Day: September 5, 2022

Chinese state media hit out at newly elected Conservative Party leader Liz Truss over her statement that China represents a major threat to national security, as polling showed Truss will soon take over from outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Truss was announced as the party’s new leader amid a cost-of-living crisis after she beat former chancellor Rishi Sunak in a weeks-long internal contest for the ruling party’s top job, and the post of prime minister that comes with it.

“Another statement of Truss during the campaign [was that] she might declare China a ‘national security threat’ to the UK,” the English-language China Daily said in an editorial on Monday.

“Trying to divert domestic attention by exaggerating the ‘China threat’ and slamming other countries is like an old meme played by lame political talk show actors, which serves no purpose other than to expose the incapacity of such politicians in terms of their governance,” the paper said.

“The easiest way is to pander to populism, but this will only bring about a more difficult fate for their countries,” the paper said.

The two-month leadership contest left a power vacuum at the heart of the British government as incumbent Boris Johnson jetted off on at least two overseas vacations, having resigned in the wake of a cascade of ministerial resignations calling on him to go.

Inflation is above 10 percent, with tens of thousands of workers currently striking for pay and conditions to keep up.

Foreign secretary Truss, who has spoken of her admiration for late former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, summoned China’s ambassador to the U.K. for crisis talks over Beijing’s military aggression targeting Taiwan during the Aug. 2-3 visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“We have seen increasingly aggressive behavior and rhetoric from Beijing in recent months, which threaten peace and stability in the region,” Truss said in a statement at the time.

She reportedly vowed to declare China “a threat to national security” if she won the leadership race.

Improved ties unlikely

The nationalistic Global Times newspaper, which has close ties to CCP mouthpiece the People’s Daily, said there was little reason to believe relations between London and Beijing would improve under Truss’ premiership.

“With the country effectively drifting aimlessly without a government since former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to resign after caroming from one scandal after another and subsequently going AWOL, the country needs pragmatism and practical policies, not outdated ideology,” the paper said.

“Having designated China as a threat to the U.K.’s national security … holding to that stance when in office will not be in the U.K.’s best interests,” the editorial warned.

It said plenty has changed since the Conservative government heralded a “golden age” in Sino-British relations in 2015.

“In the hope of securing a trade deal with the U.S. to help extricate the U.K. from the jaws of the monstrous Brexit mess the country brought upon itself, being tough on China was seen as a way to curry favor with Washington,” the article said.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Authorities in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu extended a citywide lockdown affecting some 20 million people on Monday, as millions more people were placed under restrictions in the central city of Wuhan.

Some 90 percent of cities now have some form of COVID-19 restrictions in place, as the authorities battle to contain ongoing outbreaks of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus under ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy.

Chengdu resident Ma Guoming said the lockdown has now been extended until Wednesday.

“Lockdown hasn’t been lifted; it’s been postponed in Chengdu from Sept. 5 to Sept. 7,” Ma told RFA. “Kindergartens and schools are also delaying [the start of the new semester].”

“The number of infections keeps on increasing, so I don’t know when this will end,” he said.

Fellow Chengdu resident Zhang Yan said many people are also feeling anxious in the wake of a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Luding country, Sichuan province, triggering landslides and shaking buildings in the city.

At least 21 people died in the quake, the epicenter of which was some 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Chengdu.

The quake will reawaken memories for many of the disastrous 7.9 magnitude quake in 2008 that left nearly 90,000 people dead, including thousands of schoolchildren.

In the central city of Wuhan, residents of Panlongcheng protested in their residential compounds over lockdowns that have lasted more than nine days.

Video of residents shouting “End lockdown, end lockdown!” while police vehicles gathered nearby on Sept. 2 were circulating widely on social media.

A resident of Wuhan who gave only the surname Shi said he had heard about the protest directly from friends who live in Panlongcheng.

“I just sent that video to my friends who live there, and they confirmed … it did happen in Panlongcheng,” Shi said.

Another Wuhan resident, who gave only the surname Fang, said there is widespread public anger over the ongoing restrictions.

“It’s all about locking down and easing lockdown … a lot of people are kicking up a fuss these days, saying they have been confined to their homes for a long time,” she said.

“People still have mortgages to pay, and without a job, they don’t have any money, so they are kicking up a fuss to get the lockdown lifted,” Fang said.

Local officials issued a letter to local residents on Sunday, asking for their cooperation, and citing a “high risk of community transmission” in the area.

Other lockdowns

Officials across China are also calling on people not to travel home to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival if they can avoid doing so.

Zhang Hai, a resident of the southern city of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, said lockdown restrictions have been lifted in his area, but that people still need a special pass to leave the compound.

“Six districts were locked down over two days,” Zhang said. “Today, Monday, lockdown has been lifted where I live, and I can go out with a pass.”

Meanwhile, residents of Shanghai turned out in large numbers to buy bread in support of a Korean-owned bakery chain, Paris Baguette, after the local authorities fined it more than 580,000 yuan (U.S. $83,650) for defying an order to shut up shop during local restrictions.

Local people are calling for the fine to be revoked, saying the stores acted in good conscience to ensure local people could still buy food.

“Everyone remembers Paris Baguette, not just in Shanghai, but across the whole of China,” a local resident commented on a video uploaded to social media. “Their prices were exactly the same all through the pandemic, with no increase at all.”

“Today, I went to Paris Baguette to buy bread … just to support this business,” the person said.

