Covid Keeps Workers in Factories, Distorting China Spending
Bloomberg 2/10/2021
(Bloomberg)
For the first time in her life, Zhang Sufang won’t be going home for the Lunar New Year. Instead the 37-year-old production supervisor is exchanging gifts with her parents and 16-year-old son by post as fears of reigniting the pandemic in China disrupt the nation’s biggest holiday.
“When I received boxes from home, I burst into tears,” said Zhang, who works at Fujian Strait Textile Technology Co., a yarn-maker in eastern China.
China may have got its control of Covid down to a handful of new cases per day, but quarantines and travel curbs to keep it that way have forced millions of factory workers to give up the idea of a traditional family gathering. That will distort what is traditionally an annual catalyst for spending, a setback for a government trying to boost the role of consumption in the economy.
Factory prices in China rose for the first time in a year last month as the country’s vast industrial sector leads a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, with market analysts hailing the data as a turning point for the world’s second-largest economy.
However, the lingering effects of the pandemic weighed on the country’s vast army of shoppers as consumer prices slipped, hit by new outbreaks that led to the reimposition of containment measures.
Official data showed the producer price index (PPI), a key measure of input costs, at 0.3 percent, having fallen every month last year but in January, owing to a