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.
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Buying and paying for meals and supplies online was already second nature for many Chinese before the Covid-19 lockdown
The supply and delivery networks that were already in place were able to work with the authorities in cities like Wuhan
China’s established home delivery system played an important role in getting food and other necessities to residents during the Wuhan lockdown. Photo: EPA-EFE
When Liu Yilin, a retired middle schoolteacher in Wuhan, first heard rumours of a
and shoppers flooded to the markets and malls to snap up supplies.
But as time went on and with residents banned from leaving their homes, he became increasingly concerned about getting hold of fresh supplies of vegetables, fruit and meat until the nation’s vast network of delivery drivers came to the rescue.
“It was such a relief that several necessity purchasing groups organised by community workers and volunteers suddenly emerged on WeChat [a leading social media app] days after the lockdown,” Liu said. “China’s powerful home delivery service makes life much easier at a time of crisis.”
Hu Xingdou, a Beijing-based independent political economist said: “Home delivery played a very important role amid the coronavirus outbreak. To some extent, it prevented people from starving especially in cases when local governments took extreme measures to isolate people.”
According to Liu, people in Wuhan during the lockdown had to stay within their residential communities, with community workers guarding the exits.
Human contact was limited to the internet. Residents placed orders online with farmers, small merchants or supermarkets to buy daily necessities, and community workers helped distribute the goods from deliverymen.
Every morning, Liu passed a piece of paper with his name, phone number and order number to a community worker who would collect the items from a courier at the gate of the residential area.
Thanks to a high population density in urban areas, affluent labour force and people’s openness to digital life, China has built a well-developed home delivery network.
Extensive funding from technology companies has been invested in hardware infrastructure, software to improve logistics and big data and cloud computing to help predict consumers’ behaviour.
Mark Greeven, professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, said: “Whether it is delivery of products, air parcels or fresh food or even medicine or materials for medical use, China has a very well developed system. Much better developed than I think almost any other places in the world.
“Well before the crisis, China had started to embrace digital technology in daily life whether it is in consumption, business, government and smart cities and use of third party payments. All of these things have been in place for a long time and the crisis tested its agility and capability to deal with peak demand.”
China’s e-commerce giants help revive sales of farm goods from Hubei
3 Apr 2020
According to e-commerce giant JD.com, demands for e-commerce and delivery services spiked during the outbreak of Covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus.
It sold around 220 million items between January 20 and February 28, mainly grains and dairy products with the value of beef orders trebling and chicken deliveries quadrupling compared with a year ago.
Tang Yishen, head of JD Fresh, its fresh foods subsidiary, said: “The surge of online demand for fresh merchandise shows the pandemic helped e-commerce providers further penetrate into the life of customers. It also helped upstream farm producers to know and trust us.”
Meituan Dianping, a leading e-commerce platform, said its grocery retail service Meituan Instashopping reported a 400 per cent growth in sales from a year ago in February from local supermarkets.
The most popular items ordered between January 26 and February 8 were face masks, disinfectant, tangerines, packed fresh-cut fruits and potatoes.
The food delivery service Ele.me said that, between January 21 and February 8, deliveries of frozen food surged more than 600 per cent year on year, followed by a nearly 500 per cent growth in delivery of pet-care products. Fresh food deliveries rose by 181 per cent while drink and snack deliveries climbed by 101 per cent and 82 per cent, respectively. Ele.me is owned by Alibaba, the parent company of the South China Morning Post.
Chinese hotpot restaurant chain adapts as coronavirus fears push communal meals off the menu
E-commerce providers used the opportunity to show goodwill and improve their relationship with customers and partners, analysts say.
Sofya Bakhta, marketing strategy analyst at the Shanghai-based Daxue Consulting, said the food delivery sector had made significant headway in reducing physical contact during the outbreak.
Delivery staff left orders in front of buildings, in lifts or temporary shelters as instructed by the clients as most properties no longer allowed them inside.
Some companies also adopted more hi-tech strategies.
