Wash.Post : Rome’s restaurants reopen. Will diners return? Or just delivery ride

Rome’s restaurants reopen. Will diners return? Or just delivery riders?

ROME — Out front, a chalkboard displayed the day’s menu, and back in the kitchen, a chef wearing a mask and gloves had just made the pappardelle and fettuccine. It was noontime. The double doors to Zia Rilla swung open. The restaurant, remade for the pandemic, was serving lunch and dinner for the first time in 72 days.

Its tables were spaced apart, each marked off by blue painter’s tape. Its capacity had been reduced by more than half, to 12 seats. A black spiral notebook sat on a back table, a log for customers’ names and phone numbers that would help if contact tracing ever became necessary.

“I am anxious,” said the owner, Enrica Sutrini, 66. In a country facing all sorts of risks in getting back to normal, it was unclear whether anybody would come through the door or whether Italy — so defined by the din and joys of dining — could reclaim one of its most emblematic traits.

Restaurant industry groups have warned of mass-scale closures. Across Rome, hundreds of places stayed shuttered this week, even as the government dropped its 10-week ban on sit-down dining. Sutrini said she was reopening as a trial: a few weeks to figure out whether her restaurant could be viable and whether the new Italy could feel like the old.

Italy announces plans to ease travel restrictions starting June 3

This country has never been much of a place for food delivery or takeout or tap-and-order apps, at least before the virus. And for Italians, the experience of eating together is often as or more important than the meal. Most of Sutrini’s food memories involve some kind of gathering: the communal plates of polenta she shared with her family during childhood. The big dinner parties she hosted with her husband. And, most recently, the nights at Zia Rilla when the place was packed — people staying late, stepping out for smoke breaks, finishing with an amaro nightcap.

“We’d keep on cooking until 11 p.m.,” Sutrini said. “A great happiness.”

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Her husband, Stefano Ryan, said he believed people would find a way to again go out. “We’re social animals,” he said.

Sutrini wasn’t so sure. Restaurants have gone to great lengths to protect the health of their patrons and their staffs. But that has meant disposable place mats and impersonal spaced-out seating. Some establishments are taking diners’ temperatures and have introduced plexiglass partitions between tables.

“I wouldn’t go out to eat under these conditions,” she said. “I am going against my own interests when I say that, I know. But I’d rather eat at home. We could stay up until 1 a.m. and not wear masks.”

Europe bids adieu to cheek kiss in coronavirus era

Now, the lunch hour was passing. The restaurant was still empty. One couple came by, poked their heads in, and made a reservation for two days later. Sutrini started moving around, cleaning off wineglasses, folding napkins, preparing for what she hoped might be a busier dinner service.

A beeping noise came from the back of the kitchen. It was a notification from Deliveroo, a food delivery service. Somebody had put in an order for a few appetizers and two raviolis.

In the kitchen, the chef, Ahmed Mezu, fired up the stovetop and started assembling the sauces. He spread out four delivery boxes, and by the time the cooking was finished, a 20-year-old with a bicycle and a cigarette came by to pick up the order.

The only food Zia Rilla prepared during lunch that day was eaten in somebody else’s home.

Preparing to reopen — or reinvent
In the days before the reopening, Sutrini and her husband had brainstormed for hours about how a small restaurant like theirs might survive. The tourists — 30 percent of their business — were gone. Italians had less money to spend. Maybe Zia Rilla could pare down its menu, depend on ingredients that wouldn’t quickly go bad. Maybe they could display cakes and tarts in the front, trying to catch the eyes of people on the street. Maybe they could focus more on selling pastas, becoming more like a store than a restaurant.

Or they could do more delivery.

Before being allowed to reopen to dine-in customers, Zia Rilla had spent a few weeks trying exactly that.

The restaurant had made 85 euros per day, 700 less than what it needed to break even.

Zia Rilla received a 25,000-euro government loan for businesses hurt by the outbreak. Rent had been discounted for two months.

Still, “we’re in survival mode,” said Ryan, whose father was American.

“Right now, I must be ready for anything,” Sutrini said. “Losing this place would be like getting stabbed.”

