Month: October 2022

Myanmar’s junta has officially banned online news outlet The Irrawaddy and charged the outlet’s registered publisher for violating national security laws, state media reported over the weekend, following months of legal harassment.

The ban is the latest on at least 20 media groups – news agencies, publishing houses and printing presses – since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup and began a crackdown on press freedom in Myanmar.

The Irrrawaddy, founded in 1993, is known for its breaking news coverage and investigative pieces that shed light on government abuses in both Burmese and English. Its editorials were critical of the military rule, and it had ceased operations in Myanmar after the February 2021 coup, moving production and editorial staff outside the country. 

Because of that, the practical impact of the ban on The Irrawaddy was limited, although Ye Ni, the executive editor of The Irrawaddy’s Burmese language section, called the ban yet another example of “the many tragedies affecting Myanmar since the military coup,” in an interview with RFA’s Burmese service.

In a statement carried by pro-junta news outlets on Saturday, the military regime’s Ministry of Information said the outlet is now prohibited from publishing on any media platform in Myanmar, online or otherwise. But the news agency vowed to continue to publish online.

The junta also said it had charged the news agency’s former director, Thaung Win, arrested on Sept. 29, with violating the Publishing and Distribution Act by reporting news that “negatively affected national security, rule of law and public peace.”

“Thaung Win is facing troubles because he lent his name to his journalist friends, but he has nothing to do with”  the editorial decisions of the Irrawaddy, Ye Ni said.

‘Relentlessly prosecuted’

Since taking power, the junta has moved aggressively to shut down media outlets. It has also detained more than 140 journalists, 60 of whom remain in prison and four of whom have died in custody.

A Myanmar-based journalist, who declined to be named citing fear of reprisal, told RFA on Monday that reporters are facing unprecedented challenges in the country since the coup.

“While you can say that the ban has no effect on its exiled journalists or the organization itself, those who are still in the country working for them are being relentlessly prosecuted and are likely to endure more severe punishments,” the journalist said.

“The arrests are still going on. Local journalists aren’t being released as often as in the coup’s early days. They are all being indicted and sentenced to severe punishments.”

One month after the coup, authorities abolished local outlets Mizzima, the Democratic Voice of Burma, 7 Days, Myanmar Now, and Khit Thit. 

In total, the military regime has banned 14 news agencies, four publishing houses and two printing presses in the last 20 months since the coup. 

They include the Myitkyina Journal, 74 Media, Tachileik News Agency, Delta News Agency, Zeya Times News Agency, Kamayut News Channel, Kantarawaddy Times, and Mon News Agency.

No surprise

The Irrawaddy’s management told RFA that the order came as no surprise, following a series of unannounced lawsuits, raids, arrests and other moves targeting the outlet since the coup.

In March 2021, the regime brought a lawsuit against the Irrawaddy for “disregarding” the military in its reporting on anti-coup protests, making it the first news outlet to be sued by the junta. Authorities raided the Irrawaddy’s office in Yangon twice later that year.

In August, a special court inside Mandalay’s Obo Prison sentenced former Irrawaddy photojournalist Zaw Zaw to three years in prison for “incitement,” while another staff member was temporarily detained earlier this year and the home of one of the outlet’s editors was recently raided.

Thaung Win, a member of the 88 Generation student activist group, applied for a publishing license for The Irrawaddy following a pledge by former President Thein Sein to implement democratic reforms through his quasi-civilian government, which ruled Myanmar from 2011 to 2016. 

The Burmese journalists who founded the outlet in exile relocated to Myanmar in 2012 and began operations there after the publishing license was granted.

The status of Thaung Win remains unclear, a source close to his family said Monday.

Saturday’s announcement followed a vow by the junta only two weeks earlier to take action against the Irrawaddy and BBC Burmese for airing what it called “fake news” about the military.

Targeting the media ‘out of embarrassment’

Soe Ya, the chief editor of the Delta News Agency, which shut down its operations in Myanmar following a crackdown by the junta last year, told RFA that the military regime is targeting all of the country’s independent news outlets.

“It seemed that the military thought early on that the media would be on their side once they were in power after the coup. But quite contrary to their expectation, civil disobedience movements broke out and the media covered the truth, so the junta began to speak out against it just as much as its political enemy the [shadow National Unity Government] NUG,” he said.

