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Joe McDonald, Associated Press
December 27, 2022 at 14:55
Foreign companies have welcomed China’s decision to end a quarantine on travelers from abroad, seeing it as an important step toward reviving sluggish business activity.
The ruling Communist Party has suddenly decided to roll back some of the world’s strictest anti-virus controls as it tries to reverse a recession.
It has ended restrictions that confined millions of people to their homes and sparked protests, but hospitals have been flooded with unwell patients as the virus spread.
The announcement late on Monday that the quarantine for travelers arriving from abroad will end on Jan. 8 is the biggest step toward lifting restrictions that have kept most foreign tourists out of China since early 2020. Quarantine was reduced from 7 days to 5 days last month.
Also on Monday, the government lowered the official severity of Covid-19 and lifted the requirement for people with the virus to quarantine.
Control measures are expected to last until at least mid-2023.
“It feels like China is finally turning the corner,” Colm Rafferty, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said in a statement.
Ending the quarantine “clears the way for the resumption of normal business travel,” he said.
Business groups have warned that companies are shifting investment away from China as foreign executives are blocked from visiting.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said more than 70% of companies polled this month expect the impact of the latest wave of the virus to last no more than three months, ending in early 2023.
The British Chamber of Commerce said it wanted China to restart normal processing of business visas to allow “essential travel to resume”.
It said this would “help restore optimism and restore China’s status as a priority investment destination”.
The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said in a statement that the move “could boost business confidence” but that companies were likely to “wait and see how the local situation evolves” before making long-term decisions.
Meanwhile, Japan announced that tourists from China would be tested for the virus from Friday as a “temporary emergency measure”.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that visitors who test positive will be quarantined for a week.
Japan will also reduce the number of planned additional Japan-China flights “for safety reasons,” he said.
This follows India’s decision last week to start requiring negative virus tests for travelers from China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand.
India also randomly tests 2% of air passengers arriving from abroad. Visitors who test positive or are symptomatic will be quarantined.
A foreign ministry spokesman defended China’s handling of the latest outbreak.
“The Chinese government has always insisted on implementing policies scientifically and precisely,” Wang Wenbin said.
He called for a “science-based response and coordinated approach” to ensure travel safety and “promote a steady and healthy recovery of the world economy”.
China has kept the infection rate low with a “Zero Covid” strategy, which aims to stop the spread of the virus by isolating every case. This sparked complaints that the controls were too extreme and counterproductive.
Since last month, the ruling party has gradually joined Britain and the United States and other governments trying to live with the virus by treating infections rather than imposing blanket quarantines on cities or communities.
The ruling party announced the reforms on Nov. 11, saying they were aimed at reducing disruptions following a reduction in economic activity. More changes were announced following protests that erupted in Shanghai and other cities on Nov. 25.
The government has stopped reporting national case numbers, but announcements from some cities suggest at least tens of millions and possibly hundreds of millions of people have been infected since the surge in early October.
The outbreak has sparked complaints that Beijing was loosening controls too abruptly, but officials say the wave has started before the changes.
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