Never talk to him about tropical paradise again. Julien, a 35-year-old French expatriate, had just left Shanghai, where he spent three long months in confinement with his wife and young son, when, 48 hours after arriving on Hainan Island, he found himself in again confined to his hotel room. “Everything went very quickly, he breathes desperately. We received a message from the hotel reception at 6 a.m. on August 5 to tell us that the city was going to be confined. We tried to leave but the station and the airport were already closed. We had to turn back and since then we have been locked up in the hotel”.
Like him, nearly 200,000 vacationers, including 80,000 in the city of Sanya alone, are stranded on this island the size of Belgium. The three airports have been disconnected and no one can leave. Hainan was however the last possible destination for Chinese people eager for sun, beach and palm trees while the country’s borders have been closed since March 2020. A million mainly Chinese tourists went there in July. “This is our first vacation since the start of the pandemic, sighs a family from Beijing. We have been very careful so far but we really had to be able to get some air. Here is the result, we are confined and my children will surely miss the start of the school year scheduled for early September”.
“It’s complete rubbish !”
The usual remedies are falling on the island: closure of cities, police roadblocks, padlocked doors in places and mass screenings that take place every day in the middle of the street in unbearable heat. “We are tight against each other when it comes time to do the screening, it’s really nonsense! Only one patient and everyone finds themselves contaminated”, testifies our French holidaymaker. The island already has nearly 2,500 cases as of August 10, a low figure by international standards but unacceptable for the communist regime.
While Asia as a whole has turned the page on Covid-19, opening borders and for some countries, like Thailand, going so far as to downgrade this coronavirus to the same level of risk as the flu, China remains arch- stuck on its “zero Covid” strategy which has nevertheless shown its limits and created immense collateral damage. In Shanghai after three months of confinement, the new variants threaten the return to school, even Lhasa, on the Tibetan highlands, registers its first patients. And almost everywhere sources of contamination are identified.
With several thousand patients already identified, Hainan in turn risks finding itself cut off from the rest of China. Problem, on the spot, most tourists have to sleep in the hotel at their expense. “My room costs me more than 200 euros per day, explains Julien, I have not had any reduction and I have to eat the dishes provided by this 5-star and overpriced establishment. We are screened every day: I do not understand why don’t they let us go!” The French embassy has started to receive requests for aid from cash-strapped French tourists, but dialogue with the Chinese authorities seems impossible. “Foreigners are clearly not their priority,” slips a diplomat.
“Inhumane” management of the epidemic
The same misunderstanding ignites social networks, where groups of angry holidaymakers gather. “At the start, it was about exchanging tips for finding food or getting information from the authorities, tells us a Chinese tourist. But very quickly people started to complain and even criticize the government. Some want to rent a plane to escape, others wonder why China is the only country unable to manage this epidemic normally and with humanity.
China, which has still not authorized any foreign vaccine on its soil, has also not launched a massive vaccination campaign for more than a year. Neither recall campaign for the elderly and at risk, nor vaccination obligation. The official press tried to assert at the end of July that President Xi Jinping himself was vaccinated with a Chinese serum, mistrust prevails among the population. “This vaccine gives diabetes, explains a retiree from Beijing. I had a dose but out of the question to do more. Anyway, it is useless. Even vaccinated, I must respect these containment measures, the daily screenings and all this lack of freedom. It became unbearable.”
Less than two months before the XX Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which should see Xi Jinping win a historic third term, the “war against the virus” has given way in China to a violent nationalist campaign around the Taiwan question. “The country is unable to find a way out of the health crisis without calling into question a strategy that it has defended tooth and nail for more than two years, so it makes the patriotic fiber vibrate. This is undoubtedly the only way to unite the Party around a common objective”, underlines a European diplomat. Hundreds of thousands of unhappy vacationers have confessed helplessness brooded in the warm waters of the China Sea.