heat heat heat heat
the future of the planet
The news has not been rosy for the CCP and Xi Jinping this week with both the economy slowing after the immediate post-COVID bounce and high youth unemployment rates. More immediate stories focus on the soaring temperatures in mid-May. It goes without saying that people are getting hot under the collar—pun intended. And one has to wonder if it will become a more prominent issue.
Temperatures in Shanghai and Guangzhou are notoriously steamy every year. The prospect of going out of air conditioning for the least amount of exertion is hard for foreigners working there. Even for the locals, the increased standard of living allows those in urban areas the luxury of home appliances and creature comforts beyond simply a colour television. The wall air conditioning units ubiquitoous through Southeast Asian capitals now populate buildings throughout the massive urban areas of the coastal cities. But they all demand electricity which the PRC power grid is finding hard to requite.
Air conditions, in particular, are needed. Humidity, even without the conditions deteriorating in advance of the many monsoons, runs near 100% most days between early June and September, depending on the particular location. Temperatures can easily be in the 100s for sustained periods. That combination creates a wretched climate comparable to Bangkok or Panama.
Traditionally Chinese cities have been happy to surrender the absolute worst of these conditions to Delhi or Karachi in the run up to their many monsoons. In those locations, the stultifying heat and virtual saturation of the air make conditions as close to unbearable as one can imagine, especially for the millions in India or Pakistan who live in substandard conditions where electricity is irregular at best. Even the heat of the interior of the Middle East, Death Valley in California, or heat waves such as the one suffered in the Pacific Northwest about 2 years ago tend to be dry heat which is at least often a tad better when heat radiates back into the sky in the dark of the night. But, as someone used to remind me, dry heat of 125F is still hot which I won’t dispute.
In the calendar year 2022, interior China weltered under the hottest temperatures ever recorded such as 106F. Two-thirds of the population—fully 900 milion people—felt horrible heat and associated effects. The power grid, built largely on coal-fired plants, could not meet the skyrockting demand for power. Crops withered as rains did not fall. What water did appear often came from glaciers melting off the Tibetan plateau at record levels.
The problems were not merely in the interior with Shanghai confronting 106F and a not distant city in Zhejiang province seeing an even hotter day. The temperatures over the three months of summer were the hottest on record and for a sustained, extended period.
Heat-induced deaths climbed as well. Scientists had already noted by 2019 an increase in Chinese deaths from heat but the 2022 incidents went further for a longer time.
Already this week, a city in Hainan Province, Chiangjiang, posted a high of 106.7F which occurred well before either the time of the year last year’s meteorological horror or the current El Nino developing in the Pacific. Officials already warned the public this week that the power grid would require their support in scaling back consumption as demand skyrocketed. That will be extremely hard for many.
Chinese citizens tend to comply, at laest on the surface, because they know the state will enforce its mandates as necessary. Yet one has to wonder how tolerant a public can be to hear repeated self-praise by the Party over China’s modernisation while the power grid struggles to reach a level necessary to deliver even the most basic support for hundreds of millions.
Two other crucial threats beyond the public’s patience arise from these temperatures. For his entire tenure as General Secretary, Xi has reminded his citizens that China should be self-sufficient in food production. This is somewhat ironic since the Party encouraged millions to abandon farming to take up factory positions as the Four Modernisations began altering the economy and, by extension, the country. Those agricultural plots, however, were quite ineffective at producing food in the massive quantities the country needed so China has increasingly gone overseas to countries like Brazil and Argentina to meet its food sufficiency but the droughts induced by the sweltering temperatures will further decrease agricultural production.
The water diversion projects undermine the security of states down range, especially in Southeast Asia where encroaching salt water from the rising sea level butts up against the problems of less water coming from Tibet. For the states of the five great rivers originating on the Plateau, China’s survival decisions to divert water are devastating to their economies, lifestyles, and hopes. Beijing does not care.
Additionally, China’s biggest problem is water. The expanding Gobi Desert in the north, the massive Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang, and the drying of rivers through so much of the country point to the dangers for China. But those rivers continue drying up, but at a pace that has allowed Beijing to plan diversion projects off the Tibetan Plateau to meet the agricultureal and human needs in the megacities along the eastern side of the country. The water shortages created by the horrific temperatures will be immediate, allowing no time to plan appropriately for even emergency actions.
Warning the population to anticipate discomfort is fine but expectations are higher in the Middle Kingdom than ever. The Party’s claim is it has raised living standards while the population faces ever greater frustration (and in this case discomfort) partially as a result of those increased living conditions because China continues, against its own pledges, to build and use coal-powered electricity. That coal exacerbates the very conditions creating hotter conditions. The Party has chosen to retain coal-fired plants because the nation is self-sufficient, mostly, in that energy source so there is less chance the United States can undermine China’s sourcing.
At the same time, China's leaders will surely blame the other industrialsied states (read: the United States) for the climate damage. Of course the United States, Britain, and other states created the initial problems over the past two hundred years of the Industrial Age. But China’s leadership, pledging to support climate improvements repeatedly over the past twenty years, ignores its commitments if they bump up against anything undermining economic growth. The CCP imperative of job creation at all costs both to keep people employed and raise the living standards in exchange for public acquience means that environmental issues retreat further down the list of national priorities. The costs we are now seeing are devastating over the long run.
It could be a long, hot summer for China’s people and their leaders. The question is whether this will be one more issue the people tolerate, shrugging their shoulders as they ask why their lives are so uncomfortable. Or, would this issue be a spark for frustration that burns into a challenge to the regime? We will see.FIN
Echo Xie, ‘Heatwaves hit China—with forecasts of another hot summer to come’, SouthChinaMorningPost.com, 16 May 2023, retrieved at https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3220815/parts-china-endure-scorchers-eve-el-nino-shift-scientists-predict-risk-record-heat
Vivian Wong, ‘Hotter, Longer, and More Widespread Heatwaves Scorch China’, NYT.com, 26 July 2022, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/world/asia/china-heat-wave.html