Coronavirus: lockdown sparks desperate business measures in Chinese textile hub
- As a lockdown widens in a ‘complex’ Guangzhou district, local workers find ways to keep goods moving ahead of busy shopping day
- Living conditions under Covid restrictions ‘totally a mess’, local landlord says
“It’s best not to enter the village [to avoid a yellow health code],” he said. “But I had goods to deliver.”
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Now, Tengfeng who refused to give his family name is in lockdown, along with about 100,000 other workers.
Still, small businesses have been scrambling to meet production goals to guarantee supplies for the festival despite the restrictions, as they test the effectiveness of the controls.
Around October 23, before the lockdown had been expanded, some business owners managed to smuggle their goods out, Tengfeng said. “For example, buying cigarettes for the security guard in return for ‘a favour’, or giving red envelopes [with money] to some senior management officials to let them pass directly.”
For a few nights, trucks, minivans and electric bicycles jammed into the area’s narrow alleys, which were then loaded with cloth and shuttled out to multiple distributors, residents and community workers confirmed.
On Saturday, a government notice warned that from November 5-7 – the three days that had originally been planned for the lockdown in Haizhu – shops that opened illegally would be fined 10,000 yuan (US$1,390), factories distributing goods would be fined 50,000 yuan, and logistics companies would face fines of 100,000 yuan. Health authorities have since extended the district lockdown to Friday.
The tighter containment measures have forced a total shutdown of the local textile compound, and also hit downstream garment factories and trading companies.
Tengfeng, who was already struggling for new orders, said he lost about one-third of his total annual orders due to the current lockdown.
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“But it’s still within an acceptable range,” he said. Working from home, he said he is now securing orders on the social media platform WeChat, and is relying on factories elsewhere, such as Foshan and Zhongshan.
The ripple effects have stretched as far as central Hubei province. One owner of a small garment factory in Hubei recently returned from Guangzhou to find an outbreak had forced his factory to shut down, with both supply and demand sides impacted.
The owner, who requested anonymity, said that raw materials cannot be sent from Guangzhou and finished products cannot be delivered from Hubei.
“It takes at least two hours to circle the district, and I’ve come to the village 100 times, but I still get lost almost every time,” a local government worker said.
The area is also dotted with unregulated construction and many residential buildings that are situated close together, making enforcement of pandemic restrictions extremely difficult.
“The ventilation is bad. Many people live in very poor quality places, many without windows. The virus could spread very quickly in such conditions,” he said
A landlord who manages five buildings under lease in one urban village called the place “hell”.
In the first two weeks of the outbreak, local residents, mostly textile workers, were slow to comply with the pandemic control measures, partly due to the chaotic management on the ground, and partly due to the poor living conditions for home quarantine, the government worker said.
He said he had spent a week helping to transport Covid-positive patients to the hospital and their close contacts to quarantine hotels.
“Now everything is generally in order,” he said, adding some people are even glad to quarantine in hotels, which are much better equipped than their tiny homes.