When Zia Rilla opened in 2017, Sutrini was 63, a first-time restaurateur. She had spent a lifetime cooking but had no formal training as a chef. In the decade prior, she’d been what she described as a “woman at home,” a bit bored, and the restaurant was a kind of personal challenge. She decorated the walls with cookware her grandmother had used, picked out mismatched antique plates. She filled the menu with the fresh pastas of northern Italy. Bolognese ragu, heavy on the meat, light on the tomatoes. Tortellini. Greens made in a cast-iron pan.

Most weekend nights, the restaurant was full, and, gradually, she placed more and more trust in Mezu, a migrant from Bangladesh who’d spent 10 years in Italian kitchens, until he was running Zia Rilla’s nearly on his own.

But Sutrini, in the days before the reopening, was worried more about the rules than the food. Italy’s government, trying to prevent an even deeper recession, had bumped up the reopening date for restaurants while offering scant guidance on how to open. Could the air conditioning run? Would the servers need to wear gloves? Would nonfamily members need to sit farther apart? From restaurant to restaurant, everybody seemed to be guessing. And when the rules finally came out — two days before the reopening — even that didn’t resolve the chaos.

Rome’s regional government, pressured by scientists and restaurateurs alike, said there must be “at least 1.5 meters between customers, but in any case no shorter than at least 1 meter.”

“These are words that make everybody happy but make no sense,” Ryan said.

Sutrini positioned Zia Rilla’s tables about 1.2 meters apart. The restaurant could survive that way, if the tables were filled.

A measuring tape was still on the shelf when the restaurant reopened.

The opening night test
Then, it was evening. Music was playing. The lights were a soft orange. Sutrini, wearing a mask, sat at one of the tables and then went outside to hang lanterns. Her husband cracked open a beer. Her son Nicolò, who was also there, unpacked a fancy thermometer that they would use on customers.

Outside, a food delivery rider went by on a bike.

A couple walked by holding two pizza boxes.

Foot traffic was scarce. Apartment lights were on.

Around 8:30 p.m., the first two diners of the day walked in. Sutrini knew them: a father and adult son.

“Ciao, Paolo,” she said, standing up, racing over. “Where would you like to sit?”

Ryan walked over, too, stopping before he got too close.

“Let’s pretend we hugged,” one of the diners told him.

The customers sat down and Sutrini brought over wineglasses, a basket of bread. Soon their masks were off, the drinks were on the table, and Nicolò came over with the thermoscanner. He pointed it at one of the diner’s heads. The reading was improbably low. Nicolò worked to reprogram the device and tried again. Same problem.

He retreated to read the instructions. In the kitchen, Mezu was preparing rib-eye for the pair who would end up being the restaurant’s only dine-in patrons that night.

For the following day, they had three reservations. And, soon, they’d add more outdoor seating — something that seemed to be working for other restaurants in the same neighborhood.

“Little by little, it will grow,” Sutrini said.

Then, around 9 p.m., the Deliveroo tablet beeped again.

Somewhere in Rome, another diner wanted to eat a meal from Zia Rilla — ravioli, stuffed with cod.

Mezu fired up the stovetop and opened the flaps of another to-go box.

Wash.Post : As U.S.-China rhetoric grows harsher, new risks emerge with Taiwan d

As U.S.-China rhetoric grows harsher, new risks emerge with Taiwan drawn into the mix

Rising tensions between the United States and China brought fresh mudslinging Wednesday as a sharp dispute over responsibility for the coronavirus pandemic spills into new forums such as Taiwan.

In the span of several hours, the feud swung from Taipei to Beijing to the Internet, where an animated "credibility test" on Chinese state TV's Twitter feed mocked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

President Trump then lashed out at China for a "worldwide killing" from covid-19 — part of messages that could become talking points in the presidential election campaign.

The White House salvos have sought to keep a focus on China's early response to the virus and what Trump has called a "China-centric" deference at the World Health Organization. China, in turn, has portrayed itself as a good global citizen willing to work with the United Nations and other countries to defeat the pandemic.

But the longer-range Trump strategy appeared aimed at deflecting attention from the U.S. handling of the pandemic — including the sometimes conflicting messages from the Trump administration and health experts and a reported covid-19 death toll that is the highest in the world.

