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China’s rulers would rather talk about extreme weather than a changing climate

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CHINA IS ENDURING a year of frightening weather. Beijing, the capital, just experienced its heaviest downpours in 140 years, shortly after enduring an unusually brutal heatwave. Over a four-day period starting on July 29th, Beijing recorded 744.8mm of rain—more than the city sees in a typical year. Still heavier rain, and more extreme flooding, was endured in the capital’s outlying districts and nearby cities. Swollen rivers washed away bridges and roads and trapped passengers on long-distance trains. A death toll of more than 20 in Beijing and surrounding areas is set to climb.

Nationwide, this is a record-setting year. China’s highest-ever temperature, 52.2°C, was measured in July in the far-western region of Xinjiang. In January, China witnessed its coldest-ever temperature, -53°C, in a town near the border with Russia, breaking a record set more than half a century ago.

Central-government experts, among them emergency-management planners, agricultural officials and meteorologists, issued a warning that August may bring further natural disasters, including new floods, typhoons, heatwaves, geological disasters and forest fires. Yet for all its grim detail, the government’s assessment makes no mention of one overarching risk that inspires fierce debate elsewhere, namely climate change.

The world would gain from a fuller, franker Chinese discussion about why the weather is growing more extreme. The country is the largest single source of greenhouse gases that affect the whole planet. Yet official media have downplayed climate change in their coverage of the latest disasters.

Logically, it might seem useful for Chinese leaders to awaken and mobilise public opinion behind policies to cut emissions. Xi Jinping, the Communist Party chief and the country’s most powerful leader in decades, has made bold promises for China’s carbon emissions to peak before 2030, and for the country to be carbon neutral by 2060. Evidence suggests that efforts are being slowed by vested interests, from state-owned fossil-fuel giants to coal-mining provinces and energy-hungry industries.

China’s leaders have self-interested reasons to promote a greater sense of urgency about the planet’s future. Their country is exceptionally vulnerable to bad weather. China must sustain almost a fifth of humanity with just 7% of the world’s fresh water. Its wealthiest industrial regions are clustered along its coasts, making rising sea levels an existential menace. Its central farmlands are so prone to flooding that a Chinese ruler’s mandate to govern, since imperial times, has been bound up with successfully taming rivers. Only last month, the growing official library of books about Mr Xi’s wisdom gained a new volume, recording his thoughts on water management.

Alas, the party seems allergic to freewheeling grassroots debate about whether the climate is changing. To date, most public discussion about China’s year of extreme weather has been strikingly inward-looking. State-media outlets have dwelled on heroics by soldiers, officials and rescue teams. Netizens have complained about instances of official incompetence. Social-media users have asked whether storm warnings were given in time, or whether floodwaters were diverted away from Beijing towards less privileged places.

In fact, the worst-hit cities appear to have been unlucky rather than sacrificed. They lie in the path of rivers swollen by exceptional rainfall, few of which flow directly from Beijing. Still, it is true that China is an unequal place. As flood levels rose, the minister of water resources, Li Guoying, gave orders to ensure the “absolute safety” of Beijing, of the capital’s expensive new airport at Daxing, and of the satellite city of Xiongan, a pet project of Mr Xi’s.

It is revealing to see netizens heaping praise on volunteer, non-governmental rescue groups and creating their own spreadsheets to track families, old people and other vulnerable citizens in need of help. After the covid-19 pandemic saw years of strict controls end in sudden chaos, trust in the authorities appears to remain fragile.

For that matter, some public discussions may signal unease about China’s tradition of trying to engineer its way out of environmental dangers. Online commentators note that a severely flooded suburb of Beijing, Mentougou, was meant to have been converted into a “sponge city”, with new areas of greenery and drains designed to absorb heavy rains. Indeed, Daxing was built as a “sponge airport”, with clever water-permeable paving and wetlands. That did not stop flights being grounded by swirling waters. Defensively, news outlets have quoted scholars explaining that sponge cities have their uses, but are not proof against the worst downpours.

The diplomatic climate turns chilly

The propaganda is at its most intense when foreigners might be listening. Chinese diplomats call their country a climate hero for building hydro-electric dams, generating more electricity from solar panels than any other nation and erecting as much wind-power capacity as the next seven countries combined. Actually, China is both a climate hero and a potential villain. It is a leader in renewable energy. But it is also rich in coal and run by officials worried about power cuts and paranoid about their dependency on imported oil and gas. Research by Greenpeace East Asia, a campaign group, finds that China has approved at least 50.4 gigawatts of new coal power in the first six months of this year. That is more than the entire coal-power capacity of Germany. In addition to immediate fears about emissions from such plants, there are reasons to worry about their long-term compatibility with the infrastructure needed for China to pivot to entirely renewable energy. Coal plants are hard to plug into the sorts of smart grids and energy-storage systems that make green electricity work.

China feels under siege. Its officials bristle when European Union governments talk of slapping tariffs on carbon-intensive imports, including, perhaps, Chinese-built electric vehicles. Mr Xi has pushed back on calls from America and other rich countries for China to make deeper, swifter cuts to emissions, growling that the “method, pace and intensity” of China’s efforts “must be determined by ourselves, and will never be influenced by others”. Extreme weather surely frightens China’s rulers. Any challenge to their absolute control alarms them more. ■

Read more from Chaguan, our columnist on China:
In Xi Jinping’s China, central planners rule (Jul 27th)
China’s foreign minister goes missing (Jul 20th)
Rule by law, with Chinese characteristics (Jul 7th)

Also: How the Chaguan column got its name

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Chinese authorities try to stop parents gaming the exam system (again)

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They will go to great lengths to try

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China’s alarming sex imbalance

By 2027 one in six young Chinese men won’t be able to find a partner

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Behind DeepSeek lies a dazzling Chinese university

It models itself on Stanford, and is in the tech hotspot of Hangzhou

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Panama symbolises the Sino-American struggle for influence

The superpowers use soft and hard power

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Tensions with the West are fuelling China’s anxiety about food supplies

Grain pains are growing

Hail China’s new “ice-and-snow economy”

The country is betting on winter sports and tourism to boost growth in its rustbelt

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Источник: www.economist.com