Tibet, Qinghai, but also more recently in the province of Guangdong, in the Southeast, in Heilongjiang, north -Sest, and in Wuhan, where the Pandemic of COVVI-19 began in December 2019. Monday October 31, China recorded 2,719 cases, the highest level since mid-August, while temperatures have been falling in The country, raising fears of a possible resumption of the epidemic this winter.
industrial production has dropped
Despite the massive disruptions of the economy and the daily life of the Chinese, President Xi Jinping reaffirmed the importance of the zero covid strategy during the 20 Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (PCC) , which was held from October 16 to 22. The secretary general of the Communist Party, confirmed in his post for a third unprecedented term since Mao Zedong, recalled the importance of the “People’s War to stop the dissemination of the virus”.
Under these conditions, it is difficult to see the economy rebound in the near future. After a second quarter in decline, marked by the confinement of Shanghai, the Chinese economy officially found soft growth in the third quarter, with 3.9 % increase in gross domestic product (GDP). But in October, industrial production fell, according to the PMI index of purchasing directors, published on October 31.
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