Korean Air said earlier this month that it was halting a plan to increase flights to China due to Seoul’s cautious stance towards Chinese travellers. In the near-term, a spike in demand from travellers will be hampered by the limited number of flights to and from China, which are currently at a small fraction of pre-Covid levels.įlight Master data showed that on Sunday, China had a total of 245 international inbound and outbound flights, compared with 2,546 flights on the same day in 2019 – a fall of 91%. The report quickly shot to the most-read item on Chinese social media site Weibo. State broadcaster CCTV reported on Sunday that direct flights from South Korea to China were close to sold out. Harrold said he had been anticipating having to quarantine and do several rounds of testing on his return when he left for Europe for a Christmas break in early December. “It’s a huge relief just to be able to go back to normal … just come back to China, get off the plane, get myself a taxi and just go home,” Michael Harrold, 61, a copy editor in Beijing said at Beijing Capital International Airport on Sunday after he arrived on a flight from Warsaw. “We believe there is a lot of opportunity for those committed to investing in China.” “The ending of the zero-Covid policy is … going to have a major positive impact on domestic spending,” Ralph Hamers, group chief executive officer at UBS, told the Swiss bank’s annual Greater China conference on Monday. Shrugging off those gloomy forecasts, Asian shares climbed to a five-month high on Monday while China’s yuan firmed to its strongest level against the dollar since mid-August.Ĭhina’s blue-chip index gained 0.7%, while the Shanghai Composite Index rose 0.5% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index climbed 1.6%.
8, one of the lowest rates of death from the infection in the world.īut the World Health Organization has said China is under-reporting the scale of the outbreak and international virus experts estimate more than one million people in the country could die from the disease this year. Officially, China has reported just 5,272 COVID-related deaths as of Jan. “Today, the virus is weak, we are stronger.” “Life is moving forward again!,” the official newspaper of the Communist Party, the People’s Daily, wrote in an editorial praising the government’s virus policies late on Sunday which it said had moved from “preventing infection” to “preventing severe disease”. Indeed, China also requires pre-departure negative Covid tests from travellers.Ĭhina’s top health officials and state media have repeatedly said Covid infections are peaking across the country and they are playing down the threat now posed by the disease. ALSO SEE: Chinese Flood Into Hong Kong and Abroad as Borders Reopenīeijing’s move to drop quarantine requirements for visitors is expected to boost outbound travel, as residents will not face those restrictions when they return.īut flights are scarce and many nations are demanding negative tests from visitors from China, seeking to contain an outbreak that is overwhelming many of China’s hospitals and crematoriums. We’re very glad we can now go,” Yang said, standing alongside his wife.Ĭhina’s currency and stock markets strengthened on Monday, as investors bet the reopening could help reinvigorate a $17 trillion economy suffering its lowest growth in nearly half a century. “She got married last year but had to postpone the wedding ceremony because we couldn’t go over to attend it. Waiting to renew his passport in a line of more than 100 people in China’s capital, 67-year-old retiree Yang Jianguo said he was planning to travel to the United States to see his daughter for the first time in three years. Sunday’s reopening is one of the last steps in China’s dismantling of its “zero-Covid” regime, which began last month after historic protests against curbs that kept the virus at bay but caused widespread frustration among its people. Many of those who queued expressed relief that the government had finally eased restrictions that largely prevented them and the bulk of its 1.4 billion people from travelling for three years. There were long queues of Chinese citizens lined up outside immigration offices in Beijing on Monday, as people went to renew passports after the country dropped its Covid border controls on Sunday.
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