Soe Ya noted that even former journalists are being arrested and punished, and said the people of Myanmar have lost their right to the truth, as the media can’t even report the news out of fear of persecution.

“They accuse us of being ‘subversive media outlets aiming to destroy the country.’ I think they target the media even more out of embarrassment, since they haven’t been able to run the country as they had hoped.” 

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

Chinese authorities have relaxed severe COVID-19 lockdowns in parts of the far-western Tibet region, allowing Tibetans residing temporarily in the regional capital Lhasa for work or other reasons to return to their hometowns beginning Monday, sources in the region said.

A wave of coronavirus infections hit the restive region in August, where China, wary about independence movements, has strengthened its governance in an effort to prevent frequent unrest of the repressed Tibetan minority group.

The latest move came days after hundreds of angry demonstrators took to the capital’s streets on Oct. 26-27 to protest harsh “zero COVID” measures, including lockdowns in place for about 80 days. During the lockdown, people complained of food shortages and poor conditions in mass quarantine facilities, RFA reported earlier.

Many of the demonstrators were Han Chinese migrant workers demanding permission from authorities to return to their homes in eastern China because they could not earn money amid the lockdown, city sources told RFA. 

The Chinese migrant protesters dispersed after authorities agreed to process applications for them to leave the Tibet Autonomous Region, while Tibetans from towns outside the capital area had to remain in place. 

Now authorities are allowing Tibetans living in Lhasa who are natives of the cities and towns of Shigatse, Kongpo, Lhoka, Nagchu, Chamdo and Ngari to return to their homes. But they can do so only after first getting in touch with their respective points of contact as set by regional authorities for “swift processing,” according to an official notice dated Oct. 31. They are prohibited from returning on their own.

Authorities will provide Tibetan migrant workers in the Lhasa area with transportation services to return to their hometowns once the regional office makes the contact points public, the notice said, and provided no further details. 

Despite the relaxation of COVID lockdowns in Lhasa and Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city with about 800,000 people, as of Oct. 29, the capital remains under lockdown for three more days, said sources from Tibet, adding that they did not know the reason behind the move which was not publicly announced.

Tibetan sources indicated that Chinese government officials treated Tibetans differently when it came to giving them permission to leave Tibet for other places in China, noting that authorities accommodated Chinese migrant workers who agitated against the lockdown.

“Tibetans who study in high schools and universities in mainland China were supposedly planning to visit China three months ago under special circumstances, but that didn’t happen,” said the source, who declined to be named for safety reasons.  

As of Monday, Tibet recorded 18,653 confirmed coronavirus cases in the region of roughly 3.65 million people, according to the latest Chinese government census data. 

Two new asymptomatic COVID-19 infections have been found in Lhasa in the last 24 hours, and 33 asymptomatic cases have been detected in the northern region of neighboring Qinghai province on Oct. 29, according to an official Chinese announcement.

Local authorities in Xining, capital of Qinghai province near the Tibetan Plateau, reported 70 new COVID-19 infections on Oct. 28.

Translated by Tashi Wangchuk for RFA Tibetan. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

U.S. President Joe Biden will visit Phnom Penh next month for two regional summits, according to the White House, which said the trip will underscore America’s “enduring commitment to Southeast Asia” amid a growing rivalry for influence between Beijing and Washington.

Biden will join leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, for one of the last summits of Cambodia’s chairmanship of the group, as well as the East Asia Summit, which has historically also included leaders from Russia, China, Japan and India and Australia.

The Nov. 12-13 trip comes amid a flurry of summits, with Biden also scheduled to attend the G-20 Leaders Summit in Bali, Indonesia, from Nov. 13-16 as speculation percolates about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans.

But it will also be the first trip to Cambodia by a U.S. president since Barack Obama’s visit the last time the country served as chair of the 10-country bloc in November 2012. That proved a frosty affair, with Obama pressing Prime Minister Hun Sen on his regime’s human rights abuses during “tense” meetings but otherwise avoiding overt criticism.

“The Cambodians just want to get through this time without a blow-up,” said Gregory B. Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Their last time hosting ASEAN in 2012 was a nightmare – they served as the proxies of China and wrecked consensus, and they’ve been hearing about that for a decade.”

