Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
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Carrier targets return of daily services to major Asian cities and more frequent long-haul services
Airline to monitor global situation and adjustments may be made ‘as necessary’
A Cathay Pacific employee stands near the check-in desks at a virtually deserted Hong Kong International Airport. Photo: Sam Tsang
Cathay Pacific Airways has signalled its intent to start reversing its near-total grounding of aircraft because of the coronavirus pandemic, and plans to start increasing its number of passenger flights in the last week of June.
The airline said it hoped to add more long-haul destinations, make flights more frequent, and reinstate some major Asian cities to its daily schedule for the first time in several months, “subject to government travel restrictions”.
Cathay scaled its operations back to a skeleton schedule of 3 per cent of services in early April, and that was extended until June 20. The newly announced increases would take that up to 5 per cent.
Tracking the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s airline industry in early 2020 Singapore Airlines, another of Asia’s major carriers, said last week it would maintain a 96 per cent reduction in flights until the end of June.
Cathay, which has 236 aircraft, currently operates long-haul flights to London Heathrow, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Sydney twice a week, but will increase that to five times a week.
On top of that, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, San Francisco and Melbourne are among the long-haul destinations set to return three times a week.
With regional routes currently operating three times a week, including Tokyo Narita, Taipei, Beijing and Singapore, Asian routes will increase to a daily service. Osaka and Seoul would also return to the network, too.
“We will continue to monitor the developing situation and further adjustments may be made as necessary,” the airline said.
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Earlier this month, Cathay’s budget unit HK Express extended its total grounding until June 18, having been on hiatus since March 23.
Meanwhile, Boeing has added to warnings of a very slow recovery in air travel, with Dave Calhoun, its CEO, saying demand may not return to 2019 levels for two to three years.
Cathay Pacific’s daily passenger volume has collapsed from regular previous peaks of 100,000 to less than 1,000 in April. Over the past two months, the company has been running more than 250 extra pairs of cargo-only passenger flights to maintain air freight capacity, much of which is accounted for by passenger services.
In a bid to cut costs, most of the Cathay Pacific Group’s 34,200 staff have taken three weeks of unpaid leave. Also, 433 cabin crew in the US and Canada were told they would be laid off, while about 200 pilots in the UK, Australia have been furloughed.
The International Air Transport Association, which revised down pandemic-related revenue losses for the global sector to US$314 billion (HK$2.4 trillion) two weeks ago, said last week the Hong Kong aviation market would take a US$7.5 billion hit this year, a 27 per cent increase on the previous estimate. That equates to a 59 per cent decline in air travel demand, or a loss of almost 31 million passengers, in 2020.
BOCOM International, a financial services company, forecast in a report on Monday that the city’s aviation sector would lose HK$65.2 billion in revenue in 2020, yet Cathay Pacific could emerge as a winner if it survived largely unscathed, given the weakness of rivals at home and in the region plus its dominant position in Hong Kong.
“Hong Kong aviation is at the most critical juncture in its history. Though calamitous, Covid-19 is set to reshape Hong Kong’s aviation industry for the years, possibly decades, to come,” said transportation analyst Luya You.
“Covid-19’s sweeping blows now offer a blank slate for remaining players to regain lost leadership or gain new markets. If [Cathay Pacific] can survive intact from Covid, the carrier could enjoy winner-takes-all growth trajectory in the years following [2020].”
Researchers conclude that the virus was circulating undetected in France in February
Findings highlight the difficulties governments face in tracing the source of coronavirus outbreaks
Researchers in France have carried out genetic analysis and found that the dominant types of the viral strains in the country did not come from China or Italy. Photo: AP
The coronavirus outbreak in France was not caused by cases imported from China, but from a locally circulating strain of unknown origin, according to a new study by French scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
Genetic analysis showed that the dominant types of the viral strains in France belonged to a clade – or group with a common ancestor – that did not come from China or Italy, the earliest hotspot in Europe.
