China Kovid-19. strengthened its borders with the ‘Southern Great Wall’ citing

The small Chinese town of Ruili, located in the far south next to Myanmar, has seen a major construction project in the past two years. It is a border fence equipped with barbed wire, surveillance cameras and sensors.

To the east, along China’s border with Vietnam, a 12-foot-high fence was suddenly erected last year. It prevents Vietnamese locals from visiting Chinese villages to harvest corn or sell medicinal herbs, and it resembles a prison, said Sung A Ho, a hotelier in Vietnam’s mountainous Lao Cai province.

The clear objective is to fight the spread of COVID-19 by limiting the entry of traders, workers and smugglers. The Southern Great Wall, people on social media are calling it. State media outlets have dubbed it the Anti-Covid Great Wall.

While some other countries try to transition towards living with COVID-19, China firmly sticks to a zero-Covid strategy, especially with the Beijing Winter Olympics starting this week. It does so not only through lockdown and mass testing, but also by locking down its neighbours.

The strategy means that along China’s long southern border, life is changing that is likely to last long beyond the pandemic, with trade becoming burdensome and controls on people’s movements tightened.

Karin Dean of Tallinn University in Estonia, who studies border dynamics between China and Myanmar, said efforts are being made by China to secure its borders, facilitate infrastructure projects and prevent refugees from entering China. are part of a wider campaign.

China’s call for protection from a Covid-19 spread through the border is loud. In a letter to villagers in the border areas of Yunnan province in August, Chinese leader Xi Jinping urged local people to “protect the Holy Land”.

In Guangxi, a region bordering Vietnam, party officials urged activists to “run against time, go all out, win the battle against the pandemic, and defend China’s ‘south gate’.” The head of the Communist Party of Yunnan province called for a mentality of “fearing death boldly” to reassure the party leadership and Mr. Xi.

Yunnan, which borders Myanmar, Vietnam and Laos, had last year earmarked half a billion dollars to strengthen security barriers along the border. The province’s governor said in January that 100,000 officers, police officers, soldiers and civilians were patrolling the border.

A Journal review of public records shows that over the past two years, China has built or strengthened at least 285 miles of fence along its borders, much of it to the south. Actual figures are likely to be higher because not all local governments disclose this type of spending. At a wire-making center in Hebei province, some manufacturers bill their products as “border COVID-prevention wire”.

In the Vietnamese coastal province of Quang Ninh, home to small farming communities belonging to the Dao ethnic group, a strong fence with pillars, sharp-edged metal grills and coiled barbed wire runs along the Chinese border to the top of the hill as far as the eye can see. Is . Cameras and lights are visible at gaps above the recently built blue structure, with a narrow paved path on the Chinese side.

The lights come on at night, said Duong On, 31, a Vietnamese farmer who lives in a settlement at the foot of the hill. People on the Vietnamese side can no longer venture out to cut down trees, Mr Duong said, and Chinese farmers can no longer be seen grazing their water buffaloes on the Vietnam side.

On visits to the villages in that section, long fences were visible at various points. Some appeared basic – a few layers of stacked barbed wire – while others were more elaborate, such as the one near Mr. Duong’s house. Residents said Chinese officials were continuing to build the fence every day.

Phun Thi Ha, 65, used to go to China to harvest star anise spices from the fruit of evergreen trees and cut grass to make brooms. A fence now blocks his path. A few miles from a trail where locals say cross-border travel was once common for work or for the smuggling of chicken legs, pork intestines and other frozen food, a fence now snakes along the border. Is.

“The fence turned out to be a Covid-19 barrier and also that goods could not cross,” said Doong A Tai, a resident.

China held parts of its borders long before Covid-19, not only near North Korea and near Xinjiang in the far west, but also in the south, where smuggling is a headache. But the extent to which the country has expanded fortifications along the southern border during the pandemic has gone unnoticed outside the region.

In some places, it includes the kind of surveillance common in large cities in China. According to state media, Xiaoguangnong, a small village of only about 260 people in Myanmar, has a facial recognition system to differentiate locals from outsiders.

Public records show that in addition to the southern border, Mongolia and several northern Chinese regions adjacent to Russia have been strengthening border fences over the past two years. Efforts there often focus on reinforcing existing fences rather than building new ones.

Responding to questions, China’s foreign ministry said that the strengthening of borders is a widely accepted international practice, and that the fencing is helping to prevent cross-border transmission of COVID-19.

Vietnam’s government did not respond to requests for comment, and neither did Myanmar.

The southern Chinese city of Ruili, a jewelry-trading hub, has created havoc in China’s fight against COVID-19. The local party secretary was removed from his duties last April for failure to suppress the disease.

Ruili officials said in October that since July, 716 people who entered from neighboring Myanmar, both Chinese and non-Chinese, had tested positive for COVID-19. Most recently picked up at the end of last year, the city has imposed lockdown after lockdown. In the first nine months of 2021, Ruili’s economy shrank 8.4% from a year earlier. Many residents have left.

Ruili has spent a lot of time building a strong border fence and a buffer zone over the past two years. According to local people and state media reports, an elaborate system now allows cross-border trade with little or no human contact.

Myanmar trucks must stop at the Chinese border. Their cargo will have to be cleared and stay on the Myanmar side for 48 hours. Then, robots and cranes move the cargo onto Chinese trucks. Chinese drivers take the goods across the border, where they are re-cleaned and kept for 24 hours before they can be cleared for distribution inside China.

“At least now we can restart our business,” said Chen Yunjong, a 56-year-old businessman who imported fruits from Myanmar to China. There was a time when I felt I had to do something else to make a living. “

According to local official media, Ruili’s government has deployed thousands of police and civilians to guard the border 24 hours a day.

A 30-year-old farmer said he was among those hired on night duty to keep an eye on illegal crossings – work for which is not paid. He said he was not able to sell his garden trees and other produce as many people had left the city. The farmer said he had received a total of $470 in Covid-19 subsidies last year, but without a steady income, he began digging up taro root and boiling it with vegetables to eat.

For China, it is important to keep trade running at border points to ensure livelihoods and bring essential materials. A railway connecting Kunming in Yunnan province to Vientiane, Laos—a project of China’s Belt and Road trade initiative—carries cargo, but will not carry passengers across the border until after the pandemic, according to state media.

The new barriers and other controls are likely to change relations between many communities on the border forever. Ruili’s restrictions cut easy crossings from Myanmar’s Museum City to the east, said Sai Khin Maung, an executive of a business-focused chamber of commerce at the museum.

Because all trade in watermelon, mango, maize and other products must now take place through official border gates, taking longer, produce often rots, Mr. Maung said. “We cannot express the effect on us,” he said.

David Brenner, a lecturer at the University of Sussex and author of a book on Myanmar’s border, said China has been trying to control its border with Myanmar for years to curb activities such as smuggling and drug trafficking.

“Covid-19 may be the official justification that China is giving for creating a buffer zone right now,” he said. “But this intention started long ago and will control things long after the pandemic is over.”