China identified its first COVID infection from Wuhan in Hubei Province in December 2019. In an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, China in January 2020 locked down Wuhan and other most affected cities and ordered mandatory closure of the factories and businesses. Leaving a huge impact on the industrial and service sectors, COVID shrank the Chinese economy in Q1 2020 for the first time in the last decade. In March 2020, the World Health Organization has declared COVID as a pandemic, considering the faster transmission of the disease across geographies.
Hence, as a measure to provide further stimulus and secure investors’ confidence, China has introduced a “new infrastructure” strategy aiming time-bound development of state-of-the-art infrastructure.
