INSIGHT: GREATER CHINA - In Remote Provinces, Zero-COVID is Worsening Inequality

All of these regions are six officials were punished for “failing to fulfill requisite seeing strict enforcement of zero-COVID exacerbate duties in this round of pandemic control work.” existing inequalities. [...] IN BRIEF IMPLICATIONS In 2022, COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred in many Xining, a city of nearly 2.5 million and the capital of of China’s remote borderland regions. [...] This is Qinghai province consistently ranks in the bottom because local officials in these regions are especially third of China’s 34 province-level administrative incentivized to go above and beyond in compliance divisions in terms of income. [...] Fuzhou, in coastal Fujian, is 2022, around 15 per cent [of] residents in Tibet’s one of the more recent cases of a Chinese city that capital city, Lhasa, were sent to a quarantine facility has plunged into lockdown. [...] Outbreaks at the Inner Mongolia Xinjiang lockdowns and amplified the voices of University of Technology saw students transported Uyghurs and Kazakhs, as it is much riskier for to quarantine en masse in packed trains, apparently ethnic minorities to do so publicly.