China’s economy is suffering from long covid

IF PLACES COULD be diagnosed with long covid, then Shangqiu—a sleepy city of 3.7m people, in central China’s wheat belt—would be a good candidate. A full year after the chaotic, ill-planned collapse of China’s “zero-covid” policies, evidence abounds of lingering harms done to Shangqiu’s economy, and to residents’ morale.Local finances were strained even before China began nearly three years of lockdowns and mass virus-testing drives. Shangqiu, in Henan province, is classed in the poorest third of Chinese cities, when ranked by income per person. Still, in the final, doomed months of China’s “all-out people’s war” on covid-19, city leaders spent lavishly on pandemic controls.