Families in Beijing rushed to stock up on food. Supermarkets stayed open late. Residents endured long lines for mandatory testing. China’s stock markets plunged.A fresh coronavirus outbreak in China’s capital has raised concerns that Beijing could become, after Shanghai, the next Chinese megacity to put life on hold to contain the spread of the Omicron variant.
The Beijing municipal government ordered late Monday night that almost everyone in the city would have to take three P.C.R. tests for the coronavirus over five days. The order came after 70 coronavirus cases had been found in the city since Friday.
Nearly two-thirds of the cases have been in the affluent district of Chaoyang, which ordered late Sunday that all of its 3.5 million residents must be tested on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The municipal government then ordered late Monday night that residents of 10 other districts — almost all of the city’s residents except in a few heavily rural outskirts — would have to be tested on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
The national government has leaned heavily on lockdowns despite their high social and economic costs, in pursuit of President Xi Jinping’s “zero Covid” strategy of eliminating infections. In several cities, mass testing has sometimes been a prelude to stringent lockdowns, like the four-week one in Shanghai that has kindled widespread complaints from residents there.
The outbreak in Beijing, the seat of Communist Party power, has added significance for Mr. Xi, who had ordered that the crowded nation’s capital remain free of the virus. An extended lockdown there would add to the political and economic pressures on his government.
“Chaoyang District is now the topmost focus for pandemic prevention,” Cai Qi, the Communist Party secretary of Beijing, and a protégé of Mr. Xi’s, said in instructions cited in the official Beijing Daily newspaper on Sunday. Mr. Cai appeared determined to show that Beijing would not hesitate to take steps to stifle infections, which has been a criticism leveled by some at Shanghai.
“Important pandemic measures cannot be left waiting till the next day,” Mr. Cai added. “All at-risk sites and individuals involved in these cases must be checked that day.”
The outbreak in Beijing is another blow to the already stumbling Chinese economy. Waves of selling hit the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets on Monday, driving down by 4.9 percent in a single day the CSI 300 Index of large Chinese companies’ share prices.
While the entire city of Shanghai has been locked down for nearly a month, Beijing is experimenting initially with a more selective approach. A handful of neighborhoods have been locked down, and residents of apartment complexes adjacent to these neighborhoods have been strongly discouraged from leaving their homes.
The largest area where residents are locked down or discouraged from leaving their homes covers about a square mile of southern Chaoyang District, across a wide avenue from the Beijing University of Technology. Shops on the university’s side of the avenue were still open early Monday evening, but apparel stores, convenience stores, eateries and many other businesses on the far side of the avenue were all dark and empty.
A half dozen police squad cars were parked with blue, white and red flashing lights at one corner of the area. Several more squad cars were parked along the road. A couple of ambulances stood ready to whisk away anybody found to be infected. But there was no easily visible sign of the high green security fences being used in Shanghai to cordon off homes and neighborhoods.
Li Haiqing, a 27-year-old resident of a locked-down neighborhood several miles farther east, said he had stocked up on instant food, snacks, water and paper towels on Saturday and so had been ready when he awoke Sunday morning to find that no one was allowed to leave his apartment complex.
“It took me by surprise,” he said. “I wonder why it happened so suddenly — it feels as if it had nothing to do with me,” adding, “Because there are confirmed cases after all, I think safety is the first priority.”
Cases have been spreading in Beijing for a week, with multiple rounds of transmission, Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, said at a news conference on Sunday.
Chaoyang is the most fashionable district in the city, with numerous luxury shopping malls and expensive apartments. At Shin Kong Place, a mall with stores for brands like Chanel, Saint Laurent and Versace, long lines quickly formed at the high-priced supermarket as families rushed to stockpile food.
At a P.C.R. testing booth on the street a block away, several dozen people were still in line at 8 p.m. on Sunday when the staff members inside, in full-body white hazmat suits, announced that they were closing for the night. The closing of the booth provoked anger from the people standing in the darkness waiting for the $3.80 tests, for which the results are typically returned in 12 hours. Many shouted at the staff, and several hit and kicked the booth and tried to wrench open its door and to argue with the staff.
Chaoyang had not required residents to be tested on Sunday night. But without new test results, residents are not allowed to catch a train or flight to another city before any possible lockdown is imposed. When Beijing had a small outbreak in the summer of 2020, people flocked to train stations in a rush to leave the city before they could be trapped in it.
Officials in Beijing hope to avoid the experience of Shanghai, where a stifling lockdown this month has dragged down China’s economic outlook and stirred public anger. Residents have shared bleak stories and criticisms of the lockdown through online letters, a rap song and a bleak video.
“We Shanghai residents feel that there have been many absurd, baffling and even cruel compulsory measures,” said Ji Xiaolong, a resident of the city, who has publicly criticized the government’s handling of the lockdown.
On Monday, the Shanghai health authorities said the city had confirmed 19,455 cases on the previous day, a drop of 1,603 from the preceding daily count. The city has allowed residents of some areas deemed safe to step outside, but leaders have warned that the wider restrictions must stay in place until infections are wiped out.