Trump has grounds for part of his criticism — particularly China's silencing of doctors and its denial that the virus was spreading ­person-to-person after it emerged late last year in Wuhan. But Trump's claims, outlined in a four-page letter to the WHO on Monday, mix legitimate criticism with broad inaccuracies such as the timeline of Chinese and WHO actions.

He also skims over the fact that he praised China and the WHO for months.

Still, Trump appears to be shaping his reelection campaign as it goes — using language that echoes his populist anti-China rhetoric during the 2016 run.

"The pandemic has shown once again the vital importance of economic independence and bringing supply chains back from China and other countries," Trump said Tuesday, drawing connections between the pandemic — which Trump called "the plague" — and the global economic free fall.

Pompeo opened a news conference Wednesday with a long list of complaints about China, saying focus on the pandemic is obscuring what he called the larger picture of risk posed to the United States by the Chinese Communist Party.

"We greatly underestimated the degree to which Beijing is ideologically and politically hostile to free nations," he told reporters. "The whole world is waking up to that fact."

Beijing, however, is answering with its own swift counterpunches.

On Tuesday — after Trump issued a 30-day ultimatum to the WHO to make unspecified reforms — Zhao Lijian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, described Trump's letter as an effort to "mislead the public, smear China's efforts and shift the blame of U.S. incompetence to others."

It's another indication of how fast the former diplomatic guardrails have fallen.

In Taiwan — for decades one of the most sensitive issues between Washington and Beijing — the start of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen's second term on Wednesday was overshadowed by the war of words.

China issued angry warnings after senior U.S. officials, including Pompeo and deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, sent rare, high-level messages to congratulate Tsai. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to absorb the island by force, if necessary.

China's Defense Ministry said Pompeo's message "seriously endangered relations between the two countries and two militaries and seriously damaged peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait."

The People's Liberation Army, it added, has a "firm will, full confidence, and sufficient capacity to frustrate any form of external interference and Taiwan independence plots."

In recent weeks, the Chinese military has sent warplanes and an aircraft carrier into the strait, and U.S. forces have been active conducting large-scale flight and surveillance operations off China's southern coast.

This month, commentators in China have hotly debated the need to expand China's nuclear and ballistic missile arsenal after the State Department published a paper arguing for the fitting of low-yield nuclear warheads onto submarine-launched missiles.

In her inauguration speech, Tsai said she wanted to co­exist peacefully with China but would not accept Beijing's offer of a framework that would bring Taiwan into the fold on the condition of semiautonomy.

"We will not accept the Beijing authorities' use of 'one country, two systems' to downgrade Taiwan and undermine the cross-strait status quo," said Tsai, who swept into another term with a 75 percent approval rating.

In response to the U.S. action, the Communist ­Party-run Global Times newspaper said that "Pompeo is clearly doing it to challenge Beijing."

As the rhetoric intensifies on both sides, Pompeo has become the scapegoat of choice for Beijing officials and state media.

He has been called an "enemy of humankind" and a "super-spreader" of a "political virus." Most of the ire is focused on the Trump administration's references to unsupported theories that the coronavirus could have come from a Wuhan laboratory.

China took another swipe at Pompeo with an animated clip produced by a wing of Chinese state TV. The video, titled "Pompeo's credibility test," appeared on the Twitter feed of Chinese state TV, challenging Pompeo's views on China's role in fighting the pandemic.

Hours later, Trump tweeted that "some wacko in China just released a statement blaming everybody other than China" for the virus — a possible reference to the Pompeo video, but the president did not elaborate.

"Please explain to this dope that it was the 'incompetence of China', and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing!" Trump continued.

It's a theme that the White House is increasingly pushing.

On Sunday, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told ABC News that China was responsible for allowing the coronavirus to "seed" around the world by not stopping infected passengers from traveling in the early weeks of the outbreak.

The escalating attacks on both sides reflect significant changes.

Trump has often referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a "friend" and, in the past, repeatedly praised China's response to the outbreak.

