“There are some small factories that dare to violate the pandemic controls, secretly using people to smuggle rolls of fabric to the printing and dyeing facilities for processing,” Xie said. “But it is impossible for us to do this, with more than 20 containers of semi-finished products.”

It should have been a rosy start to the year for Xie to process orders from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East after the Lunar New Year holiday in February.

But Xie said “the supply chain has been completely cut off since the middle of March”, due to the Omicron wave in Shanghai that has spread to and disrupted the neighbouring Yangtze River Delta region, which features the most skilled industrial chain and city clusters in China.

Pledges have been made to remove unnecessary traffic restrictions, but Xie has seen little improvement, with around 8 million yuan (US$1.26 million) worth of semi-finished products piled up in his warehouse.

Amid the stringent coronavirus controls, even if Xie could complete his orders, he would still face difficulties transporting the goods to the Port of Ningbo-Zhoushan.

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How Covid shut down Shanghai

How Covid shut down Shanghai

“Even if the truck drivers can get through the two roadblocks, they won’t be able to go [farther]. It just goes on and on.”

Xie is now concerned about losing valuable overseas orders as the lockdown of Shanghai continues, with daily infections yet to bottom out and the supply chain and logistic disruptions continuing.

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“Many people have borrowed money to expand production capacity in the past two years. There have been 3,000 new knitting machines imported from Germany in a single town, each costing about 3 million yuan, and each machine needs two operators at a monthly salary of 15,000 yuan,” he said.

“Now a lot of such machines are shelved, but the factory owners have to pay off the loans and pay the labour.”

US-based freight-tracking firm Freightos has warned that a lengthy lockdown of China’s financial hub could lead to the most significant logistics disruption since the start of the pandemic.

“Manufacturing shutdowns, closed warehouses and severe disruptions to trucking capacity – despite government steps to ease road restrictions – are causing the availability of exports to plummet. Air and ocean export volumes are sinking with them,” Freightos said earlier this month.

Xie’s plight is not unique in cities within the Yangtze River Delta, where factories and merchants have been forced to shut down operations to varying degrees, and the disruptions are also spreading to other provinces.

The grievances from the logistics sector and disruptions to the supply chain are in sharp contrast with Beijing’s plan to break choke points and its segmented measures to build a unified market to allow for the easy movement of goods.

“Local cadres are focusing on containing the pandemic – the only mission for them prior to the 20th party congress in the autumn,” said a government adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

“They are unwilling to take care of a minority group, such as truck drivers, which might undermine their efforts to achieve zero-Covid.”

“Many of the raw materials for our industry are supplied from Hebei province [in northern China), where some areas have been locked down for a month, and now our factory is almost out of materials and about to lie flat,” said a business owner focusing on the steel sector in Changshu city in the neighbouring Jiangsu province, who identified himself only as Uncle Jor.

“At present, those epidemic prevention and control officials at all levels are in power, it is easy for them to deny any application seeking the resumption of work.”

Amid the restrictions, a large percentage of China’s 30 million truck drivers are either stuck on the motorways or cut off from certain parts of the country.

“I was quarantined by village officials after sending cargo to Dongguan in Guangdong,” said Wang Xian, a truck driver in the central province of Hubei.

“The officials warned me that if I said no quarantine, my son would be suspended from school and quarantined instead.”

Vice-Premier Liu He has said that a nationally recognised pass will be issued to enable truck drivers to deliver raw materials, components, food and essential supplies between provinces without having to wait for test results at every stop.

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“Four-fifths of our drivers are blocked near the Shanghai port, and we have only 10 or 20 per cent of the transport capacity that we would normally have,” said Raymond Zhang, a Shanghai-based logistic industry insider.

“A lack of unified requirements among regions makes transport inefficient.”

Small and middle-sized export manufacturers are also under great pressure, since most of their orders are settled under a shipment term called Free On Board, which means suppliers have to absorb any extra transport costs, added Zhang.

Goods bought or sold under this practice mean that the seller has to pay a penalty if they cannot deliver goods, clear them for export and load them onto a vessel at the named port on time.

But exporters are often at the mercy of local officials, after all local postal and express delivery companies in Shanxi province in western China were required to suspend operations from April 13 after dozens of local couriers tested positive.

“I don’t know how long it will take to get back to normal. The cash flow can sustain me for another two months, so over the short term, it will not drive away my clients,” said Shanghai-based logistic industry insider Zhang.

“But I’m pretty sure I can’t survive if another round of such outbreaks come in the rest of this year.

“That’s the most common and biggest concern across industries, from exporters, factories, and logistics: how long such a policy will last.”