In Beijing, Meituan used self-driving vehicles to deliver meals to contactless pickup stations. It also offered cardboard boxes to be used as shields aimed at preventing the spread of droplets among its clients while they ate in their workplaces. In Shanghai, Ele.me employed delivery drones to serve people under quarantine in the most affected regions.
Some companies even “shared” employees to meet the growing labour demand in the food delivery industry that could not be satisfied with their ordinary workforce, Bakhta said.
More employees from restaurants, general retail and other service businesses were “loaned” to food delivery companies, which faced manpower shortages during the outbreak, according to Sandy Shen, senior research director at global consultancy Gartner.
“These arrangements not only ensured the continuity of the delivery service but also helped businesses to retain employees during the shutdown,” she said.
A delivery man takes a break between orders in Wuhan, central China, during the lockdown. Photo: AFP
Mo Xinsheng became one such “on-loan” worker after customers stopped coming to the Beijing restaurant where he worked as a kitchen assistant.
“I wanted to earn some money and meanwhile help people who are trapped at home,” said Mo, who was hired as a delivery man.
But before he could start work he had to go through lengthy health checks before he was allowed into residential compounds.
He also had to work long hours battling the wind and cold of a Beijing winter and carrying heavy loads.
“I work about 10 hours every day just to earn several thousand yuan [several hundred US dollars] a month,” he said.
“Sometimes I almost couldn’t breathe while my hands were fully loaded with packages of rice, oil and other things.
“But I know I’m doing an important job, especially at a time of crisis,” Mo said, “It was not until then that I realised people have become so reliant on the home delivery system.”
Woman uses remote control car to buy steamed buns amid coronavirus outbreak in China
The delivery system has been improved by an effective combination of private sector innovation and public sector coordination, said Li Chen, assistant professor at the Centre for China Studies at Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“[In China,] government units and the Communist Party grass roots organisations have maintained fairly strong mobilisation capabilities to cope with emergencies, which has worked well in the crisis,” he said.
However, Liu, the Wuhan resident, said prices had gone up and vegetables were three times more expensive than they had been over Lunar New Year in 2019.
“There were few varieties that we could choose from, apart from potatoes, cabbage and carrots,” he said.
“But I’m not complaining. It’s good we can still get fresh vegetables at a difficult time. Isn’t it? After all, we are just ordinary people,” he said.
Image copyright HAN ZHUImage caption Choosing an electric car was an easy decision for Shenzhen resident Han Zhu
Han Zhu is on a mission to go green. The 29-year-old data analyst wants her next car to be electric. But her reasons for buying an electric vehicle are in part practical.
In the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, government restrictions on the number of petrol cars sold each year mean she would have to enter a lottery or auction to be able to buy a petrol vehicle.
“There is a possibility you may never get it. With the electric vehicle green licence, you don’t have to wait in line,” she says.
Shenzhen has become the showpiece capital for the Chinese electric dream. In 2017 it became the first city in the world to introduce a fleet of electric buses. A year later, the government rolled out a plan to replace city taxis with electric cars.
“In Shenzhen, in almost every residential building there are two charging units. One out of 10 cars on the street are Teslas,” she says. “In China if the policy leads in one direction, technology and money goes in that direction too,” she says.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption China has the world’s biggest market for electric vehicles
In less than a decade China’s new electric vehicle market has become the largest in the world. In 2018 more than a million electric vehicles were sold in China, more than three times the number sold in the US.
Beijing invested an estimated $50bn (£43bn) in the industry, hoping that today’s dominance of the electric vehicle market would lead to global automobile supremacy tomorrow.
And thus far the policy has been working. Over the last three years the number of Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers has tripled, with more than 400 registered nationwide.
But that breakneck expansion alarmed the government. Last year it decided to put the brakes on by withdrawing approximately half of its financial incentives for buyers.
A slump in sales quickly followed, in the last quarter of 2019 sales for electric vehicles plummeted.
Now the coronavirus has supplied a second punch.
Manufacturers have been forced to halt production lines and close dealerships in a bid to stop the spread of virus.
Overall auto sales in plunged 79% in February compared with the same month in 2019, according to figures from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. Sales of new energy vehicles (NEVs) fell for the eighth month in a row.