“The French outbreak has been mainly seeded by one or several variants of this clade … we can infer that the virus was silently circulating in France in February,” said researchers led by Dr Sylvie van der Werf and Etienne Simon-Loriere in a non-peer reviewed paper released on bioRxiv.org last week.
The Covid-19 pandemic has infected more than 128,000 people in France and caused more than 23,000 deaths.
France detected the virus in late January, before any other country in Europe. A few patients with a travel history that included China’s Hubei province were sampled on January 24 and tested positive.
The Covid-19 pandemic has infected more than 128,000 people in France and caused more than 23,000 deaths. Photo: AFP
The French government took quick and decisive measures to trace contacts of the infected people and shut down the chance of further infection.
However, these strains were not found in patients tested after the initial imported cases, suggesting “the quarantine imposed on the initial Covid-19 cases in France appears to have prevented local transmission”, the researchers said.
The Pasteur institute collected samples from more than 90 other patients across France and found the strains all came from one genetic line. Strains following this unique path of evolution had so far only been detected in Europe and the Americas.
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The earliest sample in the French clade was collected on February 19 from a patient who had no history of travel and no known contact with returned travellers.
Several patients had recently travelled to other European countries, the United Arab Emirates, Madagascar and Egypt but there was no direct evidence that they contracted the disease in these destinations.
To the researchers’ surprise, some of the later strains collected were genetically older – or closer to the ancestral root – than the first sample in this clade.
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A possible explanation, according to the authors, was that local transmission had been occurring in France for some time without being detected by health authorities.
The French government may have missed detecting the transmission. According to the researchers, a large proportion of those patients might have had mild symptoms or none at all.
The researchers also found that three sequences later sampled in Algeria were closely related to those in France, suggesting that travellers from France might have introduced the virus to the African country and caused an outbreak.
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Benjamin Neuman, professor and chair of biological sciences with the Texas A&M University-Texarkana, said the French strains might have come from Belgium, where some sequences most closely related to the original strain from China were clustered.
“Since the earliest European strains of [the coronavirus] Sars-CoV-2 seem to be associated with Belgium, the idea that the virus spread from Belgium to both Italy and France at around the same time seems plausible, as this paper contends,” he said.
France is the latest in a growing number of countries and areas where no direct link between China and local outbreaks could be established.
The dominant strains in Russia and Australia, for instance, came from Europe and the United States, respectively, according to some studies.
These findings have drawn fire from some politicians who have tried to deflect domestic anger over their handling of the crisis by blaming China.
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“So now the Fake News @nytimes is tracing the CoronaVirus origins back to Europe, NOT China. This is a first!” he tweeted on April 11, referring to a story about the studies in the The New York Times’ science section.
The findings also highlight the difficulties governments face in tracing the source of coronavirus outbreaks.
Less-developed countries may never know where their strains came from due to inadequate testing and sequencing capability.
India, for example, has released the genetic sequence of fewer than 40 samples to the public so far, a small number considering its huge population.
Most of the strains sampled in 35 early cases came from clades that could be traced to Italy and Iran, with only a few from China, according to a recent study. But researchers were not able to track further because of the lack of data.
A scientist on the study, Dr Mukesh Thakur, of the Zoological Survey of India, said it was too early to rule out China as the source of outbreaks in India because the number of samples at hand was limited.
A 20-year-old student studying medicine in Wuhan, for instance, might have come in contact with many people on the way home before she was tested positive on January 30.
Thakur said local media reported that the Indian government quarantined 3,500 people possibly linked to three positive cases imported from Wuhan.
“God knows how many of them tested positive in the subsequent stages,” Thakur said in an email response to the Post’s queries on Tuesday.
Some prominent scientists, including Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, said the virus might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak.
The virus had thus adapted well to the human body. Some genes regulating its binding to host cells were similar, or even identical, to those found in some other highly infectious human viruses, such as HIV and Ebola.
According to some estimates, the ancestor of Sars-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, might have left bats between 50 and 70 years ago. A recent study by a team of geneticists in Oxford University estimated the first outbreak of the current pandemic could have occurred as early as September last year.
