A year after China ended its harsh COVID policies, it's struggling to rebound
BEIJING — On the northern edge of Xi'an, a 45-year-old man surnamed Jiang tells a typical story of dream-chasing in China's reform era.
He left his home village at the age of 18 to work in a diamond factory in southern China's Guangdong province, a manufacturing juggernaut. The pay was decent, he says, but after a decade he was restless. So he returned home, where he started a small construction equipment rental company.
Business was fine, he said, until state-backed competitors began attracting all the contracts. So he moved again, this time to the northwestern city of Xi'an, China's onetime imperial capital, now home to 13 million people.
"My hopes were big," he says, sitting in the back of the secondhand kitchen appliance shop that he runs with his family, surrounded by refrigerators, stoves and blenders. "Slowly, though, they have been obliterated."
A year ago, China lifted draconian COVID restrictions that were an anvil around the neck of the economy and placed unprecedented controls on a