A Shanghai resident surnamed Wang said many people struggled to find enough food during the citywide lockdown, and Paris Baguette was fondly remembered for continuing to bake bread in defiance of a citywide order to shut down.

“This [fine] is really too much, because they were helping to meet a need for people,” Wang said. “They shouldn’t be punished.”

The Korean company has more than 8,000 bakeries around the world, of which more than 300 are in China, selling French bread, sandwiches, cakes and coffee.

And in the southern city of Guangzhou, residents took to social media to curse out restrictions in their local areas, using the Cantonese language that is also widely spoken and written in Hong Kong.

Their comments, many of which contained the saltier swear words that Cantonese is known for, had apparently evaded government censors and automated blocks and filters, because the characters used to write them aren’t recognized by a system trained in Mandarin syntax.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

Photos of people taking a stroll on what was once the bed of the mighty Yangtze River near Chongqing and satellite images showing the shrinkage of China’s Dongting Lake have recently been making headlines around the world, as the region sees its worst drought since the 1960s.

While China’s Meteorological Bureau lifted a 41-day-long extreme temperature warning on Aug. 30, the region has likely seen far too little rainfall in recent months to make any kind of natural recovery soon.

Officials say that average precipitation in the Yangtze basin was just 160.3 mm (6.3 inches) in July, 50.4 percent lower than during the same period last year.

Water levels on the Yangtze, and in Dongting and Poyang Lakes, are currently between five and eight meters (16 and 26 feet) lower than is normal for the time of year, but officials say that not enough rain is forecast to fill them up again.

According to meteorologists, the wave of abnormally high temperature and drought is linked to a high-pressure zone sweeping across most of Asia from the Western Pacific.

Wang Weiluo, a water conservation expert living in Germany, said that, where China’s drought is concerned, there are also multiple human factors involved.

“There are 52,000 reservoirs and dams built along the Yangtze River, with a water storage capacity of nearly 400 billion cubic meters,” Wang told RFA.

“In theory, these reservoirs can store almost half of the water in the Yangtze River, so water levels in the various rivers in the Yangtze River basin are regulated by these reservoirs,” he said.

“There are two reasons for the low water levels: one is the lack of natural precipitation; and the other is the result of artificial regulation.”

According to Wang, there has been a marked official reluctance to release water from reservoirs since 89 officials and engineers were punished for doing so and causing the disastrous Zhengzhou floods of 2021.

In early May, the National Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters issued a directive requiring governments and reservoir management units across the country to ensure that water levels in reservoirs were high enough to prevent flooding ahead of the rainy season.

As a result, some 22.15 billion cubic meters of water is currently being stored in reservoirs, at a time of disastrously low precipitation, Wang said.

“This is one of the main reasons for the reduction of water levels in the Yangtze River this year,” Wang said.

“This order, that was executed in the style of a planned, socialist economy was a decision-making error that has been imposed across the whole country,” he said, adding that natural water flows have already been constricted by all the dams and reservoirs.

Three Gorges Dam

Zhou Jianjun, a professor of water conservancy at Tsinghua University, has found that average annual water flow at Yichang on the Yangtze river stood at 450 billion cubic meters before the massive Three Gorges Dam was built.

By 2016, this had dwindled to just 400 billion cubic meters, 11 percent less than in its previous state.

To make matters worse, rainfall has a tendency to reduce in areas around reservoirs, once rivers are overdeveloped, Wang said.

“This has already happened in past experience, and both Xin’anjiang Reservoir and Danjiangkou Reservoir have reached such a conclusion,” Wang said, adding that the Three Gorges Dam appears to be undergoing a similar phenomenon, while rainfall in northern China, the Hexi Corridor and the Qingling mountains has increased.

But Chinese scientists are unlikely to speak out openly about these phenomena, for fear of political retaliation, and in the absence of research funding for such topics that make the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) look bad.

Since taking power in 1949, the CCP has embarked on a massive spree of dam-building, resulting in nearly 100,000 new dams and reservoirs, following the former Soviet Union’s playbook, Wang said.

But in the Soviet Union, reservoirs were used to ease droughts, while the entire dam-building model began to be rejected by the 1960s and 1970s by Soviet-era planners, because the ecological crises they create far outweighed the benefits.

The U.S. has also started demolishing its aging dams, Wang said, adding that half of the world’s reservoirs are now on Chinese soil.

Lack of sediment

Meanwhile, low water levels in Dongting and Poyang Lakes this year are closely linked to increasing reclamation of farmland from the lakes, Wang said.

Part of the issue with dams is that they prevent natural sediment from flowing along with rivers, and emit clear water.

“Clear water is like a naughty child with huge strength,” Wang said. “The random digging of river channels has deepened the main channel of the Yangtze River in various sections, especially at the mouths of the Poyang and Dongting Lakes.”

“When water levels in the Yangtze River are low, then water from the lake flows outside [into the river], so water levels dropped very quickly,” he said.

There is a knock-on effect downstream, too.

Shanghai is now suffering from retreating coastlines due to a lack of sediment at the delta end of the Yangtze, bringing salt tides further up the estuary than before.

Yet the Chinese government continues to take risks and gamble with natural ecosystems, transferring water between rivers and reservoirs as part of the South-to-North water diversion project first conceived by late supreme leader Mao Zedong, Wang said.

In July this year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced that the Yangtze River white sturgeon had been officially declared extinct.

“This is the third species of fish in the Yangtze River that has gone extinct,” Wang said. “The first was the Baiji dolphin, the second was the Yangtze shad, and the third is the white sturgeon.”