BACK ON TRACK WITH CAUTION
Besides Jiangxi, many Chinese local governments have taken differentiated measures to ensure the resumption of normal economic activities on the premise of virus containment.
On Feb. 20, Changchun, capital of northeastern Jilin Province, issued a circular requesting the related government departments to help companies solve problems such as labor, funds and gas supply shortages and encourage small hotels to work with employers to accommodate their workers.
The districts with no confirmed COVID-19 cases or no new cases for 14 consecutive days may further relax the control on the operation resumption of the companies and the personnel flow, it said.
Changchun is home to one of the country's largest automobile maker, FAW Group, as well as a slew of auto parts and components producers. At one FAW factory, work resumed on Feb. 22 on two shifts with some 300 vehicles rolling off the assembly line a day.
To ensure workers' health, the government of Changchun's automobile economic and technological development zone, where the factory is located, allocated disinfectant to the workshops and helped rent hotels and college dormitory buildings to quarantine more than 7,200 returned workers.
So far, over 90 percent of the enterprises in the development zone have resumed operation.
Liu Guoqiang, vice governor of the People's Bank of China, said the epidemic's pressure on the economy will be short-lived and will not change the country's sound economic fundamentals.
More Chinese provinces, including Liaoning, Gansu, Anhui and Guangdong, have lowered their emergency response level after reporting no new cases for several days.
To facilitate work resumption, the country has loosened traffic controls and arranged buses, trains and flights to bring migrant workers back to factories. Tax and fees for industries heavily impacted by the epidemic have been lowered to alleviate social security burdens on the employers.
The Ministry of Commerce has pledged to facilitate foreign-invested enterprises to resume production, especially to industry leaders, to keep the global supply chain stable.
In Dongguan, a manufacturing hub in Guangdong Province, a total of 5,791 foreign-funded enterprises had resumed work, including 60 percent of large and medium-sized ones as of Feb. 23.
The Shanghai Association of Foreign Investment found, based on a survey over 697 key foreign-funded enterprises in Shanghai, that more than 90 percent of surveyed firms in the service sector and about 70 percent of those in the manufacturing industry have resumed operation.
By Feb. 22, a total of 10,680 industrial enterprises above designated size in Jiangxi, around 83.9 percent of the total, have resumed business with more than 1 million people back to work, according to local authorities.
"With a raft of supportive policies, the resumption power index in Jiangxi will maintain its upward trend. Work and production back on track will continue injecting vitality into economic growth," Hu said.
