In a significant step toward normality, the capital city of Beijing allowed most restaurants to resume in-store dining Monday, after a hiatus of about a month.
"Our high-frequency trackers suggest that barring another severe Covid resurgence and related lockdowns, mobility, construction and ports operation could recover to pre-lockdown levels in around one month," Goldman Sachs China Economist Lisheng Wang and a team said in a report Saturday.
The long weekend movie box office of 178 million yuan was the worst Dragon Boat Festival performance since 2012, excluding the worst of the pandemic in 2020, according to ticketing site Maoyan. But for the calendar year, it marked an improvement from May. The nearly $4 billion figure was about two-thirds the spending during the same holiday in 2019. That was better than the recovery to 44% of pre-pandemic levels during a longer holiday in early May, while Shanghai was still locked down.
The contraction rate is similar to that between February and March, said Bruce Pang, head of macro and strategy research at China Renaissance. He said that since April's economic indicators declined, the latest figures show the pandemic's impact remained in May and the economy remains in its most severe situation since the second quarter of 2020.The PMI data showed continued declines in business plans for hiring.