BEIJING/SHANGHAI -- As coronavirus cases start to tick up in Beijing, officials in the Chinese capital are clamping down early in a bid to avoid harsher measures that could dent faith in President Xi Jinping's leadership ahead of this fall's once-in-five-years Communist Party congress.
A lockdown in the Communist Party's center of power could be viewed as a major setback for the strict zero-COVID policy that Xi's government had considered one of its biggest victories.