For China, the back-and-forth has shown an evolution in its propaganda priorities. Over the past decade, Beijing has taken halting steps to upgrade its spin operations for the digital age, rolling out English-language animated cartoons and pro-China rap songs online, sometimes with the help of Western consultancies.

The trade war with the United States pushed these Western-looking propaganda efforts out of beta testing.

Beijing has tasked ambassadors and other officials with setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts for the first time to spar in real time with the Trump administration, despite the platforms' being blocked for viewing inside China.

The escalating friction is a "perfect storm" of several factors, said Sheena Greitens, assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, with "tough-on-China" campaigning ahead of the election and the global pandemic laying bare some of the transparency problems in China's government.

"Regardless, one lesson for the future is that American strategy and national security shouldn't depend on or assume transparency from China," she said, "because it's not an empirically valid assumption to make given the nature and structure of China's domestic politics."

FT : Big hedge funds are the biggest winners from the downturn

Big hedge funds are the biggest winners from the downturn 
For a while now, being a large hedge fund has been seen as a blessing and a curse. 

Sure, managing more client money means a bigger payday when you collect your fees at the end of the year but it has become increasingly difficult to invest huge amounts of capital and generate decent returns. 

Plus, the more assets you have, the more clients you have to answer to and hedge funds — which aren’t exactly known for their transparency despite how ardently some may preach it — don’t tend to like that. 

In the years after the financial crisis, many fund managers branched out and launched their own shops creating a small universe of so-called emerging managers (unrelated to emerging markets) who could pitch their small size as an (ahem) asset. 

Yet money has largely been concentrated in hallmark names. Some two-thirds of the industry’s assets are now run by about 5 per cent of the managers, according to data group HFR. 


And after chalking up gains from the market volatility introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, big US hedge fund platforms are likely to get even bigger, report the FT’s Laurence Fletcher and Robin Wigglesworth and DD’s Ortenca Aliaj. 

Even the huge fees some of these firms demand, which are above the industry average of two and 20 — taking a 2 per cent management fee and 20 per cent of profits — don’t seem to be much of a sticking point any more. That’s bound to give them a further advantage: having their pick of the talent in an industry that is reeling from the stock market’s fastest descent into bear market territory.

Many of these firms are also able to breathe a sigh of relief. It wasn’t too long ago that investors were left wondering what the point of investing in hedge funds was if they couldn’t outperform the broader market or protect capital when volatility shot up. 

But funds such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel, Izzy Englander’s Millennium Management and Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management have not only protected their investors from losses, they’ve actually made money during a financial crisis.

These results have prompted a wave of fundraising from several big firms, including Citadel, DE Shaw and Baupost Group, some of which have been closed to outside money for years. 

That’s not to say that the cohort of big funds didn’t have their own casualties. Two of the largest hedge funds in the world — Bridgewater Associates and Renaissance Technologies, which manage almost $250bn combined — have suffered losses in the market rout.

Perhaps a warning sign to their rivals that getting too big might end up being a problem. As Con Michalakis, the chief investment officer of Australian pension fund Statewide, put it:

“If you have a few lumbering giants and one of them mis-steps, you will have turmoil.”

FT : Multimillionaire sues PwC for ‘negligent’ advice on how to avoid taxes

Multimillionaire sues PwC for ‘negligent’ advice on how to avoid taxes
Relocating is a stressful experience, even if it is to the glamorous French Riviera. What can make it even worse is if you move to Monaco, a popular tax haven, but end up in a lengthy legal battle with the UK taxman. 

John Hargreaves, a multimillionaire whose family has a fortune of £550m, is taking the issue up with PwC and suing the accounting firm, alleging that it gave him bad advice on how to avoid paying taxes over a sale of shares when he moved from England to Monaco two decades ago.

Hargreaves, who founded the UK discount retailer Matalan in Preston, Lancashire, in 1975, says that the “Big Four” firm acted negligently when it advised him to relocate before he sold £237m worth of shares in the company in 2000. 

He believed that he wouldn’t have to pay capital gains and income taxes. Unfortunately, HM Revenue & Customs decided that his steps to give up his status as a UK resident were not effective. It wants £135m in tax and interest payments.

