Back to 2020 — Editor’s Note for Friday, April 1, 2022

Dear reader,

This week’s biggest story in China has been the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai: China’s most cosmopolitan city pretty much closed for business this week. It’s not clear how long the tight restrictions on residents and companies there will last. Many residents are frustrated and angry, as we reported yesterday.

Earlier this week, AmCham Shanghai and AmCham China conducted a survey of 167 member companies, including 76 manufacturers, on the impact of China’s current COVID-19 rules on the American business community. Some of their findings:

• 60% have cut down on output because of a lack of employees, inability to get supplies, or government-ordered lockdowns;
• Among manufacturers, 86% said that their supply chains had been disrupted;
• 54% of respondents have decreased 2022 revenue projections following the recent outbreak.

It sounds like it’s back to 2020 in Shanghai, and that’s also the impression I got from talking to public health care scholar Yanzhong Huang — see the Q&A section below.

Breaking news today: The Times (of London) says that according to documents from Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, “More than 600 websites belonging to the defense ministry in Kyiv and other institutions suffered thousands of hacking attempts which were coordinated by the Chinese government.”

The Times says that the SBU “revealed that, in an apparent sign of complicity in the invasion, Chinese attacks started before the end of the Winter Olympics and peaked on February 23, the day before Russian troops and tanks crossed the border.”

We’ll cover this in detail in next week’s China-Russia column by Joe Webster.

Also breaking today, but much funnier: Pop icon Jay Chou (周杰伦 Zhōu Jiélún) says someone has stolen his valuable Bored Ape NFT, and it’s not an April Fool’s joke!

Our phrase of the week is: The cleverest housewife can’t cook without rice (巧妇难为无米之炊 qiǎo fù nán wéi wú mǐ zhī chuī).