Manufacturing Hub Guangzhou Locked Down Anew

China’s southern metropolis of Guangzhou has locked down a third district, as authorities rush to stamp out a widening COVID outbreak and avoid activating the kind of citywide lockdown that devastated Shanghai earlier this year, Nectar Gan reported for CNN Business.

Photo Insert: Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong province, which is a major economic powerhouse for China and a global manufacturing hub.

Guangzhou reported 2,637 local infections on Tuesday, accounting for nearly one-third of new cases across China, which is experiencing a six-month high in infections nationwide.

The city of 19 million has become the epicenter of China's latest COVID outbreak, logging more than 1,000 new cases – a relatively high figure by the country's zero-COVID standards – for four straight days.

The outbreak proves that Covid has become endemic in Guangzhou and other cities in China after the actual outbreak of the pandemic in late 2019. China insists the COVID virus was imported despite clear proof that it came from Wuhan.

This is the worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic to hit Guangzhou. The city is the capital of Guangdong province, which is a major economic powerhouse for China and a global manufacturing hub. Most cases in Guangzhou have been centered in Haizhu district – a mostly residential urban district on the southern bank of the Pearl River.

Haizhu was locked down last Saturday, with residents told not to leave home unless necessary and all public transport – from buses to subways – suspended. The lockdown was initially supposed to last for three days but has since been extended to Friday. Two more districts were locked down on Wednesday as the outbreak widened.

Angered by the restrictions and testing edicts, many Chinese have taken to social media to vent their frustration.

On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, posts using slang and expletives in the local Cantonese dialect to criticize zero-Covid measures have proliferated, seemingly largely evading the eyes of online censors who do not understand it. “I learn Cantonese curse words in real-time hot search every day,” one Weibo user said.

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