For the first time in ASEAN’s then 45-year history, the 2012 summit in Phnom Penh closed without a joint statement, with Cambodia ending the bloc’s consensus position that disputes over the South China Sea be negotiated between Beijing and the bloc as a whole. The shift came two years after an upgrade of ties between China and Cambodia.

By comparison, “so far this year, they’ve done well,” Poling said. 

“There’ve been complaints but they’ve managed a difficult time coming out of Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the crisis in Myanmar,” he said. “If they can just get through this final summit, they’re going to breathe a sigh of relief: It’ll be the Indonesians’ turn to deal with it.”

One-on-one with Biden?

It is not clear if Hun Sen will meet privately with Biden during the two summits. During a speech on Sunday, the prime minister only confirmed Biden’s plans to attend the summits and gave no further details.

If the pair meet, all eyes will be on the approach taken by Biden – the seventh U.S. president to serve in office since Hun Sen became prime minister – in the wake of five years of political repression that dismantled Cambodia’s democracy and pushed Phnom Penh closer to Beijing.

A lot has changed in Cambodia since Obama’s visit.

Most prominently, the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, which almost beat Hun Sen’s party at the disputed July 2013 national election, was banned in the lead-up to the 2018 vote. Its leader, Kem Sokha, was arrested for allegedly planning a “color revolution” under direction from the U.S. government, and remains on trial for treason five years later.

The spate of repression has not abated, with Hun Sen last week threatening to ban the Candlelight Party – a remnant of the opposition that his government banned five years ago – if it does not distance itself from comments made by exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy.

“Biden will be walking a fine line,” said John D. Ciorciari, a Southeast Asia expert and director of the Weiser Diplomacy Center at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He said that Hun Sen would seek “a more accommodating U.S. posture on governance.”

Since Obama’s 2012 visit, Ciorciari noted, “Hun Sen’s government has cast aside a pretense of democracy and engaged in political abuses that require stern U.S. criticism.” But since American officials also fear “driving Cambodia even further toward Beijing,” he explained, “the tone of Biden’s visit may not be dramatically different than that of Obama’s.”

Upgraded relations

But the trip’s focus will remain the dual ASEAN and East Asia summits. 

Notably, the United States and ASEAN are expected to officially upgrade diplomatic relations to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” during next month’s meeting, after Chinese-ASEAN ties were similarly upgraded during last year’s summit in Brunei, when it chaired the group.

Collin Koh, a research fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said Biden would likely only engage with Hun Sen to the extent needed to help shore-up ties with the 10-country regional bloc he currently leads.

“The trip is mainly for the Biden administration to demonstrate its commitment towards engaging ASEAN, not so much Cambodia per se,” Koh said. “Cambodia happens to be the destination because it’s the current chair of ASEAN and is hosting the ASEAN summits.”

He added that he doubted there would be substantial changes to the strained U.S.-Cambodian relationship coming out of the summit. 

While both sides might pay lip service to improved dialogue, Koh said, “it’s difficult to imagine how Cambodia-U.S. relations can overcome the cumulative trust deficit that has built up over the recent years, especially as Phnom Penh continues to deepen its engagement with Beijing.”

Ultimately, Biden’s trip says more about the rivalry between Beijing and Washington, which Phnom Penh is in a fortunate enough position to exploit, said Sophal Ear, the author of “Aid Dependence in Cambodia” and an associate professor in global political economy at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management.

“This is about showing ASEAN love when China is both embracing and arm-twisting ASEAN,” Ear said. “Cambodia’s goal is to once again project to its people and the region that it is loved by the U.S. and respected by the U.S., while of course maintaining its ironclad friendship with China.”

Poling from the Center for Strategic and International Studies said Biden’s trip to Phnom Penh after five years of U.S. condemnation of Hun Sen will in any case serve as a testimonial to Western foreign policy failures.

“The U.S. vastly overestimated its leverage to affect change in Cambodia,” he said. “If sanctions, or trade restrictions or diplomatic naming-and-shaming were going to have an impact, they would have by now. The U.S. and Europeans just don’t have the influence they think.”

