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On January 19, the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention held its 269and press conference since the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic. The city made public a positive case discovered the day before and whose district manager was going to detail the course, as is the usual procedure. But the description of Yue Zongxian’s comings and goings would last longer than expected: during the fortnight preceding his positive test, this 44-year-old worker had worked in 28 different places, between restaurant kitchens, renovation sites and collecting waste. garbage.
Most of the time, the man is hired to transport bags of sand and cement in the middle of the night, when the trucks are allowed to drive in the Chinese capital. His pace is such that, after this press conference, he was nicknamed by Internet users “the hardest working man in Covid tracing reports”.
His case set the web ablaze
But Yue Zongxian, one of the 285 million migrant workers in their own country, had a good reason for chaining casual jobs: on August 12, 2020, his eldest son disappeared on his way home from the factory. “He had only attended school until college. He was introverted, not the smartest, but very honest and loyal. I think he must have been tricked by someone,” testifies Yue Zongxian to the weekly Zhongguo Xinwen Zhoukan (China Newsweek). The objective of the former fisherman from Henan, a poor province located south of Beijing: scour the places where his son could have worked. In 2020, he takes the road to join Beijing, where the young man would have been hired. A year and a half of research that leads him nowhere.
On January 18, Yue Zongxian went to get tested for Covid-19 before taking the train home to spend the Chinese New Year with his family. The result being positive, he was placed in quarantine in the hospital, where he had a fever for a few days before recovering. But his case ignited the web, garnering more than 100 million views on social media Weibo.
To better highlight the deep inequalities that mark contemporary Chinese society, some have compared her journey with that of a young woman, who also tested positive a few days earlier, but whose comings and goings to restaurants, in chic shopping malls , jewelry stores, a Dior store and a ski resort, reflected a completely different daily life.
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