At issue seems to be the fact that Hargreaves, who reportedly commuted between the UK and Monaco in a private jet, was continuing to work at Matalan’s UK offices three days a week and staying at his UK home for two or three nights. That appears to have failed to satisfy HMRC over its requirements on residency. 

The 76-year-old, who is described as “cautious and risk-averse in relation to tax matters” in the court filing, says that PwC has exposed him to an “exceptionally high amount of tax”. 

PwC said it believed the claim would ultimately fail and it was seeking to strike out aspects of the claim.

FT : What Xi knew: pressure builds on China’s leader | Free to read

What Xi knew: pressure builds on China’s leader | Free to read
President faces scrutiny over early management of the pandemic as Beijing contemplates resetting economic targets

The annual session of China’s parliament was supposed to have been a triumphant occasion for President Xi Jinping, marking the halfway point of his second term with the path clear for him to begin an unprecedented third term in 2023.

Instead on Friday he will take centre stage at the Great Hall of the People in the midst of a global pandemic that erupted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, knowing that his government now faces the most daunting set of economic and financial challenges since Deng Xiaoping began to steer the country out of the wreckage of the cultural revolution in 1979.

On top of that, Mr Xi must also manage a growing international controversy over his government’s handling of the earliest stages of the pandemic — in particular about what he knew, what he did and what he didn’t do during a critical 13-day period preceding China’s acknowledgment on January 20 that coronavirus was highly contagious.

This year’s National People’s Congress had to be delayed by almost three months because of the pandemic. Normally lasting a fortnight and attracting thousands of reporters, it will instead be a truncated seven-day sitting and off-limits to most of the hundreds of media organisations that normally cover it.

With the Chinese Communist party marking its centenary in 2021, this year’s NPC was supposed to set up two central goals for the anniversary. The party decreed in 2010 that the world’s second-largest economy would double in size by the end of this year, and also set 2020 as the deadline for the formal elimination of “absolute poverty” across the country.

Instead, the party’s dream of doubling the size of the economy now lies in tatters after output fell almost 7 per cent in the first quarter — the first official year-on-year contraction since 1976.

Minxin Pei, a China specialist at Claremont McKenna College in California, says it is not yet clear whether “the Chinese economy can recover after this shock, especially after the expected restructuring of global supply chains and another escalation in US-China tensions”.

“These issues,” Prof Pei adds, “will have a real impact on the livelihoods of ordinary Chinese people.”

As international political and economic pressure builds on Mr Xi, the one silver lining for him is the widely held view within China that he has at least steadied the ship. After largely disappearing from view in late January and early February, he finally showed up on the front lines of the battle against coronavirus on February 10 and has since led the most effective long-term containment plan among the world’s most populous nations. Late last month, the Beijing municipal government lifted an edict requiring people to wear face masks outside. Couples are dancing in public parks again.

Mr Xi’s cause has been helped by the chaotic response to coronavirus in the US and parts of Europe. US president Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have also aggressively pushed an unproven theory that the virus might have leaked accidentally from a government lab in Wuhan, alienating American allies and raising nationalist ire in China.

Even public anger that erupted over government attempts to silence Li Wenliang, a doctor who alerted friends about the virus and later died of it, was largely directed at local officials rather than Mr Xi or other senior leaders in Beijing. Li has been posthumously lionised by the central government as a national martyr in the battle against the “devil virus”.

“At first people were angry with the government for its handling of the epidemic,” says Deng Yuwen, a former editor at the Central Party School’s influential Study Times newspaper. “Then the virus spread across the world and death tolls were much higher elsewhere. People changed their minds partly because of what Xi did right, but more because of other countries’ failures.”

Jessica Chen Weiss, a China expert at Cornell University, agrees that “coronavirus appears to have strengthened Xi’s grasp on power, despite the shockwave that the outbreak initially sent through the system”.

“The struggles of other countries,” she adds, “have made it harder for liberals to argue democratisation is the solution to China’s ills.”