Bangladesh police captured dozens of suspects after launching a crackdown in Cox’s Bazar refugee camps this weekend against armed criminal groups linked to a wave of killings targeting Rohingya, officials said Monday.

Lawlessness by armed Rohingya groups has increased in the sprawling camps amid recent unrest across the border in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, law enforcers and refugee community leaders said, with one police official even saying that Rohingya militants were using the camps as a safe haven.

At least five dozen suspects – all of them Rohingya – have been arrested since authorities began “Operation Root Out” on Friday, an official with the Armed Police Battalion (APBn) confirmed to BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

The police launched the operation in response to killings of Rohingya that have struck fear among many in the refugee community of about 1 million, claiming at least 40 Rohingya lives since the start of 2022, according to police records.

“Fights have been going on between the junta army and a group for about 2½ months in Myanmar near the border with Bangladesh. For this reason, some Rohingya terrorists from the neighboring country have entered into Bangladesh and taken refuge in the refugee camps where they created unrest,” Md. Faruk Ahmed, a battalion assistant superintendent, told BenarNews.

“A total of 60 criminals have been arrested in two rounds of the drive,” he said.

Ahmed said 41 suspects were arrested on Saturday and 19 more Sunday night into Monday, adding that police would continue to arrest suspects.

“Out of the 19 people arrested in the operation, 12 are accused of robbery and seven are accused in other cases,” Faruk said.

Alleged members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Rohingya insurgent group, have been observed targeting night watch security volunteers and community leaders in recent attacks at the camps.

Nine Rohingya, including a child, have been killed in suspected ARSA attacks this month alone, according to police and camp leaders.

Panic in camps

Rohingya, especially the camp leaders who have been pushing for repatriation to their home villages in Myanmar, said the recent attacks have terrorized the refugee population.

“I can’t explain to you what kind of fear I am in right now. There are three to four Majhis (Rohingya community leaders) here who enter the police camp every day after Asr prayers and leave in the morning. This is how our days are going,” said a Majhis in camp No. 9 in Balukhali who asked to remain anonymous over security concerns.

“Now not only ARSA, but some other groups including the Nabi Hossain Group, Munna Group and RSO [the Rohingya Solidarity Organization] are active in the camps. They are the ones who are causing the killings,” he said.

Another Rohingya leader blamed ARSA for killings and other crime in the camps.

“Although there are several groups in the Rohingya camps, ARSA is responsible for these crimes aimed at establishing absolute dominance in the camps,” Master Shafi Ullah, 50, a leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights in the Balukhali Camp, told BenarNews.

He said the ARSA members oppose Rohingya returning to Myanmar, so they are attacking and, in some cases, killing those who are pushing for repatriation.

“Everybody is afraid of what danger could befall them,” he said.

Myanmar apologizes

Meanwhile on Sunday, Myanmar Border Guard Police (BGP) officials expressed regret about recent firing along the border of Bangladesh, a Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) official said after a five-hour meeting in Teknaf, a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar.

BGB regional commanding officer Lt. Col. Sheikh Khalid Muhammad Iftekhar said the Myanmar officials promised that the shelling would stop. Col. Cao Na Yan Show led the seven-member Myanmar delegation.

“We agreed to help each other in any need. We have also decided to work together to protect the bordering people on both sides,” he said.

Massive gunfire and shelling erupted along the border between Myanmar troops and members of the Arakan Army, another insurgent group in Rakhine state.

On Aug. 28, two shells fired by Myanmar landed in Bangladesh territory, leading officials in Dhaka to file a strong protest and summon the Myanmar ambassador.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

China is rebooting a Mao-era institution that once functioned as a pillar of the socialist command economy to prepare for future “decoupling” from the global economy, analysts said.

Heralding a major step away from the market-oriented economic policies of the last 40 years, the 20th Chinese Communist Party congress earlier this month saw the elevation of Liang Huiling, who heads a state-run system of “supply and marketing cooperatives,” to the party’s Central Committee, amid other signs that leader Xi Jinping is steering the country away from market economics and closer to a state-dominated economy.

“This is a return to the [state-run] collective economy,” economic commentator Chen Jun told RFA. “It’s pretty scary — they don’t want an economy any more. They may decide they don’t want private companies any more.”

