Day: September 3, 2021

Officials and community enforcers in Chengdu have issued eviction orders to a group operating under the aegis of the now-banned Early Rain Covenant Church and detained one of them in a continuing crackdown on the unofficial Protestant group.

Video footage of the incident seen by RFA showed a government official asking the group to relocate, leading to an altercation.

“Residents of the Wuhou community of the Early Rain Covenant Church have been harassed again,” a church member who asked to remain anonymous told RFA.

“A large group of people turned up claiming to be the owners and told us we weren’t welcome.”

A church member who gave the surname Li said police and officials had turned up at Jiaoda Garden residential compound in Chengdu’s Wuhou district, where several Early Rain members live as a community, on Sept. 2.

“The families of several members of the group were successively evicted by a group of people organized by the police station and the community owners’ committee,” Li said.

“They weren’t allowed to enter, and they were asked to move out of the community,” he said.

Then, police from Jinyang police station visited the homes of several church members on Friday, asking them to move out within three days.

During an altercation with police, church member Li Ying was detained at the police station for allegedly “interfering with law enforcement” and released later the same day.

“One of our brothers was negotiating with them, and was taken to the police station for questioning for obstructing law enforcement because he inquired about and asked for proof of identity from the police officers,” Li said.

“On the morning of Sept. 3, one member received a guest at their home, and then police and members of the residential community’s neighborhood committee came knocking on the door, demanding that the guest leave,” he said.

Detained, jailed

The evictions attempts come after police detained several minors and jailed two members of the Early Rain Covenant Church following a raid on a gathering in Chengdu on Aug. 22.

Meeting host Dai Zhichao and church member He Shan were sentenced to 14 days’ administrative detention, a sentence that can be handed down by a police-run committee without the need for a trial, following a Sunday raid by state security police and officials from the municipal religious affairs bureau.

On Dec. 30, 2019, the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court jailed Early Rain pastor Wang Yi for nine years, after finding him guilty of “incitement to subvert state power” and of “running an illegal business” in a secret trial.

Wang, who founded the church, was detained by police in Sichuan’s provincial capital Chengdu on Dec. 14, 2018, alongside dozens of church members in a raid that prompted an international outcry.

Some Early Rain Covenant Church members who were detained in raids on Dec. 9 and 10, 2018, and later released said the police had beaten them, and one detainee described being tied to a chair and deprived of water and food for 24 hours, rights groups reported at the time.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under general secretary Xi Jinping regards Christianity as a dangerous foreign import, with party documents warning against the “infiltration of Western hostile forces” in the form of religion.

The party, which embraces atheism, exercises tight controls over any form of religious practice among its citizens.

State security police and religious affairs bureau officials frequently raid unofficial “house churches” that aren’t members of the CCP-backed Three-Self Patriotic Association, although member churches have also been targeted at times.

China is home to an estimated 68 million Protestants, of whom 23 million worship in state-affiliated churches under the aegis of the Three-Self Patriotic Association, and some nine million Catholics, the majority of whom are in state-sponsored organizations.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Teachers across China are being reported and punished for offering paid catch-up sessions to students amid an ongoing crackdown on the tutoring industry by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping.

In one case, a teacher surnamed Lü in the eastern province of Anhui was “busted by a local education authority after parents exposed him,” the CCP-backed Global Times newspaper reported on July 28.

Lü was apprehended outside a “fancy villa” on the outskirts of Anhui’s Huangshan city, where he was hosting paid tutorial classes for his students.

“The Huangshan education bureau is currently investigating the case and it is expected to exert a severe punishment,” the paper said, adding that some high school teachers charge as much as 1,000 yuan (U.S.$153) per session for “catch-up” sessions.

In another case, a math teacher surnamed Yang, who had been honored as a “super-teacher” by local authorities, was found to be charging 120 yuan/hour for additional coaching. He was subsequently caught and ordered to pay back all of the tuition fees to parents, before getting fired from his job.

Former high-school teacher Wang Yu from the southern province of Guangdong said the students often request such catch-up sessions from teachers, and that teachers and students alike should bear consequences for breaking the new rules.

“The government is banning supplementary lessons outside school, because it’s assumed that the teachers can cover the necessary material in full in class,” Wang said.

“But students’ ability varies, and some learn fast, while other don’t, and need to have supplementary tutoring outside of school,” he said. “This should be a contract between two parties that each is equally responsible for.”

Wang said schools have also been charging pupils wishing to stay in school after formal class ends at lunchtime, to complete their homework.

“Some places have been charging five yuan a day if students stay in school for one to two hours to do homework [after class],” Wang said. “I calculated this to estimate that a school makes around … 1.8 million yuan annually from these afternoon service charges, and that doesn’t include the lunch-break fee [to take a siesta in school before doing homework].”

“[This is now happening] because of the ban on out-of-school tuition,” Wang said.

Politically motivated ban

Current affairs commentator Guo Baosheng said the tutoring ban was politically motivated.

“The reasoning behind these new regulations wasn’t justified, and came purely from political considerations,” Guo said. “It seems that China’s education system has failed to instill any moral values in anyone; it seems to have made them worse.”

On June 15, the Ministry of Education set up a new department to monitor off-campus education and training provisions, to implement “reforms to the off-campus education and training sector.”

The CCP leadership signaled on July 30 that it would press ahead with a crackdown on private tuition schools and other measures aimed at slashing homework and out-of-hours educational activities.

Training institutions were banned from offering subject-based tutoring on national statutory holidays, rest days, or winter and summer vacations, the directive said.

More than 75 percent of students in primary and secondary education attended after-school tutoring in 2016, the most recent industry figures showed, and the need to hothouse children privately to get them into the best schools was criticized by CCP leader Xi Jinping in March as a barrier to boosting birth rates.