However, Mr Xi still faces demands from overseas — and from a few voices at home — for a credible investigation into the chain of events that began in central China late last year and triggered the world’s biggest economic catastrophe since the Depression in the 1930s. Politicians as far apart as Australia, India, Europe and Brazil have pinned the blame for this on Mr Xi’s administration. When international travel resumes, it is hard to think of a western or even significant developing nation that would be willing to be the first to host a state visit by China’s president.

In a video address to the World Health Organization’s annual assembly on Monday, Mr Xi said China would back an “objective and impartial” WHO review, but only after the crisis passes. He will also insist that any official WHO examination does not focus solely on China.

“It’s impossible to conduct an independent investigation under China’s political system,” says one veteran Chinese investigative journalist, who asked not to be named. “There is no way independent experts can access information from the government.”

Gaps in the narrative
The issue of what Mr Xi knew and when did he know it — especially with regards to human-to-human transmission of coronavirus — is a critical one for the ruling party. The question has the potential to undermine Beijing’s official narrative that Mr Xi masterminded a successful campaign to contain the outbreak within China, buying the rest of the world precious time that most countries, most notably the US, then squandered.

“They’ve got their version of history out there now and they will defend that against all comers,” says Christopher Johnson, a former CIA China analyst now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The evidence so far about Mr Xi’s role is inconclusive but leaves some difficult gaps for the party to explain.

According to party documents obtained by the Associated Press last month, national health officials warned on January 14 in an internal meeting that China faced a “severe and complex public health event”, adding that “the risk of transmission and spread is high”. But Beijing did not make a public announcement until January 20.

The officials had been alarmed by Thailand’s discovery a day earlier of the first reported coronavirus infection outside of China, involving a Wuhan resident who had travelled to Bangkok. Over the following weeks, the first Wuhan-linked cases began appearing overseas, in locations including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Washington state and Boston. This suggested that Wuhan’s official case numbers, which remained in the double digits for most of January, were implausibly low.

Last week, China’s National Health Commission confirmed the January 14 meeting but defended the six-day lag before issuing the public warning, saying it had been grappling with “huge uncertainty” about the virus and “further in-depth research was needed to know [its] human-to-human transmission capacity”.

The revelation about what Mr Xi’s administration knew but chose not to tell the world about on January 14 raises the awkward question of whether or not the president himself was briefed on the dangers of human-to-human transmission at an even earlier date.

In mid-February the journal Qiu Shi, or Seeking Truth, which is published by the party’s central committee, revealed Mr Xi had issued instructions on containing the outbreak during a January 7 meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee.

At the time, says Prof Pei, “Xi wanted to show that he was always in charge — this was primarily for domestic consumption”. But a few months on, the revelation only begs questions about whether Mr Xi and other top party leaders knew on January 7, if not earlier, that the virus was highly contagious.


The article was published shortly after a three-week period in which Mr Xi, whose appearances and utterances normally receive blanket propaganda coverage, had been relatively invisible in state media. He made his first appearance on the front lines of the virus fight on February 10.

In another belated assertion of Mr Xi’s grip on the situation, two days before the Seeking Truth article was published, he fired the party’s two top officials in Wuhan and its province, Hubei.

Line to Wuhan
Mr Xi’s disappearing act in late January and early February could indicate that even China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong was finding it difficult to get to the bottom of what was happening in Wuhan, says Mr Johnson.

“The instinct of local officials in China, or any similar system, is not to say, just before the biggest holiday of the year: ‘We have a catastrophe on our hands,’” he says. “The bottom line was Xi didn’t have his people in Wuhan initially so he didn’t know what the right information was. The real risk [he faced] was coming out and saying that ‘things are great’ or ‘things are terrible’ and then being proven wrong three days later. That’s how you get yourself in trouble.”

Aside from potentially shedding embarrassing light on Mr Xi’s own handling of the crisis, an investigation could also raise some awkward questions about whether China’s official virus count — currently at 82,965 cases and 4,634 deaths according to the National Health Commission — has been grossly underestimated.

According to Chinese state television, more than 124,000 people flew from Wuhan to Beijing or Shanghai between December 30 and January 22. But to date China’s political and financial centres have reported a total of only 1,259 infections and 16 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

“The small infection numbers outside Hubei are related to low testing rates,” says one Chinese doctor who asked not to be named. “We did not have many test sites outside Hubei. If we want to figure out the real infection rate, we need to conduct large-scale antibody testing to see how many people used to be infected.”