Chen cited recent losses on the Shanghai stock market, as well as plummeting prices of luxury apartments in the city.

“They are also controlling the movements of the population around the country using the pandemic [tracking app],” Chen said. “They are transferring energy consumption to heavy industry and military-linked companies.”

“They don’t care about the economy — [they think] ordinary people will be fine if they get enough to eat,” he said.

A senior Chinese media executive who declined to be named for fear of reprisals said the supply and marketing co-op system, which used to run general stores in rural areas as late as the 1980s, was never abolished, even though the market economics instigated by late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 eventually replaced it with commercial supply chains and distribution networks.

He said he expects the government to use it as a fall-back logistics and supply system to ensure emergency preparedness and food security in the event of worsening relations and further economic decoupling with the rest of the world.

“The supply and marketing cooperative system has always existed, and never died out this whole time,” the executive said. “They aren’t very efficient, but nonetheless they are a national supply and logistics channel.”

“Its first job is to ensure daily supplies of certain goods, but it has another purpose, which is to ensure supplies in extreme circumstances,” the media executive said, adding that the system could be used if the country was at war, particularly engaged in a military invasion of the democratic island of Taiwan.

“They already have one set of extreme circumstances in mind, which is that they will attack Taiwan one day,” the media executive said. “Then, we will have to be self-reliant when our connections with the rest of the world are cut off.”

Quiet comeback

Hunan-based current affairs commentator Li Fang said the government has been quietly restoring funding to the supply and marketing cooperatives in recent years, hiring new people, but without trumpeting the plan in the state-run media.

“They are making a quiet comeback, from the central government down to provincial governments, without much fanfare,” Li said. “Maybe once our relations with Western countries have completely broken down, the economy will decouple and go back to being the planned economy of days gone by.”

“They know that it could come to that,” he said. “Maybe they haven’t felt the time was ripe to talk about this before now.”

Official budgets show a massive boost in funding for the supply and marketing co-op system since Xi initiated a reboot in 2016, reaching 2.3 billion yuan (U.S. $315 million) in 2016 and 2.87 billion yuan (U.S. $393 million) in 2017.

While the All-China Federation and the regional supply and marketing co-ops have published detailed regional budgets since then, RFA has been unable to locate a nationwide spending figure for more recent years.

But an official who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals said the actual funding flowing to the nationwide supply and marketing cooperatives system has been several times as much listed in official budgets.

One of the aims is to bolster domestic supply chains to weather international sanctions of the kind imposed by the rest of the world on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February, the official said.

The government plans to use the supply and marketing cooperatives to prepare for economic emergencies and combat readiness, the official said.

Xi wrote in the official ideological journal Qiushi in July: “We need to deepen the comprehensive reform of supply and marketing cooperatives, improve the system and optimize its functions, changing its way of working.”

Meanwhile, guidelines issued in June 2021 called for a comprehensive financial and logistics platform to serve rural credit needs and supply chains, with local governments ordered to make the reconstruction of the marketing and supply cooperatives — which are effectively state-run entities despite the name — a political priority.

A resident of the central city of Wuhan who gave only the surname Cai said most supply chains currently run pretty smoothly, with a range of goods readily available in supermarkets, chain stores or via online shopping.

He said the government reboot of the supply and marketing cooperatives suggests the government is preparing for shortages at some point in the future.

“They have to protect their regime first and foremost, and you can see they are maintaining stability, no matter what it costs,” Cai said. “They don’t care about disrupting the lives of the people for a party congress, so do you think they will care about it [in future]?”

State news agency Xinhua reported in July that supply and marketing cooperatives reported steady sales growth in the first half of this year, citing figures from the All-China Federation.

Nationwide sales rose by 19.1 percent to nearly three trillion yuan (U.S. $435 billion), with online sales of agricultural products and sidelines rising by 33 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Taiwan-invested iPhone maker Foxconn has promised buses for workers who want to leave and free food for those who stay on its Zhengzhou campus, amid a mass exodus of employees following a COVID-19 outbreak at the plant.

Videos uploaded to TikTok showed dozens of people carrying luggage along highways around the Foxconn plant, with cases of instant ramen and bottled water laid out at the roadside by unknown donors.