“China’s auto market was already reeling from a large drop in demand in 2019. In 2020 no carmaker has been immune to the effects of the coronavirus. That includes everyone from the oldest joint ventures producing internal combustion engine SUVs to the most innovative upstarts making connected electric vehicles,” says Scott Kennedy from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The vast majority [of electric car makers] will not survive. But how long they survive and whether industry consolidation occurs through lots of mergers or bankruptcies will depend on the willingness of the government.”
Image copyright NIOImage caption The NIO EP9 is one of the fastest electric cars in the world
After listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018 and raising billions of dollars, NIO is perhaps the highest-profile Chinese maker of electric cars.
But in the five years since it was founded it has been beset by problems and has burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2019 the company cut 2,000 jobs on the back of falling revenues. In February it announced it had signed a tentative agreement with a local government that has pledged to fund the company.
“China is a huge market growing at an immense pace. We will adjust and adapt to the market condition,” said an NIO spokesperson.
And it’s not just the car makers. China has some giant makers of components, such as batteries.
In 2018 CATL, a Chinese electric battery maker, became the official supplier of BMW’s electric cars.
Last month Tesla announced it would enter into an agreement with the company to supply batteries for Tesla’s newly built Shanghai mega-plant, capable of producing 500,000 vehicles a year.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption China’s BYD is the one of the world’s biggest makers of electric vehicles
But despite that apparent success, analysts have their doubts.
“Chinese auto and battery technology is still not world-class. CATL and BYD are strong battery makers, but they are still somewhat behind technologically from their South Korean and Japanese counterparts. And Chinese automakers are still second-class producers even in their own country and they have barely any sales outside China,” says Mr Kennedy.
For car buyers, that question of quality hangs over China’s electric car makers.
Yi Zhi Yong, a middle-aged entrepreneur, drives a hybrid car made by Chinese manufacturer BYD. Backed by US billionaire Warren Buffett, the company was the third-largest battery-only electric car producer in the world in 2019, according to research by EV-volumes.com. Tesla sold the most, followed by another Chinese firm, BAIC.
He didn’t buy a pure electric vehicle because he is not confident about the quality.
“The quality of domestic pure electric vehicles is not good at the moment,” he says. “No domestic pure electric vehicle is worth buying yet.”
But he feels the progress made by China is a source of national pride. “In the 1990s we couldn’t imagine that China could build cars that can compete with the Japanese,” he says.
Back in Shenzhen, Han Zhu says the rolling back of government subsidies won’t put her off buying an electric vehicle. But rather than buying a Chinese marque, she has her eye on a Tesla.
“I think that they are totally different. I was super excited about Tesla but not other electric cars,” she says.
Government records suggest first person infected with new disease may have been a Hubei resident aged 55, but ‘patient zero’ has yet to be confirmed
Documents seen by the Post could help scientists track the spread of the disease and perhaps determine its source
The first known case of Covid-19 in China dates back to November, but the hunt for “patient zero” goes on. Photo: EPA-EFE
The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, can be traced back to November 17, according to government data seen by the South China Morning Post.
Chinese authorities have so far identified at least 266 people who were infected last year, all of whom came under medical surveillance at some point.
Some of the cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients.
Interviews with whistle-blowers from the medical community suggest Chinese doctors only realised they were dealing with a new disease in late December.
Scientists have been trying to map the pattern of the early transmission of Covid-19 since an epidemic was reported in the central China city of Wuhan in January, two months before the outbreak became a global health crisis.
Understanding how the disease spread and determining how undetected and undocumented cases contributed to its transmission will greatly improve their understanding of the size of that threat.
According to the government data seen by the Post, a 55 year-old from Hubei province could have been the first person to have contracted Covid-19 on November 17.
From that date onwards, one to five new cases were reported each day. By December 15, the total number of infections stood at 27 – the first double-digit daily rise was reported on December 17 – and by December 20, the total number of confirmed cases had reached 60.
On December 27, Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that the disease was caused by a new coronavirus. By that date, more than 180 people had been infected, though doctors might not have been aware of all of them at the time.
