Newsletter 86 - Heat Wave 2022

The background

The on-going relentless heat wave in China this summer got international attention lately. Quoting a report from Axios:

The extreme heat and drought that has been roasting a vast swath of southern China for at least 70 straight days has no parallel in modern record-keeping in China, or elsewhere around the world for that matter.

More than 260 weather stations saw their highest-ever temperatures during the long-running heat wave

It has coincided with a severe drought that has shriveled rivers and lakes and throttled back some of China’s hydro power production.

This has led the government to cut power to Sichuan’s key industrial hubs, an emergency measure extended on Aug. 21.

“I can’t think of anything comparable to China’s heat wave of summer 2022 in its blend of intensity, duration, geographic extent and number of people affected,” meteorologist Bob Henson, a contributor to Yale Climate Connections, told Axios.

Anecdotes from the Chinese social media

In our previous newsletters, we mentioned the intensive heat in South West China. Overall, there has not been much media or government reports from China on the human tolls of the combination of heat, drought, and lack of electricity. On the social media, people say that the lack of electricity is mainly due to the drying up of hydro-power due to the drought.

Mr. Jajia, who we introduced in newsletter 78, with his YouTube channel on Chinese and Japanese cultures, is also a seasoned media person. He has escaped to Japan, so he is free and active on Twitter to offer his opinions on what is happening in China. He said: “In the few years at the beginning of this century, wherever some people died, of heat, landslide, mudslide, , fires, flood, etc., at least there are data of casualty in the news. Numbers might be fudgeded, but there are some numbers at least. Now, wherever people died, there is absolutely no news, no one knows outside that disaster areas.”

Such is the state of news media in China. They only report what the government wants people to know. So, it is up to social media to spread anecdotes, so that people have some idea of what is happening. There are quite a few these days.

The death of a Taxi driver

On August 22nd, a post from Weibo spread on Twitter:

I just heard a story that makes me very sad. A security guard discovered a taxi parked on the roadside that have not moved, so he called the police. The police found out that the driver had died for a while. They heard that his family is in Shapingba. Last week, he was worried that if he went back home, his health code will become yellow, then he can not make money with the Taxi, so he lived on the car. Perhaps to save money, he did not use the air-con when he had no passengers. Just think how sad his family is feeling. Heat, COVID, pity the difficulty of the time!

(Shapingba is 22 km from Chongqing, the 4th largest city of China, where the driver died)

The death of an old person

Another one posted on Weibo on August 22nd:

I just heard a very sad story. This summer, Sichuan is very short on electricity. An old man in the neighbourhood died, I asked the neighbour, they had no air-con or fan.

It is so hot, the old man went to town to buy a fan, with the 300 yuan his children gave me for Chinese New Year. It was 42 degree. He carried the fan home. But because there was a blackout from noon to 6pm, he died.

When people found him, he still had the plug of the fan in his hand.

People used to say, old people need to survive the winter. But this old man died in the summer. I don’t know how his family can forget this summer.

According to Chinese social media, many people died of the heat in the countryside while working in the field, with temperature at 40+°C.

Meanwhile, the government is monitoring social media and actively “asking” the users to delete their stories.

The death of chickens and fish

The same Tweet also contains screenshot of two stories on the death of chickens and fish:

high temperature meets blackout, a chicken farm suffered heavy loss, the owner cries, the situation brakes one’s heart*: August 22nd, Sichuan. A woman in Sichuan shared a video on social media, drawing lots of attention. The woman says: because the continuous blackouts, all the chicken on the farm have died, she suffered heavy loss. She had tried to use a power generator, but the generator broke down in the heat.

#SichuanBlackout#. From our friends in Sichuan, air-con is stopped in the office, blackouts happen from time to time, elevators and air-cons are turned off. One of our reporters is interviewing in Sichuan. A fish farmer in Neijiang told us that he had rented a few acres of pond as a fish farm. Lately because of the high temperature and drought, the water is too warm, and due to frequent blackouts and his own power generator burnt out, tons of fish in his pond have died. He feels that the blackout in the small towns last longer than in the city. No electricity in the day. They only got some electricity in the middle of the night. People had to stay in the village square to cool down.

Meanwhile, COVID testing in Chongqing

Chongqing, the fourth largest city in China, also suffers from severe wild fires. You can imagine, with no water, the fire is very hard to control:

With heat, energy shortage, wild fires, the government still thinks that COVID testing is the most important task. The government announced that the 17 million people must all be tested within 24 hours, because of a few dozens positive cases.

More press coverage for the Cambodian boiler room scams

An Australian Media reported: The online scammer targeting you could be trapped in a South-East Asian fraud factory.

And Global Times gave it a twist, as commented by James Taylor:

This is among the first state media reports I’ve seen on latest wave of Cambodia boiler room scams. Many are run by Chinese nationals, target Chinese & are staffed by many trafficked Chinese nationals. But according to GT, it’s mostly Taiwan’s fault.

Beijing has huge sway in Cambodia and significant pull with Hun Sen and co. So it would be really interesting to know what steps, if any, central authorities have been taken to ensure Chinese nationals are able to escape the very real threat of bonded labour in Cambodia?

Mr. Taylor also recommended a report by Al Jazeera for more in-depth reading: Cambodia’s cyber slaves.

Huawei is expecting a very chilling economy

According to Southern China Morning Post, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei urges employees to prepare for hard days ahead and focus on profit not sales.

Ren told employees in a memo that they should focus on profits and cash flows instead of revenue to ensure the company’s survival.

The internal warning indicates Huawei is in crisis management mode amid falling revenues and profits.