“Shanghai is now at a crucial moment in the zero offensive,” Sun Chunlan, the Chinese vice premier overseeing the lockdown, said last week. “The pandemic won’t wait for people, and there can be no thought of putting our feet up and taking a breather.”
Residents in the Pudong District of Shanghai shared pictures over the weekend of new metal fences and cage-like barriers going up around apartment exits, part of the district’s drive to enforce “hard” isolation for locked-down buildings.
A high point of the public pushback against the city’s policies has been “Sounds of April,” a six-minute video that — against melancholy music and black-and-white overhead footage of Shanghai — replays the voices of residents begging for help from officials. The video spread fast and wide on Chinese social media last week before censors pulled it down.
It opens with Shanghai officials saying last month that a lockdown would not be necessary, and then that it would last just a few days.
Then comes a montage of voices: a truck driver carrying food for the stricken city who says his shipment risks rotting because nobody has come to receive it; a son saying his aged and ill father was refused hospital care; a resident forced to quarantine in an unfinished hospital; a local official asking for understanding from a man whose pleas for medical attention have gone unanswered.
Some critics of Shanghai’s response are senior members of the academic establishment who usually keep their views muted.
In a submission to the government that spread on Chinese news media, Tang Xiaotian, a professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, warned that officials should avoid potentially illegal measures to confine people. Residents have been angered by measures such as the barriers around apartments that could hamper escape in a fire, he noted.
Official propaganda about the lockdown in Shanghai had “hurt the credibility of the government,” Liu Xiaobing, a professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, who is a member of China’s national legislature, wrote in an essay shared on Chinese social media. It was also later removed. He did not respond to an email seeking comment.
“The policy enforcers only worry about the trouble they could bring on themselves if they relax controls,” Mr. Liu wrote. “They never worry about being called to account from the harm caused by dead-handed restrictions.
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The prospect of further lockdowns in China prompted a fresh wave of economic anxiety on Monday as investors and companies whose supply chains run through China contemplated the impact of 70 new virus cases that the Beijing government said it had detected over the weekend.
The city government ordered one of its districts to test all 3.5 million of its residents for coronavirus in the coming days, a move that may be a prelude to a larger lockdown in China’s capital city. Shanghai, a major port and business center, has been locked down for roughly a month, part of China’s “zero Covid” strategy. Other Chinese cities both large and small have announced their own restrictions on the movement of residents in a bid to keep the virus from spreading.
The lockdowns present yet another challenge for global supply chains that have been stressed by pandemic shutdowns and the war in Ukraine, leading to greater competition for goods and higher prices that are fueling inflation worldwide.
While the Chinese authorities have sought to keep factories and especially ports operating by keeping workers on the premises in so-called closed-loop systems, the lockdowns have interrupted shipments and lengthened delivery times for many of the global companies that depend on Chinese factories.
Phil Levy, the chief economist at Flexport, a freight forwarder, said in an email that while Beijing is an important city, “it is not at the heart of factory production or supply chain operations.” He said lockdowns there would have a more limited impact than previous restrictions in Shanghai and Guangdong, where ports continued to mostly operate.
But the effects would depend on where outbreaks occurred — for example whether they shut down a port — and how long lockdowns persisted, Mr. Levy added. “This is a relatively slow part of the year, but there is plenty of catch-up to be done, and things will soon be due to build. The costs will mount the longer this lasts.”
The disruptions that are still unfolding in Shanghai and other Chinese cities are likely to reverberate along global supply chains in the coming months. Andrea Huang, a senior director at Overhaul, which monitors company supply chains, said with lockdowns not expected to ease until early or mid-May, the ripple effects for industries like auto and consumer electronics would extend into June or July.
In Shanghai, the local authorities on Friday selected some companies in the automotive, semiconductor and other key industries to restart production, but the vast majority of enterprises remain shuttered.
Activity at the port has also slowed. According to data from Project44, a logistics platform, the number of vessels that were berthing at the Shanghai port last week had dropped by about half since the lockdown began, while the number of vessels seeking to call at the nearby port of Ningbo jumped as shipping companies tried to get around restrictions. The time that imported containers were spending in the port had also risen sharply, from 4.6 days on March 28 to 14 days on April 23, the company said, as coronavirus testing requirements for truck drivers limited the ability to get containers in and out of the port.
Fears of broader lockdowns weighed on global stocks on Monday, while oil and other commodities also fell in anticipation of lower demand.
Elisabeth Waelbroeck-Rocha, chief international economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said that, in addition to disrupting global supply chains and fueling inflation, coronavirus outbreaks and accompanying lockdowns had undermined Chinese economic growth in March and April, making China unlikely to reach its target of 5.5 percent growth in gross domestic product in 2022.
The epicenter of the outbreak shifted from Jilin Province in the northeast to Shanghai, a manufacturing base for high-end auto components, but smaller-scale outbreaks in other regions have largely been brought under control, she wrote in a not