News of CBI

China's popular tourist island of Hainan locked down more areas on Monday as it battles its worst Covid-19 outbreak after recording very few cases over the past two years, compared with many other regions in the country. About 25,000 tourists were stranded in Sanya, the hardest-hit city in Hainan's outbreak and the island's key tourist centre, as of Sunday. The island in the South China Sea, which recorded just two local symptomatic Covid cases last year, has reported more than 1,400 domestically transmitted infections this month, including 982 symptomatic ones. Although that is small by global standards, it is the province's biggest outbreak since the virus was first reported in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. The sharp increase in cases comes amid increased interest in tourism after China slightly eased curbs aimed at domestic travel, accounting for the shorter incubation period of the Omicron variant, which requires a shorter quarantine time. READ MO...

China’s economy grew at the slowest pace since the initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, a reflection of the damage the nation’s zero-Covid approach has had on growth and the challenge Beijing faces in meeting its full-year target. Gross domestic product increased 0.4 per cent from a year earlier, the worst performance since the first quarter of 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday. Growth was far weaker than the 1.2 per cent gain in a Bloomberg survey of economists. On a quarterly basis, the economy contracted 2.6 per cent. China’s economy is paying the price for Beijing’s attempt to stamp out Covid cases, a strategy that’s becoming evermore difficult as more infectious virus variants emerge. On top of that, the property market remains in a deep slump. Economists say the government’s ambitious growth goal of about 5.5 per cent is out of reach, with GDP forecast to expand slightly more than 4 per cent this year. “The downward pressure on the economy has increased sig...