Another clip showed people with luggage scaling barbed-wire perimeter fences to leave.

Some complained that they had been “left to die” after testing positive and being placed in isolation with no reliable food deliveries.

An employee who answered the phone at the Zhengzhou factory on Monday didn’t deny reports of a food shortage, but said the company had meals “ready for distribution.”

“We have been working [on food deliveries] all along,” the employee said. “The government is also helping out.”

“We do have [lunchboxes] available for distribution whenever [needed],” they said. “We have been providing free food all along.”

In one TikTok video, a woman in a mask cries, saying she has tried calling local emergency services, but they “declined to do anything.”

“Does anyone actually care if we live or die? the woman asks. “I don’t have the energy to climb into the top bunk; I’m just squatting here on the floor.”

Another says: “Nobody answers if  you @ them in the group chat. The employee helpline is useless, too. I don’t know what else to do now.”

Warnings by text

A person who answered the phone at the employee helpline said they had tried to warn employees by text which quarantine centers had no medical care or food deliveries.

“We are doing our best to send those responsible out [to the quarantine centers] to see what’s happening on the ground,” the person said. “That’s why we need people to tell us the address they are registered at.”

Asked if online reports that as many as 20,000 Foxconn workers had fled the Zhengzhou plant, the person replied: “I don’t really know about that, because I’m not [in Zhengzhou].”

Workers have broken out of #Apple’s largest assembly site, escaping the Zero #Covid lockdown at Foxconn in #Zhengzhou. After sneaking out, they’re walking to home towns more than 100 kilometres away to beat the Covid app measures designed to control people and stop this. #China pic.twitter.com/NHjOjclAyU

— Stephen McDonell (@StephenMcDonell) October 30, 2022

Screenshots of an apparent social media message from Foxconn Communist Party secretary Su Dongxia on Sunday showed Su acknowledging that the company couldn’t manage the COVID-19 outbreak without help.

“There are more than 200,000 people in Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant, which makes it less of a company and more of a complex society that is very hard to manage,” the message said.

“Since the outbreak, Foxconn has been trying its best to mobilize resources internally and work hard to deal with it, with little external support,” the message, which was widely reported on Chinese social media, said.

“Just arranging food and drink for hundreds of thousands of people across more than 10 square kilometers is a pretty arduous task, yet we had employees turning volunteer to serve up hot lunches to hundreds of thousands of people,” Su’s message said.

“Do you know quite what that takes?”

But Su appeared to admit that the company’s efforts hadn’t been enough.

“The fact that we couldn’t do this alone has meant we were forced to allow factory employees to go home,” the message said.

“This company doesn’t have the resources to control public opinion, so some of the negative information you see may also be true,” the message said. “But make no mistake: our company’s a lot cleaner than the rest of society.”

Hometown welcome

China Business News reported that authorities in a number of nearby cities and counties, including Yuzhou and Xuchang, had written to Foxconn employees with household registrations there saying they are prepared to welcome them back to their hometowns.

But anyone wanting to go home should send their details in advance to ensure services and isolation facilities could be delivered appropriately, the report said.

Provision varied, with some requiring recent, negative COVID-19 test results, and other offering isolation facilities at the user’s own expenses.

Beijing-based political commentator Ji Feng blamed the chaos at Foxconn on the current insistence on Communist Party leadership in the private sector.

“When the interests of the party and those of companies are in conflict, party officials will always choose the party,” Ji told RFA. “When the interests of the party conflict with human need, they also choose the party.”

The Global Times newspaper, which has close ties to Communist Party paper the People’s Daily, said employees who choose to remain at the factory will be “guaranteed a normal life and working environment,” with their health and safety fully protected.

“For employees who want to return home, to ensure their safety, the administrative committee of Zhengzhou Airport Economic Zone and the company will organize staff members and vehicles to serve their needs,” the paper cited a company statement as saying.

Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant is currently in a bubble system, with daily COVID-19 tests, free meals for all employees, a 24-hour-care helpline and volunteer services, the paper quoted the company as saying.

“This outbreak spread fast, but the viral load is low. So far, no serious infections have occurred at the Zhengzhou campus, and the situation is generally under control,” the statement said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.