China says it will hit back at nations with COVID restrictions on its travelers. UM. Let us dig a little bit deeper here, joining us live as Bloomberg's Beijing bureau editor Philip Glaman. Thank you, Philip for making time with us. I appreciated. What I'm seeing is that Beijang is saying that the restrictions, uh, of which are coming from a lot of places now, are not based on science. Is that it yeah, good morning from Beijing. UM. That's about
the size of it. UM. The virus has been a political issue in China from the very beginning UM, and of course Jan being made um stamping out COVID nineteen priority and a signature policy of his over the past few years. So so these countries putting up um, you know, restrictions as China sees them, is is is really irking the Chinese government. They've stepped up their their propaganda and they're complaining over the past few days UM about this and so far that's that's kind of uh, you know
where we're at. They haven't really laid out any sort of specific um uh countermeasures that they're going to take, or any sort of or even named any of the countries that they're especially annoyed with. I was gonna I was gonna ask that what form of retribution could it take? I mean, what what what could they do at this point? Travelers in they don't want that. I mean, they could reach the potential in Beijing of digging a deeper hole, couldn't they. Yeah, this is one of those disputes that
right now you might think could escalate. Um, it probably won't. Um. China's is very clever about these things. That has a way of of ramping up the rhetoric and then um, in a few days time or in a you know, some sometime down the road, this this could all just sort of go away. Um. It could you know, require tests to enter China and some countries, um, things like that. But it doesn't really seem like something that would get
that China let get too far out of control. Yeah. Meanwhile, the US says there's there's no need for it, says protecting its citizens and that it is a smart science. Um. Meanwhile, we're running a story on Bloomberg today that the current COVID surgeon Shanghai is is again putting major stresses on crematoriums. What do we know. Yeah, so crematoriums and emergency rooms, UM, the ones that we visited in the videos that we
see on social media, they've been pretty busy. UM. And so what it looks like um, and we have to guess because the Chinese government doesn't put out data anymore on the number of people who are sick or dying of COVID and so it does look like UM as you might expect with with Oh Macron, that elderly people and people with underlying health conditions are passing away. UM.
And so we've seen crematoriums get busy. We've seen people have We've we've talked to people who have said that they have had, you know, difficulty getting a loved one who passed away from their house to the crematorium because the crematoriums are busy. So one person said that a body had to wait in their home for five days. UM. So it's a little bit of a struggle that UM
China is dealing with right now. It's it's tricky to get the full picture of it because UM, the government is in you know, they when when we visit crematoriums or we ask for this data, you know, they don't. They don't provide the data, and they're telling us to leave the crematoriums or funeral homes or what have you. So it's really tough to get a clear picture, but so far that's what we're seeing. Alright, A lot of legs on on this. Going forward to Philip, thank you
so much for your time. We really appreciated. Beijing bureau editor for Bloomberg, Philip Glaman