They found that the dominant strains circulating in China and Asia were genetically younger than some popular strains in the United States.
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China ordered on Saturday that anyone in Wuhan working in certain service-related jobs must take a coronavirus test if they want to leave the city.
The order comes after the central city, where the coronavirus emerged late last year, lifted a 70-day lockdown that all but ended the epidemic there.
People in Wuhan work in nursing, education, security and other sectors with high exposure to the public must take a nucleic acid test before leaving, the National Health Commission said in an order.
The government of Hubei province, of which Wuhan is capital, will pay for the tests, the commission said.
Since the city relaxed its lockdown restrictions people who arrived in there before Chinese New Year, when the virus was peaking in China, are allowed to go back to their homes.
People working in other sectors aiming to leave Wuhan are encouraged to take voluntary tests before going.
Within seven days of arrival at their destinations, people who can present test results showing they do not carry the virus, as well as a clean bill of health on a health app, can go back to work.
Everyone else will have to spend 14 days in quarantine before returning to work.
Authorities have worked with the China’s tech giants to devise a colour-based health code system, retrieved via mobile app, that uses geolocation data and self-reported information to indicate one’s health status.
Wuhan will speed up its efforts to investigate asymptomatic coronavirus cases and confirm the presence of antibodies in people, which might suggest immunity, the commission said.
Wuhan, which accounts for 60% of infections in China and 84% of the death toll as of Saturday, has been testing inhabitants aggressively throughout the virus’ breakout and many companies had already been asking workers from the city to undergo tests before resuming work.
Wuhan revised up its death toll from the coronavirus by 1,290 on Friday, taking the city’s toll to 3,869, because of incorrect reporting, delays and omissions, especially in the chaotic early stages of the outbreak, authorities said.
China national death toll is 4,632 from 82,719 cases.
Train trips, Xinjiang and chartered flights among the growing holiday trends, travel agents say
Destinations such as Dubrovnik, Croatia, are becoming more popular among mainland Chinese tourists, according to one of China’ s biggest travel services. Photo: AFP
Chartered flights and niche destinations such as Croatia and Malta are growing in popularity as Hong Kong falls out of favour for mainland Chinese holidaymakers over the National Day “golden week” break.
Japan has overtaken Thailand as the most searched overseas destination on the website of travel agency Ctrip, followed by Malaysia, the United States, Singapore, Australia, Macau, France, Italy and Russia.
Within the mainland places such as Beijing and Shanghai continued to be among the most popular searches but Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, is a fast-growing term, especially among people in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
“It could be that tourists want to see autumn leaves,” a Ctrip spokesman told the South China Morning Post.
October 1 marks the start of a week-long break on the mainland when millions of Chinese take the chance to travel. This year, an estimated 800 million people are expected to go on trips in China or overseas, about 10 per cent more than last year.
The country’s motorways are expected to be jammed from about 2pm on Monday, reaching a peak at around midnight, and again from 10am Tuesday, according to web mapping service Tencent Map.
China’s highways can expect heavy traffic as travellers head out for the holiday. Photo: Reuters
Ctrip said people heading overseas were increasingly seeking out new destinations, with bookings to places such as the Czech Republic, Austria, Croatia, Malta and Cambodia growing by 45 per cent this year.
“As Chinese people travel outside the country more and their experience of travel grows, many are more willing to go to smaller eastern European countries, such as the Czech Republic,” the spokesman said.
“Popular movies also have a strong influence. Many young people are willing to travel to see where films are shot, such as Croatia, one of the locations for Game of Thrones.”
Other noticeable trends this year include more people travelling with pets, by train and on chartered flights. The site said it sold 60 per cent more European train tickets and 10 times the number of train tickets for Japan for this golden week compared to last year.
The most popular routes in Asia were Tokyo to Kyoto in Japan, and Seoul to Busan in South Korea.
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Thousands of users also chose chartered flights, a service Ctrip introduced in September.