And the State Administration for Market Regulation announced on June 1 it would be “rectifying” tutoring services run by internet giants Tencent and Alibaba, fining the companies around U.S.$5.73 million for regulatory violations.

The moves came after a March 6 speech by CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, who hit out at “chaos” in the tutoring industry, calling it “a stubborn disease that is hard to manage.”

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

China’s key industries are sending mixed signals on controlling carbon emissions as the government prepares to release new details of its climate change plans.

As the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases, China has been under pressure to improve on its emissions pledges in time for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland in November.

The meeting of some 200 countries, known as the Conference of Parties, or COP26, is seen as a watershed event for efforts to avert the worst effects of global warming.

A report in August by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world is already likely to reach the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2040, even if most nations meet their goals of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

In China’s most recent pledges last September, President Xi Jinping said the country would strive to hit its peak in carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions before 2060.

Despite rapid development of renewable energy sources, experts say that the 2060 target will be difficult because of China’s consumption of fossil fuels, especially coal.

Earlier this year, experts voiced disappointment with China’s failure to set deadlines for carbon reduction efforts in its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025), delaying specifics of its sectoral targets until the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026- 2030).

The delay sent a signal that the government would prioritize economic growth and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in the near term, leaving the tougher tasks of environmental controls until later in the decade.

Those concerns have been largely borne out by the government’s call for more coal production to ease power shortages and support industrial production this year.

The country has also defied international pressure by continuing to build new coal-fired power plants during the current plan period.

On the second of two recent trips to China, U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry this week pressed Chinese officials to stop approving new coal plants.

Recent reviews of China’s progress by advocacy groups have been mixed.

Coal Revival

On Aug. 25, the environmental group Greenpeace East Asia said that China’s provincial governments had approved 24 new coal power projects with 5.2 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity in the first half of the year. That represented a 79-percent decline from the year-earlier period, Bloomberg News said.

“Especially since Xi’s climate summit remarks, local governments have slowed approvals for new coal. But provinces are clearly still anticipating financial support on coal,” said Li Danqing, a Greenpeace East Asia project leader.

“China needs to urgently expedite its electricity transition,” the UK-based climate research group Ember said in a semiannual update report. China was responsible for 90 percent of the world’s growth in electricity demand from the first half of 2019 to the comparable period this year.

“As a result, China’s share of global coal generation rose from 50 percent in 2019 to 53 percent in H1-2021,” Ember said,

At the same time, the government has pressed key polluting industries like steel to accelerate carbon reduction plans in preparation for compliance with new national goals.

China’s steel industry, which accounts for about 15 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, according to Reuters, has been pushed to reach a peak by 2025, the Communist Party tabloid Global Times reported in March.

In attempts to curb industry excesses, the government has raised export tariffs on steel and set a goal of limiting annual output to not exceed the record 1.05 billion metric tons produced last year.

Despite the pressure, crude steel production through July was already 56 million tons ahead of the 2020 pace, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported, raising concerns that deep cuts and price hikes could be in the cards for the rest of the year.

As deadlines draw nearer, China’s climate and economic goals seem to be pulling in opposite directions. Statistical analyses of available data also appear to be reflecting the strains.

One example is a recent report for the UK-based website Carbon Brief, showing a “marked slowdown” in the growth of China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the second quarter, with an increase of just 1 percent from a year before, compared with a year-on-year rise of 15 percent in the first quarter reported earlier.

The figures suggested that China has already made major progress in curbing emissions in the April-June quarterly period.

“These shifts appear to reflect steps the government has taken to control financial vulnerabilities, particularly in the real estate sector, as well as to rein in further rapid increase in steel production,” said the report by veteran climate researcher Lauri Myllyvirta at the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

The findings were based on official reports of domestic production, import and export of fossil fuels and cement, and commercial data on stocks of stored fuel, the analysis said.

But while the government has taken steps to discourage excessive property development and steel production, the readings based on year-to-year comparisons raise doubts about such a dramatic drop in CO2 growth rates.

COVID effect

Economists and energy experts have warned against drawing conclusions based on comparisons with the first quarter of 2020, when the country’s gross domestic product plunged by a record 6.8 percent due to the COVID-19 lockdown, according to NBS data.

“Comparing the first quarter of 2021 with the first quarter of 2020 is not useful as the first quarter of 2020 was the peak of the pandemic,” said Philip Andrews-Speed, a principal senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Energy Studies Institute.

Equally suspect are comparisons to the second quarter of 2020 when GDP partially recovered with growth of 3.2 percent, far below the 6.2-percent growth rate of Q2 2019.

China may well have made progress in planning for reductions in C02 growth rates, but the results appear to be less than evident judging by official data on energy- intensive products like steel and cement.

Production of crude steel actually rose 7.8 percent in the second quarter from the first quarter, and the output of cement over the same period soared by a stunning 61.2 percent.

The quarter-to-quarter comparisons may have their own problems due to variations in winter weather and the Lunar New Year holiday period.

But the NBS data for the key construction materials make it hard to argue that China’s carbon emissions have markedly improved.

Steel production topped well over 90 million tons for every month this year reported through June. Even with a decline in July, seven-month output rose 8 percent from a year before.

Monthly rates for cement production have declined from May through July, but so far this year, output has climbed 10.4 percent.

Production of coal through July is up 4.9 percent and thermal power, fueled by coal and gas, has surged 14.7 percent. Total electricity generation was up 13.2 percent in the seven-month period.

Andrews-Speed said that total power output in the second quarter was marginally down compared with last year’s third and fourth quarters, “which is consistent with a slowing of the economy.”

The Carbon Brief report noted that China has continued to announce new investments in coal-based production capacity for the two largest CO2 emitters, the power sector and the iron and steel industry, “pointing to a continued mismatch with the country’s emissions goals.”