With pandemic declared, the race is on to develop a coronavirus vaccine
13 Mar 2020
By the final day of 2019, the number of confirmed cases had risen to 266, On the first day of 2020 it stood at 381.
While the government records have not been released to the public, they provide valuable clues about how the disease spread in its early days and the speed of its transmission, as well as how many confirmed cases Beijing has recorded.
Scientists are now keen to identify the so-called patient zero, which could help them to trace the source of the coronavirus, which is generally thought to have jumped to humans from a wild animal, possibly a bat.
Of the first nine cases to be reported in November – four men and five women – none has been confirmed as being “patient zero”. They were all aged between 39 and 79, but it is unknown how many were residents of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei and the epicentre of the outbreak.
It is possible that there were reported cases dating back even earlier than those seen by the Post.
According to the World Health Organisation’s website, the first confirmed Covid-19 case in China was on December 8, but the global body does not track the disease itself but relies on nations to provide such information.
A report published in medical journal The Lancet by Chinese doctors from Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, which treated some of the earliest patients, put the date of the first known infection at December 1.
Dr Ai Fen, the first known whistle-blower, told People magazine in an interview that was later censored, that tests showed that a patient at Wuhan Central Hospital was diagnosed on December 16 as having contracted an unknown coronavirus.
With pandemic declared, the race is on to develop a coronavirus vaccine
13 Mar 2020
Accounts by other doctors seem to suggest the medical community in Wuhan became aware of the disease in late December.
Previous reports said that although doctors in the city collected samples from suspected cases in late December, they could not confirm their findings because they were bogged down by bureaucracy, such as having to get approval from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, which could take days. They were also ordered not to disclose any information about the new disease to the public.
As late as January 11, Wuhan’s health authorities were still claiming there were just 41 confirmed cases.
BEIJING, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) — “A spring breeze blew into Sijiqing.”
This is how seniors at the Beijing-based nursing home recalled a visit in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.
During the visit to the Sijiqing Home for the Elderly, Xi chatted with senior citizens, asked them about their health, families and lives.
Xi stressed the need to improve the management and service quality of elderly care institutions to ensure that every senior citizen can live a carefree, healthy, comfortable and happy life.
More than five years on, Liu Jinwen, a member of the elderly fashion models team at Sijiqing, said the visit had a great impact on them.
“Senior citizens should maintain a positive outlook on life and spend their old age gracefully,” Liu said. “To that end, we set up the models team to make our lives more ‘beautiful!'”
Liu is just one of the growing number of happy seniors in China.
Under Xi’s leadership, the country has over the past few years formulated a series of measures to boost elderly care and witnessed a marked improvement of the lives of the senior citizens.
BETTER NURSING HOMES
The services at nursing homes are related to the happiness of more than 200 million old people in China, especially the 40 million of them who have lost the ability in full or in part to take care of themselves.
In 2017, a four-year campaign was launched nationwide to boost nursing homes’ service quality. More rules and regulations on the management of elderly care institutions have also been drawn up.
At Sijiqing, a lot of cultural activities were organized. A “Silver Age” college was set up. And the nursing home teamed up with a local hospital to provide fast access for senior citizens to quality medical treatment.
“It’s really convenient now,” said Zhang Jin, a Sijiqing nursing home resident.
IMPROVED COMMUNITY-LEVEL SERVICES
Another field of senior care that has benefited a lot from policy support is community-level services.
Community-based elderly care is important to China’s old-age care system. About 90 percent of the Chinese elderly prefer to spend their later years at home, 6 percent at community-level elderly care centers and only 4 percent at nursing homes, according to statistics.
But community-level elderly care centers also play a key role in providing food and medical services to senior citizens who opt to stay at home.
Liu Jianguo, 86, and his wife are among the people who benefit.
The couple, living in the southeastern city of Fuzhou, go to the community elderly daycare center almost every day.
“My wife and I usually spend the whole day here,” Liu said, praising the center for its environment, facilities and staff.
Across China, all urban communities and more than half of rural communities had established community-based old-age service facilities as of the end of 2018.
In China, a comprehensive elderly care service system is taking shape, meeting the needs of the elderly who prefer to spend later years at home, community-level centers or nursing homes.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 