Ji Yu, head of chartered flights for Ctrip said most people thought chartered flights or helicopters were something only millionaires could afford, but in the internet age, they had become cheaper and more accessible.
“In the internet era, consumer needs vary from person to person, especially in terms of travel. There are products on the market to satisfy each customer’s personal needs.”
Among the more popular chartered routes were from Beijing or Shanghai to Tokyo, Bangkok, the Maldives and London.
More people are also going away for longer. Digital travel services giant Qunar said that 80 per cent of the travellers booking flights or hotels through its services were heading off for more than five days. And of those 41 per cent were travelling for more than a week.
Meanwhile, trips to Hong Kong have fallen substantially, with just 15 group tours expected to enter the city each day, down from 110 last year, according to the Travel Industry Council of Hong Kong.
Efforts to promote Hong Kong attractions have also increased in Shenzhen in recent weeks, with advertising videos scenic spots, popular restaurants and malls in Hong Kong playing on cross-border buses. Passengers can also get discounts to some stores and services with their tickets.
Foreign lifestyle experiences are becoming more popular as citizens seek to escape pollution, food and medicine safety worries and authoritarian government controls
Citizens encountering more barriers to their dreams of travelling abroad, with severe limits on moving money overseas and restrictions on visiting foreign countries
Thailand, including the likes of Chiang Mai, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand are popular destinations for Chinese families. Photo: Shutteratock
Xu Zhangle and her husband and their two children are a typical middle-class couple from Shenzhen, and along with 60 other Chinese families, they are going on an extended holiday to Thailand in July, where they hope to enjoy an immigrant-like life experience.
The family have paid a travel agent around 50,000 yuan (US$7,473) for the stay in Chiang Mai in the mountainous north of the country, including transport, a three-week summer camp for their daughters at a local international school, rent for a serviced apartment and daily expenses.
Zhangle loves Chiang Mai’s relaxed lifestyle and easy atmosphere and wants to live as a local for a month or even longer, instead of having to rush through a short-term holiday.
“It would not be just [tourist] travelling but rather a life away from the mainland.” she said.
Recently, upper middle-class citizens have increased their efforts to safeguard their wealth and achieve more freedom by spending more time abroad.
They have invested considerable amounts of money in overseas properties and applied for long-stay visas, although many of their attempts have ended in failure.
Chinese citizens are encountering more barriers to their dreams of travelling abroad, with severe limits on moving money overseas and restrictions on visiting foreign countries.
Still, growing anxieties about air pollution, food and medicine safety and an increasingly authoritarian political climate are pushing middle class families to look for new ways to circumvent the obstacles so they can live outside China.
Among the options, there is growing demand for sojourns abroad of a month or more, to enjoy a foreign lifestyle for a brief period to make up for the fact that their emigration dreams may have stalled.
“I think this is becoming a trend. Chinese middle-class families are facing increasing difficulties to emigrate and own homes overseas. On the other hand, they still yearn for more freedom, for a better quality of life than what is found in first-tier cities in China.
They are eager to seek alternatives to give themselves and their children a global lifestyle,” said Cai Mingdong, founder of Zhejiang Newway, an online tour and education operator in Ningbo, south of Shanghai.
“First, the availability of multiple-entry tourist visas and the sharp drop in air ticket prices have made it convenient and practical to stay abroad for from a few weeks to up to three months each year.”
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Now, many well-to-do Chinese middle class families can get a tourist visa for five or even 10 years that allows them to stay in a number of countries — including the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other Asian countries — for up to six months at a time.
“In 2011, a round-trip air ticket from Shanghai to New Zealand cost 14,000 yuan (US$2,000), but now is about 4,000 (US$598),” added Cai.
This opens up the possibility for many middle-class families who are not eligible to emigrate, to live abroad for short periods of time.
