Media Contact
On Monday, China said it was considering delaying its two annual political meetings, the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPCC) scheduled for March because of risks related to the COVID-19 epidemic.
Jeremy Wallace
Associate Professor of Government
Jeremy Wallace, associate professor of government at Cornell University and an expert on Chinese politics, says that the decision to postpone the meetings is a sign of the outbreak’s ongoing disruption on China’s politics, as well as on its economics.
Wallace says:
“The decision to delay the 2020 NPC and CPPCC meetings illustrates that the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak is not going away.
“Early on, economic impact assessments compared this coronavirus to what happened during the SARS crisis, but this outbreak has infected almost ten times as many people and killed two and half times as many as SARS. Serious economic and political consequences will be felt in 2020 in China, the Asia-Pacific region and the world.”
