The growth of the economy has slowed down a lot, and according to @IlPost the fault lies with the continuous lockdowns wanted by the government. In the second quarter of the year, between April and June, the Chinese economy achieved its worst result since the beginning of 2020, when the country was hit by the first wave of COVID-19, and the second worst result in over thirty years. [The "zero COVID" strategy has hurt China – The Post]
China's GDP grew 0.4 percent from the same quarter last year, less than half of what analysts had hoped, and fell 2.6 percent from the first quarter of the year.
The reason is the so-called "zero COVID strategy" adopted by the Chinese government, which has caused long lockdowns in some of the country's main economic centers in recent months, causing a slowdown in economic activities that will probably lead to the worst annual result for Chinese growth in several decades.
China's low growth is also a problem for the economy of the rest of the world, which has long relied on China as its main driver of global growth.
While for some time now the West has renounced the use of extensive restrictive measures to contain the spread of infections, in China the zero COVID strategy provides for the adoption of very hard and immediate lockdowns to completely eliminate any outbreak that occurs in the country. This plan had worked for a long time, allowing the Chinese to live a roughly normal life while the West was hit by successive pandemic waves, but the appearance of Omicron and its very contagious variants made maintaining the strategy almost impossible.
The Chinese regime, however, has stubbornly kept the strategy active: both for political reasons, because the "victory" against the pandemic is one of president Xi Jinping's main boasts, and for more practical reasons, linked above all to the relatively low rate of vulnerable people vaccinated.
