Covid-19, as it is now called, has caused more harm to the Chinese manufacturing industry since the wake of the SARS virus. After 3 weeks, a complete shutdown of the country’s manufacturing sector which had thousands of factory workers quarantined. This situation has slowed down the world’s economy as China is one of the world’s economic powerhouse. Currently, the virus has claimed closed to 1900 lives and had over 60,000 quarantined.
The Hubei province has been said to be the worse hit, and it is home to over 11 million migrant workers (according to 2018 report); another bad news for the Chinese economy. As it stands, many companies have already started counting their losses since the outbreak of the virus worldwide, a deputy manager of a hat manufacturing company in Jiangsu has complained that they have experienced the worse patronage since the outbreak as orders gotten immediately before the outbreak of the virus has long been canceled.
As the Chinese government joins other world leaders in the struggle to revive the economy after a long holiday, to avoid further spread, some drastic efforts have been put in place to achieve that purpose. Currently, it seems that those efforts made by the government are yielding results as production is slowly coming back to full capacity especially in places like Nantong. According to one of the factory managers, he made it known that they resumed with just 30% of their workforce but has slowly increased to 80%, but expecting full resumption before month-end. But from findings so far, the slow pace at which workers resume in their different workplaces can be linked to the many security checkpoints, and roadblocks which have discouraged them from resuming in their different places of work.
The government on releasing the increasing resumption rate of most workers has made the use of face masks compulsory, track their movements to make sure they don’t come close to those highly affected places. In February the Nikkei Asian Review had reported that the Chinese government had taken to blocking some businesses from reopening one of such example is Foxconn, the government restricted them from reopening their Shenzhen plant because of what they have tagged the “unstable working condition at the factory”, so the plant is expected to remain shut down pending government review. Zhengzhou had the same fate with Foxconn, Bloomberg had reported that Zhengzhou might be resuming with limited workers on the 10th of February but not with 100% of their workers. Facebook at the moment has stopped taking orders for it’s newest Oculus Quest VR headset as production has long stopped, linking the delay to the virus.
The point is, even with the bad effect of the virus on the world’s manufacturing sector, the Chinese manufacturing industry is slowly coming back to its full capacity claiming it’s spot as the biggest manufacturing industry in the world. Even as the world battle with the effect of the virus, the situation is gradually getting under control, and it is just a matter of time before everything comes back to normal.