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- Robin Brant
- BBC reporter from Shanghai
A year after the new corona epidemic broke out, the Chinese economy rebounded. This may be a debt-driven and consumer-driven recovery of China’s rich, but it’s good news for Pan Runping.
She returned to her small apartment in Shanghai and returned to work in a restaurant and bar, but she was very worried and worried that the Chinese would become targets abroad.
“I don’t want to see any harassment of overseas Chinese,” he said as we were talking in his kitchen. “We are normal and healthy, (the Chinese) have done nothing wrong,” he said.
As China is about to enter the second year of the new corona epidemic, we have interviewed several young Chinese workers, Pan Runping is one of them. At the age of 27, most of his business sells craft beer.
Zhou Siyi, one year older than her, is mainly involved in handcrafted leather goods. His studio is located in the corner of the 7th floor apartment. Zhou Siyi told me she is very patriotic and her mother is a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
China “is like hard rock that will not be defeated by the virus,” she said as we chatted at the table where she made wallets and handbags. But she believes that China initially made a mistake and allowed it to spread. “Obviously China should feel sorry for that,” he added.
At first, people expressed doubts about the official number of new crown cases in China, but China quickly contained the outbreak. This is due to rigid blockages in some places, as well as complex monitoring and large-scale nucleic acid testing on an unprecedented scale.
Effective traceability of cases and close contacts is key, which helps the economy recover quickly.
This is good news for Zhou Siyi. Many people began to consume her custom bags and also started buying cars made by her husband’s state-owned enterprise.
He believes the “secret” behind this is the Chinese government. “The secret is that we only have one leader, and that is our general secretary,” he said. “Everyone will listen to the leader”.
She was sorry for Wuhan’s first mistakes. He said China has helped other countries and tried to “make up for our mistakes”.
I’m sorry, I made a mistake: it’s unusual to hear these words from the party-bound population here. But he doesn’t think that the Chinese leader, even Chinese President Xi Jinping, could apologize to the world.
“As ordinary people, we feel sorry for that, but as national leaders, for some reason, they can’t tell.”
The Chinese economy is recovering rapidly and, as official figures show, there are impressive signs of recovery. But some observers believe this is unbalanced.
Peking University Professor Michael Pettis told me that “China’s recovery is very uneven.”
“Almost all of the recovery is on the supply side of the economy, on the production side of the economy. On the demand side, it has been very weak.”
Simply put, because China first adopted one of its most familiar strategies to stimulate recovery: borrowing to finance infrastructure to stimulate the economy.
Professor Pettis, who studies the field of finance, believes that the end result is that people do a lot but don’t buy a lot. The areas of recovery are mainly new car sales or the aviation industry.
Pan Runping, who works in the bar, can prove it. Customers who come to this high-end bar still spend the same money as before, but she does the opposite.
On the contrary, it puts more emphasis on saving money than before. “It’s really hard to get a job this year,” he said. “The life of a part-time like us is really difficult.”
Pan Runping is now more than a thousand miles from its hometown in southern Yunnan province. It is the epitome of hundreds of millions of people in China who have left their hometown to go to big cities to work hard but have been hit hard by the economic downturn.
Some of his friends never returned to Shanghai after returning to their hometown. They chose to work in a more stable government or a state-owned enterprise.
“If I go home and look for a job, the situation is very different … I prefer jobs related to public employees, which are safer and more stable”. However, he still wants to stay in Shanghai and run his own restaurant.
Overall, China has now returned to its stable state before the outbreak. The top leadership held a meeting in October and approved the 14th Five Year Plan, which is an important part of the CCP’s social and economic strategy. China is expected to become the world’s only large growing economy in 2020.
But for some people, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the future. Pan Runping worries about how she and her friends will be treated when they go abroad.
Zhou Siyi had a way that he thought he could resolve this feeling of anxiety or apologize for what had happened.
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