Many wealthy Chinese middle class families can get a tourist visa for five or even 10 years that allows them to stay in several countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and other Asian countries, for up to six months at a time. Photo: AP
Chinese tourists made more than 140 million trips outside the country in 2018, a 13.5 per cent increase from the previous year, spending an estimated US$120 billion, according to the China Tourism Academy, an official research institute under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
“In [the Thai cities of] Bangkok and Chiang Mai, there are more and more Chinese who stay there to experience the local lifestyle, which is different from theirs in China. The life there is very different from that in China,” said Owen Zhu, who now lives in the Bangkok condo he bought last year.
“The freedom, culture and community are diversified. The quality of air, food and services are much higher than in first-tier cities in China, but the prices are more affordable.
“In Bangkok, in many international apartment complexes where foreigners live, the monthly rent for a one-bedroom [apartment] is about 2,000 (US$298) to 3,000 yuan.”
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A one-bedroom apartment in Shenzhen in southern China is twice as expensive, with rents continuing to rise rapidly.
There are global goods, and it is easy to socialise with different people from around the world,” Zhu added
“Many Chinese people around me, really, come to Thailand to live for a while and go back to China, but then come back again after a few months.”
Both Cai and Zhu said they discovered the new phenomenon among China’s middle class and decided it was a business opportunity.
Growing anxieties about air pollution, food and medicine safety and an increasingly authoritarian political climate are pushing middle class families to look for new ways to circumvent the obstacles so they can live outside China. Photo: AP
Zhu is in the process of registering a company in Bangkok and plans to build an online platform to service the needs of Chinese citizens living abroad who do not own property or have immigration status, especially members of the LGBT community.
Cai said dozens of Chinese families in the Yangtze River Delta had paid him to send their children to schools in New Zealand or Europe for around three or four weeks in the middle of the school year, while the parents rent villas in the area, with New Zealand and Toronto in Canada among the most popular destinations.
Last year, Zheng Feng, a single mother and freelance writer from Beijing, rented a small villa in Australia for a month for them, a friend and their children to escape Beijing’s pollution and experience life overseas.
“To be honest, I don’t have enough money to invest in a property or a green card in Australia. But it’s very affordable for me and my son to pay about 30,000 yuan (US$4,484) to live abroad for one or two months.” Zheng said.
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Zheng will join the Xu family in Chiang Mai later this year and she is also planning a similar trip to England next year.
Zheng’s friend, Alice Yu, invested in an American EB-5 investor visa a few years ago, and plans to make one or two month-long trips abroad each year until her family is finally able to move to the United States.
Demand for the EB-5 investor visa in China seems to be waning given heightened uncertainty about the future of the programme and US immigration law in general under US President Donald Trump.
Approval for the visa can now take up to 10 years, resulting in a huge backlog that has further dampened interest and led to a significant dip in investment inflows into the US from foreign individuals.
A one-bedroom apartment in Bangkok can cost around bout 2,000 (US$298) to 3,000 yuan a month. Photo: AFP
“Maybe it will soon become standard for a real Chinese middle-class family to have the time and money to enjoy a long stay at a countryside villa overseas,” said Yu.
“Regardless of whether we can get a long-term visa for the United States, I want my children grow up in a global lifestyle and with more freedom than just growing up on the mainland. So do all wealthy and middle class Chinese families, I think.”
Karen Gao’s son started studying at an international school in Chiang Mai in June, at the cost of about 70,000 yuan (US$10,462) a year, after she quit her job as a public relations manager in Shenzhen and moved to Thailand on a tourist visa.
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“A few months each year for good air, good food and no censorship and internet control, but cheaper living costs compared to Beijing, it sounds like a really good deal to go,” said Gao, who has now been offered a guardian visa to accompany her son, who has already been given a student visa.
“In Shenzhen, I wasn’t able to get him into school because I had no [local] residence permit.
“It would be the best choice for us because we feel so uncertain and worried about investing and living in the mainland.”
Last year, Gao, like thousands of other private investors mostly middle class people living in first-tier cities, suffered significant losses when their investments in hotels and inns in Dali, Yunnan province, were demolished amid the local government’s campaign to curb pollution and improve the environment around Lake Erhai.
“We were robbed by the officials without proper compensation,” Gao said.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 