Even within China, some voices are calling for an official investigation regardless of the reputational risks it might involve, arguing that an honest accounting of the party’s mis-steps is necessary to counter international criticism.

“We should put together a comprehensive white paper about the virus in which we recount what happened between the end of December and [Wuhan’s quarantine on] January 23, what we did and why we made mistakes,” Yao Yang, a prominent economist at Peking University, said last month in a local media interview. “We should state clearly that during this period we did indeed drag our feet and weigh [various] pros and cons, but did not purposefully engage in a cover-up.”

Belated protection
The global coronavirus pandemic ultimately raises a larger question about Mr Xi that NPC delegates will studiously avoid over the coming week: whether the direction he has guided the country in over the past seven years, characterised by increasingly strict party control of civil society, has fundamentally strengthened or weakened its capacity to govern.

In late January the party’s ability to mobilise the entire nation stunned the world, beginning with its quarantine of Wuhan and then the rest of Hubei province, encompassing 60m people. It then took advantage of the Chinese new year holiday, extending it for an additional week to keep people at home nationwide and then only relaxing restrictions on movement between provinces in carefully calibrated stages.

Chinese officials argue that the implementation of such forceful measures, just one month after the first officially confirmed cases emerged in Wuhan, explains the country’s extremely low per capita infection and mortality rates. By contrast, the US response continues to vary depending on the approaches adopted by state governors, leading to multiple Wuhan-sized infection clusters and stubbornly high daily infection and fatality counts.

But even if the Chinese party-state ultimately led a successful containment effort, many critics counter that the system’s rigidity cost it an opportunity to ringfence the outbreak in Wuhan in early January.

In an online post this month that was quickly censored, Zhang Xuezhong, a Shanghai-based constitutional law expert and longtime party critic, lamented the consequences of Mr Xi’s authoritarian rule. “The government’s tight controls have almost completely destroyed the ability of Chinese society to help itself,” he wrote.

Mr Zhang’s comments echoed a similar critique written in late February by Ren Zhiqiang, a former property executive and party member who has been highly critical of Mr Xi’s crackdowns on civil freedoms.

“No matter how many shortcomings exist in China’s administrative system, if there was freedom of speech citizens could have taken measures to protect themselves,” wrote Mr Ren, who has since been detained by the party’s discipline inspection commission. “Simply trusting the people with freedom of speech could have achieved a great victory in preventing and managing this epidemic, and there wouldn’t have been such a huge price to pay.”

Fwd:Briefing; WRAPX; After Hours Summary: EXPE +3.6% up on earnings; CPRT -5.3%, ZTO

After Hours Summary: EXPE +3.6% up on earnings; CPRT -5.3%, ZTO -4.3%, TTWO -4.2% lower on earnings; ACB +31.9% up big as it gains entry to US market

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: SCVL +6.4%, HVT +4.5%, EXPE +3.6%, NDSN +1.4%, SNPS +0.9%, LB +0.2%

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: ACB +31.9% (to acquire Reliva, which provides strategic entry to the US mkt), INTC +0.1% (acquires Rivet Networks, boosts Intel's Wi-Fi offerings for PC platforms)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: CPRT -5.3%, ZTO -4.3%, TTWO -4.2%, SKY -4%, BOOT -2.6%, YY -1.1%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: SCPH -15.9% (commences stock offering), GLPG -10.5% (GILD and GLPG announce "positive" top-line results from Phase 2b/3 trial of filgotinib), FLXN -6.6% (announces $75 mln stock offering), RUTH -5.3% (announces that Jefferies will purchase $43.5 mln of stock), BSX -3.7% (announces concurrent $750 mln common and preferred offerings), KDP -1.6% (40 mln share stock offering, or 2.8% of outstanding shares, by Maple Holdings), NOV -0.7% (suspends quarterly dividend until further notice), GILD -0.6% (GILD and GLPG announce "positive" top-line results from Phase 2b/3 trial of filgotinib)