China stops requiring Covid tests to enter the country – 08/28/2023 – World

China will no longer require, as of Wednesday (30), that tourists present a negative Covid-19 test when arriving in the country. It is a milestone for the end of restrictions in the Asian giant, which has adopted one of the strictest regimes in the world to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the pandemic.

For nearly three years, China managed Covid as a disease equivalent to bubonic plague and cholera. As cases spread, entire communities were isolated, sometimes for months.

As part of the restrictions, travelers arriving in the country were forced to isolate themselves for weeks in government-designated hotels. In some cases, residents have been forcibly locked in their homes in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus.

The Chinese regime only decided to loosen the isolation rules in December last year, after a wave of protests with challenges to the tough restrictions that impacted the second largest economy in the world. Shanghai was one of the first cities to announce it would implement the new home quarantine guidelines and remove rules for travelers entering the city.

The policy changes were announced after China’s leader Xi Jinping, who counts China’s relentless fight against Covid as one of his main achievements, chaired a meeting of the Communist Party’s Politburo. Earlier, several Chinese cities had been taken by protests, which cooled after strong police repression and the removal of restrictions in different parts of the country.

Officials have not linked any of the changes to the demonstrations, but they have noticeably softened their tone on the health risks of the virus — bringing China closer to what other countries had done more than a year ago in abandoning restrictions and coming to terms with the virus.

Until 2019, mainland China received 30 million foreign tourists a year. With Covid and almost three years of closed borders, the number of international visitors has dropped dramatically. The ban on tourist visas and the bureaucracy related to entering the country has severely reduced tourism.

The first signs of recovery appeared last January, when the normalization of leisure travel and entry permission for foreigners increased searches for flights to China by 59%, according to data from a popular online ticket search engine. But the optimism was short-lived.

In the first quarter of this year, 50,000 people visited China through groups organized by travel agencies, far from the 3.7 million in the same pre-pandemic period. The Wall Street Journal estimated that Beijing and Shanghai have so far attracted less than a quarter of what they received pre-Covid.

Since lifting restrictions imposed due to Covid, the regime has faced a slow economic recovery. The restrictions, along with diplomatic friction with the United States and other Western countries, have led some foreign companies to reduce investment in China.

According to the World Health Organization, 121,628 people had died in China due to Covid until this Monday (28), a number considered low by global standards considering the population of 1.4 billion in the Asian country.