Chinese dictator Xi Jinping on Wednesday paid a much-touted visit to the northern province of Shaanxi, ostensibly to observe the “resumption of economic and social order” in its capital city of Xi’an.

While Xi was touring factories and schools in Xi’an, another northern city called Harbin was going into coronavirus lockdown, over two weeks after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claimed to have effectively eradicated the Wuhan coronavirus.

Chinese state media celebrated Xi’s victory tour with photos of Xi’an returning to completely normal operations. Everyone wore a big smile, including Xi.

Xi visited Jiaotong University, whose professors “deeply moved” him with a letter of political support two years ago, met with various shop and restaurant owners at their newly reopened businesses, and “inspected the local poverty alleviation work” across Shaanxi Province.

Meanwhile, in another northern province called Heilongjiang, the city of Harbin – with a population comparable to New York City – was going back into coronavirus lockdown.

Chinese officials blamed the city’s outbreak of coronavirus on one person, a 22-year-old female graduate student who returned home to Harbin in March after traveling to New York. According to the official story, the student went through a two-week quarantine, displayed no symptoms, tested negative for the Wuhan coronavirus, and passed an antibody test that should have revealed any previous infection, but was still “silently” carrying the coronavirus.

The student supposedly passed the coronavirus to an elderly man who has been treated as patient zero in the Harbin outbreak until now. The old man became a super-spreader at a social event, causing at least 78 cases of coronavirus, including medical workers who treated the other people who caught the coronavirus from him.

Travel into Harbin’s residential areas has been banned, and 28 days of quarantine has been imposed on foreign visitors, in accordance with the CCP’s narrative that all coronavirus infections in China are now imported from other countries, especially the United States, Russia, and African nations. Foreign visitors have been effectively banned from China, which once bitterly opposed other nations taking such measures to fight the spread of the coronavirus, so the new imported cases are said to have been brought in by Chinese nationals returning from visits to other countries.

According to Harbin officials, several thousand people have been tested for the coronavirus, and about 400 are currently under quarantine. Several other cities in the region have also imposed travel restrictions, with at least one reported infection caused by travel to Harbin.