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March 4,
2020Updated 2:56 p.m. ET
They call it the “Blue Great Wall.”
The cobalt-hued metal sheets sprang up
just weeks ago across Tianjin, a port city of over 15 million people in
northeastern China. They crisscrossed streets and alleyways. They cut off
businesses from their customers. They separated neighbor from neighbor.
“From this day forward,” read the signs
affixed to many of them, “this residential community will be managed in a
closed-off way.”
Barriers of all kinds have sprung up
across China. The country is battling the outbreak of a disease called
Covid-19, which has killed more than 3,000 people and sickened tens of
thousands more. It is caused by a new coronavirus, so named for the spiky
protrusions that cover its microscopic surface.
To
stop the coronavirus from spreading further, the Chinese government is thinking
up new ways to separate its people. Traveling between many of its cities has
ground to a virtual halt, freezing large swaths of the world’s second-largest
economy.
The
Chinese Communist Party has spent decades pressuring and cajoling a
historically fractious nation of 1.4 billion people to see China as a united
country. Now, it is keeping them apart.
Barriers have risen up at the
neighborhood level, too. Guards now surround many residential complexes. In
some places, only one member of a household can leave home at a time to go grocery
shopping or just get a breath of fresh air.
Some
places, like Tianjin, have erected walls around entire neighborhoods. Officials
in those places have discovered that metal sheets, the type typically used to
keep people from wandering onto construction sites, make handy walls.
China has plenty of those types of
sheets lying around. For years, the country has turbocharged its economic
growth by building. Office complexes, highways, airports, shopping malls, steel
mills — some barely used — stand as monuments to a single-minded devotion to
growth.
To fuel that growth, local governments
and government-controlled companies borrowed money from the country’s state-run
financial system. Now, China’s economic growth is slowing — a phenomenon
that predates the coronavirus outbreak — and the local debt load
across the country is estimated to total in the trillions of dollars.
Perhaps
no place in China embodies that mind-set more than Tianjin
Tianjin was long one of the
fastest-growing places in the country. It got there by introducing ambitious
plans to build industrial parks, economic zones and glamorous skyscrapers, some
among the tallest in the world. One glassy district promotes itself as China’s
Manhattan.
Now the
bill is coming due. Tianjin officials recently admitted that they had
overstated growth, and it is now one of China’s worst-performing cities. Many
of its construction sites had gone idle. Experts estimate its debt load totals
hundreds of billions of dollars.
When
the coronavirus struck, local officials sprang into action. The district of
Heping in particular seized on the city’s huge supply of blue-colored
construction walls as a way to stop the virus’s spread. It helps that Tianjin
neighbors Hebei Province, an industrial area where steel mills are plentiful
and supplies can be easily found.
The
local government said in a statement that the Blue Great Wall blocks off side
entrances into communities and lets officials more easily track people moving
through main entrances.
“The
Heping district manages and controls complex entrances to block any unnecessary
access into a community and maintains only a main entrance, building a ‘Blue
Great Wall’ of security,” a statement from the district government said.
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