Omicron: China’s Covid-19 policy keeps Japanese families apart in lead-up to the Beijing Winter Olympics

Name: NHL confirms their players will miss Beijing Winter Olympics amid Covid-19 surge
Uploaded: 2021-12-27T05:27:37.000Z
Duration: 1 min 31 s
Description: NHL confirms their players will miss Beijing Winter Olympics amid Covid-19 surge

Many Japanese workers in China’s capital have not returned home or seen their families for around two years

‘Unfortunately, we’ve become nothing short of victims of the Beijing Olympics. I miss my family very much’: Japanese trading house worker living in China

4-MIN READ4-MIN

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics, starting in February, loom large in China’s capital, and also in the country’s disease control policies. Photo: Kyodo

Kyodo

Published: 1:27pm, 27 Dec 2021Updated: 2:57pm, 27 Dec 2021

As China has been bolstering its “zero-Covid” policy ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics, many Japanese workers in the capital, who have not returned to their home country for around two years, remain cut off from their families.

While urging citizens in the city to refrain from travelling to other regions, the Beijing government has tightly restricted the entry of accompanying family members of Japanese employees in a bid to prevent the intrusion of the novel coronavirus.

Even if such families can enter China, they must be quarantined at a designated facility for 21 days on arrival in a city other than Beijing in the nation, with all direct flights between Japan and the capital suspended since March 2020.

Quarantined people are prohibited by health authorities from stepping out of their room, making families with small children who are eager to play outdoors shy away from visiting China.

01:31

NHL confirms their players will miss Beijing Winter Olympics amid Covid-19 surge

Shinya Tanaka, a Japanese worker for a major trading house, said that in autumn the Beijing government resumed taking applications for invitation letters that accompanying family members need to get a visa.