The reopening of ferry services on the Yangtze River was an important symbolic step to get business and daily life back to normal in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus pandemic began.
In this April 8, 2020, photo, Chen Enting, 34, snaps a photo of his ticket to commemorate his first ferry ride across the Yangtze River in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province after a 76-day quarantine ended in the city at the center of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The ferry on the Yangtze River is a symbol of Wuhan’s people,” said Chen, a 34-year-old cost engineer and Chinese Communist Party member. Today, Wuhan is regaining its status as an economic dynamo as Chinese leaders shift emphasis from exports to developing more sustainable growth based on domestic consumer spending. The city government says more than 300 of the world’s 500 biggest companies, including Microsoft Corp. and Honda Motor Co., have operations in Wuhan to get access to central China’s populous market.
In the mid-19th century, Wuhan became, along with Shanghai, Tianjin and Qingdao, one of a series of “treaty ports” where China’s Manchu rulers were forced to give Western powers trading privileges and exempt their people from local laws. It and the Yellow River in the north are the “mother rivers of the nation,” much like America’s Missouri and Mississippi or Eastern Europe’s Danube. It is also the site of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s biggest hydroelectric project.
Shipping, however, plunged after the coronavirus outbreak started in Wuhan late last year and led to a strict lockdown of the city. Traffic near Wuhan fell by as much as 70%, according to HawkEye 360, a company in Virginia that follows radio communications and ships’ satellite-linked tracking beacons.Mao’s face, etched in a giant gold coin, perches atop a stone obelisk in the Bund, the riverfront former center of Western business activity and now a tourist spot.
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