In Jiangxi Province, which borders Hubei Province, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, power generators have returned to 93 per cent of last year’s capacity as factories appear to increase production. Loading And in a suburban food market in eastern Beijing, a butcher is selling meat again. Li Huiying never made it home for the Lunar New Year period. The 36-year-old is from Jiangxi Province, 15 hours from Beijing. The mass lockdown of travel across the country meant the train and plane tickets she and her husband had bought for the traditional family holiday were cancelled. “The market was only open for a half-day until recently,” she says. The extension of trading hours is a small win in an area where, until the beginning of March, streets were almost completely deserted.

The Australian government is watching the stalls and businesses of China closely. It announced a $17.6 billion stimulus package on Thursday and abandoned its promise to get the budget back into surplus. In a few short months it has watched as unforeseen events decimated a balance sheet built up over seven years of tight spending and surging resources exports. The government’s ability to return to anywhere near that mark before the next election hinges on the economy of China – Australia’s largest trading partner – bouncing back next year. “The bit of good news we’re hearing from particularly Australian businesses who have got a presence in China is that people are starting to get back to work,” says Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. “Talking to some Australian businesses with thousands of employees in China, [they] are talking about having 95 to 97 per cent of their workers now back into the factories and supply chains starting to pick up. “So I don’t want to understate the significance of the disruption to supply chains, but I also want to point out that there are some positive signs that are coming out now out of China, as people get back to work.”

The reality is the virus will have a long tail in China, as it will around the world. Li Huiying, 36, a butcher at a suburban market in eastern Beijing Credit:Sanghee Liu “My business is not doing well now as I can only sell one pig a day compared to two to three in the past,” says Li, as she surveys the meat inside her Beijing butcher's stall. “The reason is that the pork price has gone up a lot while less people are visiting the market.” Months of food shortages have meant the price of pork has skyrocketed, rising by 135.2 per cent over the past year.

Car sales went off a cliff in February, falling by almost 80 per cent since February 2019. It was the industry’s worst result in modern times. Apple’s iPhone shipments to China plummeted by 60 per cent. In a report that has now been blocked by Chinese censors, Chinese media outlet Caixin revealed this week that factory power generation figures were questionable. The report claimed factory bosses were leaving the lights on to boost the perception among Party cadres that they were back at work. At the Universal Studios site in Liyuan Town, migrant worker Mr Qiao hired a car to travel for eight hours from Shandong province with three other workers to get to the construction site of the latest outpost of the US theme park giant. “In the past two months, all I did while being locked at home was eating, sleeping and watching TV without any income,” he says. He will be quarantined for another two weeks before he can start helping build the latest version of the Jurassic Park and Harry Potter worlds. Fellow workers who managed to get to the site two weeks earlier are already saddling up on the bulldozers and cranes.

“We need to work hard to complete it as scheduled by the end of the year,” says one worker. Ma Jun, the director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing, told Bloomberg on Tuesday that in China there is a belief that problems can only be solved within the process of economic development. “Just like a moving bicycle, it runs more smoothly when it is moving at a high speed. But when it slows down, setbacks tend to occur,” he said. Global ratings agency S&P forecasts the Chinese economy will grow at 4.8 per cent in 2020. It will have to claw its way back from its worst result in three decades to help many countries, including Australia, avoid recession. And it's likely that, without aggressive, draconian public health containment measures, things could have been much worse.

Loading Schools forced into lockdown, workplaces shuttered, families separated. The phenomena that would have been unthinkable outside China a month ago have become a reality in Europe and are now expected to hit Australia. More than 60 million people were placed into lockdown in Hubei Province in January. By March, that same number were ordered to stay home in Italy as the number of deaths surged past 800. Overwhelmed by more than 12,000 cases, the Italian College of Anaesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care is now preparing for wartime triage. Those patients with the highest chance of recovery, or with the most years left in their lives, will get priority as intensive care units are overrun. The World Health Organisation has urged other countries to enforce radical containment measures, as China did, to stop other countries becoming like Italy before it is too late. “This is not a drill,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said three days before he officially declared a global pandemic.

On Friday, China announced the country had recorded only 15 new infections on Wednesday. It was 1000 times that per day in mid-February. President Xi Jinping talks to coronavirus patients via video link The Chinese Communist Party has not hesitated to take credit. In a series of coordinated messages delivered by its emissaries around the world, China’s embassies and consulates suggested the coronavirus may not have originated in China after all. “Some preliminary research shows that the virus might be originally from a seafood market in Wuhan but we do not have any conclusion yet,” said China’s Consul-General in Sydney Gu Xiaojie. “As to where the virus originated from, that is something researchers are still working out.” The narrative has allowed China’s President Xi Jinping, threatened by the potential political consequences of the virus, to frame China’s sacrifice and quarantine as a victory over a foreign threat and suppress voices that might suggest otherwise.