Chinese President Xi Jinping, his ruling Politburo and senior government officials will meet over the next two days to plot a recovery for China's battered economy just as the nation faces a surge in COVID-19 infections.
The key annual economic policy conference takes place as virus infections spike in the capital Beijing a week after the leadership abandoned its tough "zero-COVID" controls.
The closed-door annual Central Economic Work Conference will run from Thursday to Friday, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
Policy insiders and business analysts are watching closely, saying the leadership was likely to chart further stimulus steps and discuss growth targets.
Global investors, already caught off guard by the virus-policy U-turn, now find themselves flying blind into a chaotic post-pandemic transition, lacking proper data to track rising infections and potential threats to the economy in the months ahead.
Economists estimate that China's growth has slowed to around 3% this year, far below the official target of around 5.5%, marking one of China's worst performances in almost half a century.
State media reported late on Tuesday that some 50 people are critically or seriously ill in hospitals in Beijing, while infections are also rising in the cities of Wuhan and Chengdu as well as Hebei province, according to medical staff, social media posts and state press reports.
But exact case numbers have become impossible to track due to lessened testing, and the National Health Commission (NHC) said from Wednesday it would no longer report new asymptomatic COVID-19 infections as it was hard to accurately tally the total count, breaking with a practice it has held for most of the past three years.
China's yuan, on track for its worst year since 1994, when China unified the official and market exchange rates, eased against the dollar on Wednesday with traders also citing worries about a fresh surge of infections.
The increase in the number of cases comes a week after Chinese authorities overturned previously extensive testing and quarantine rules, aligning with a world that has largely reopened three years after COVID emerged.
The elation that met those changes has quickly faded amid mounting signs that China may pay a price for shielding a population that lacks "herd immunity" and has low vaccination rates among the elderly.
