Workers overhaul electricity equipment in Luocheng Mulao autonomous county, South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Wednesday. Staff from China Southern Power Grid are busying checking for defects to ensure a safe and smooth power supply during the upcoming Spring Festival. Photo: cnsphoto

Wenzhou in East China's Zhejiang Province, a major manufacturing base in China, has asked grassroots regulators to rectify policies and remove hurdles that impede business resumption, as an industrial plant in the city was found to be running idle machines to consume electricity.

Some lower-level county governments administered by Wenzhou had called on the companies under their jurisdiction to consume more electricity - without considering whether labor force and materials are in place for production - so that they would be considered as having fully restarted business operations, an official with the Wenzhou government told the Global Times on Monday.

But there were no "mandatory orders" from Wenzhou city or the higher level of governments for local plants to restart operations, the official said. Grassroots governments had deviated from the efforts to hasten business recovery after a protracted production pause, caused by the coronavirus outbreak. 

After learning of the hoax of machine running idle in Yueqing County, the Wenzhou city government immediately instructed on February 26 that the Yueqing government make rectifications, while warning against formalism and falsification.

The official said that the lower-level government involved now submits a rectification report daily to make sure their corrections are done.

Counties and townships can devise specific policies to boost business recovery, but every grassroots government needs to work toward the goal of recovering production capacity by making authentic efforts, read an official instruction on the incident that the Global Times got on Monday

The Wenzhou city document also praised another county named Yongjia, also administered by Wenzhou, for encouraging enterprises to resume operations by dangling government subsidies to local enterprises in line with the actual amount of power they consumed.

Apart from Wenzhou, Zhejiang's provincial capital city Hangzhou has also encouraged local enterprises to report power consumption. But a media relations staffer at Hangzhou Silan Electronics Co told the Global Times on Monday that actual power consumption is an effective measure of the business resumption rate of large enterprises.

The employee said the company, which has resumed about 80 percent of its production capacity, had recently reported its actual power consumption to local authorities.

Although business resumption may be a little bit slow in Zhejiang as it's one of the provinces hard hit by the novel coronavirus outbreak, many industries in other provinces have gradually recovered.

Data from the Shanghai Economy and Information Technology Authority showed that 94.5 percent of enterprises above a designated size and 53 percent of small and medium-sized companies have restarted business.

Especially, 91.7 percent of the 48,000 subsidiaries of state-owned enterprises have restarted operations by February 26, with the operating rate of industries including petroleum and chemicals, telecommunications and power surpassing 95 percent.

As production capacity is on the course of recovery, the implications of the outbreak on the domestic economy will ebb and growth will rapidly revive after the onslaught of the virus, Xu Gao, chief economist with Bank of China International, told the Global Times on Monday.


Newspaper headline: Zhejiang policies questioned