a million plus people are now in lockdown in yuzhou. the latest proof that china is very committed to its zero covid strategy. translation: it doesn t bother me to do a covid test at midnight. - it s for our own safety. 300 miles away and two weeks ahead of yuzhou is xi an, a city famed for its terracotta warriors, for 13 million people have now been locked down since before christmas. what started out a fortnight ago with the late night army of officials welding gates shut, has led to this. some people banned from leaving their tower blocks have taken to bartering with their neighbours. cigarettes for vegetables, other goods for sanitary towels. this is what most of china looks like. it s busy. yes, you have to have a mask before you get on the metro and there s a temperature check, but the government says its zero covid strategy has achieved
this for about 18 months now. and that s a strategy that includes things like this pop up tents where you can get a booster on the way home and win prizes as well. but it also includes very, very harsh measures that can be imposed on a city in a matter of hours. harsh measures, brutal enforcement. it s been part of china s covid containment since the beginning. just last month, some cities were parading covid spreading offenders in public. keeping cases at near zero is now even more important as china prepares to host another olympics. the winter games in beijing is just a month away. china s president, xijinping, saw for himself the final preparations on tuesday. on the brink of a third term in power, he wants and needs a smooth ride at the games. zero covid is central to that. robin brant, bbc news, shanghai.
welcome to newsday. reporting live from singapore, i m karishma vaswani. the headlines. inside china s latest battleground against coronavirus a city of more than 1 million is under lockdown afterjust three reported cases. as the us hits the highest number of daily infections ever recorded anywhere in the world, president biden urges people to get vaccinated. this continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated, so we got to make more progress. uk hospitals are struggling to handle the surge in covid cases, but borisjohnson says england is in a better place compared to previous waves. with the plan b measures
welcome to newsday. reporting live from singapore, i m karishma vaswani. the headlines. inside china s latest battleground against coronavirus a city of more than 1 million is under lockdown afterjust three reported cases. as the us hits the highest number of daily infections ever recorded anywhere in the world, president biden urges people to get vaccinated. this continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated, so we got to make more progress. uk hospitals are struggling to handle the surge in covid cases, but borisjohnson says england is in a better place compared to previous waves. with the plan b measures
run the lives of more than a billion people here everything from social media to gaming, maps to mobile paymentsl happeningn single ecosystems like wechat or alipay. how dependent are you on wechat? 100% 100%. 100%. 100%, usually every single day usually anything that the government has bought, they created another version for chinese people to fit their needs. reporter: but that era is over. china s government now cracking down with new regulations on once untouchable tech titans, reasserting state control over the industry and its user data. they genuinely do want to curb the power of some of these companies who create what they believe is a safer and more trustworthy, clean internet ecosystem. reporter: it is a global trend in the u.s. critics of big tech are also pushing for new regulations around social media