A massive heat wave shuts Chinese factories
More US officials visit Taiwan
And China’s Zero Covid Policy locks down…IKEA?
That and more on this week’s China news headlines.
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by Incogni.
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It looks like there’s a popular new travel spot for US officials: Taiwan.
Less than two weeks after US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
led a Congressional delegation to Taiwan, another delegation landed there.
This one was a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey .
Senator Markey said during the trip that he’s long promoted closer ties with Taiwan.
Which is true. Markey has been in Congress for so long that he actually
voted for the Taiwan Relations Act, which passed in 1979. That’s 43 years ago.
Has anyone in Congress heard of retirement?
Anyway, Markey and his delegation met with Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen.
Which is great, but I kind of wonder whether President
Tsai is getting tired of meeting with Congressional delegations.
According to the US State Department, at least 10 Congressional delegations
have visited Taiwan already this year. And it looks like they’re just going to keep coming.
It’s like when you invite friends over to stay, and they discover that your apartment building
has a roof deck and a pool. Then word spreads and more and more people want to stay with you
and every weekend you have to inflate the air mattress all over again. I hate that thing.
Well Taiwan better invest in a pull-out couch,
because it’s not just US lawmakers that are coming to stay.
A Japanese lawmaker is set to visit next week.
Canadian lawmakers are planning a trip in the fall.
And a Lithuianian deputy minister visited Taiwan last week.
Which probably wouldn’t have made international headlines,
except that China then sanctioned her for visiting Taiwan.
Has anyone in the Chinese Communist Party heard of the Streisand Effect?
And in more good news, the US and Taiwan are going to hold official trade talks.
According to the US Trade Representative’s Office,
the first round of negotiations will take place early this fall.
We should be trading a lot more with Taiwan, and a lot less with China,
a country where the government uses rape as a form of torture.
As you can imagine, the Chinese Communist Party has been reacting to all this
positive attention for Taiwan totally normally.
Well, totally normally for the Communist Party. So, jealous rage.
And more military drills!
Plus, earlier this week China sanctioned seven
Taiwanese officials for being “diehard Taiwan independence separatists.”
Those officials include the current de facto Taiwanese ambassador to the US, Hsiao Bi-khim .
And legislator Wang Ting-yu, who I interviewed when we were in Taiwan in January 2020.
The sanctioned officials don’t seem to be too worried, though. One of them, Lin Fei-fan,
wrote on his Facebook page that people keep congratulating him for getting sanctioned.
He also wrote, “I think, in this day and age, being sanctioned by an authoritarian regime
should be a badge of honor for members of the free world.”
What I want to know is, when am I going to get sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party?
I just get sanctioned by the YouTube algorithm. Speaking of,
here’s either a commercial break or a brief black screen.
Welcome back.
Five major Chinese state-owned companies
have announced they’re delisting from the New York Stock Exchange.
Which brings up the question: why were these major
state-owned companies listed on Wall Street in the first place?
Oh right, so they could make hundreds of billions of dollars from foreign investors.
The delisting is part of an ongoing battle between China and the US over the fact that
hundreds of Chinese companies are listed on Wall Street but don’t follow US auditing requirements.
That’s because they claim that some of their financial documents are state secrets.
The SEC has threatened to delist more than 100 Chinese companies if they don’t follow the
rules within the next three years. I guess these companies were just getting ahead of the curve.
In a sign that China’s diplomacy in Europe is not going so well,
the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia withdrew from a China cooperation group called the 16+1.
That’s a group China established back in 2012 to promote relations with Central and
Eastern European countries. They were the 16, and China was the 1. It was
supposed to boost economic and political ties, especially China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Things seemed to be going well for a while. Greece joined in 2017, making it the 17+1.
But then the Chinese Communist Party’s increasing aggressiveness started to backfire.
Last year Lithuania quit the group.
And also encouraged other countries to quit.
Of course then Lithuania really pissed the Chinese regime off when it started
to establish closer ties with Taiwan. So China cut off all trade with the country.
Which everyone called out as economic coercion.
Which didn’t help China’s case in Europe.
And now that Estonia and Latvia are out of the 16+1, I guess we should start calling it the 14+1.
I wonder whether we’ll see more countries quitting soon. You know what they say, three makes a trend.
But if China is slowly losing support in Europe, it still has a friend in Vladimir Putin.
My favorite Chinese state-run media, the Global Times,
thanked Putin for criticizing Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
And China and Russia continue to deepen their ties. Earlier this week China
announced it would participate in military exercises with Russia later this month.
Speaking of China’s military, a Chinese navy ship has docked in a Sri Lanka port,
despite objections from India and the US.
Indian and US officials had tried to get Sri Lanka to remove access to the port.
Which it didn’t. But Sri Lanka did ask China to delay the navy ship’s arrival. Which didn’t work.
This is the same port that China helped build in 2012.
Then when Sri Lanka couldn’t pay back the loan, China took it over in a 99-year lease.
Some experts warn China could try to turn this port into a military base in the future.
So you can see why the US and especially India were worried.
More after the break.
Welcome back.
Parts of China are experiencing the worst heat wave in 60 years.
The heat wave has been going on for more than two months now. Temperatures have been topping
104 degrees in 11 different provinces. And it’s also causing a huge drought.
Which the Chinese authorities are trying to solve. By making it rain.
As in “shooting chemicals into the clouds” to literally make it rain.
But that doesn’t work when there’s not enough clouds. The drought is
so bad that the Yangtze River is at record lows.
And that’s a problem because the areas with the heat wave and drought
also rely on hydroelectric power. Reservoirs are down by as much as half.
Which means it’s time for the rolling blackouts.
It’s gotten so bad in Sichuan province that factories have
been ordered to shut down for six days to ease the power shortage.
That’s another blow to China’s economy,
after months of factory and port closures due to China’s Zero-Covid Policy.
The factory shutdowns affect companies that supply Tesla,
Apple, Toyota, and a bunch of other international companies.
Speaking of shutdowns, an IKEA in Shanghai suddenly went into lockdown
after it was found that close contacts of a Covid case had shopped there that day.
Videos showing IKEA shoppers busting out of the doors went viral.
And of course they were immediately censored.
The reason people ran out of the store wasn’t that they were afraid of Covid.
They were afraid of being quarantined. And for good reason. Shanghai authorities
announced that the store would go through “closed loop” management for two days.
Which means anyone who didn’t get out of the store would have to undergo “two days
of quarantine at a government facility and five days of health surveillance.”
All of this because the close contacts of an asymptomatic positive case had been at the IKEA.
It wasn’t even clear if they were still at the IKEA when it got locked down.
Zero-Covid is going great.
It’s going so great that the city of Xiamen is testing fish for Covid.
It’s not the first time this has happened, but a news report
showing people swabbing live fish for Covid went viral.
And was heavily mocked online in China. Because it’s pretty much impossible for fish to get Covid.
But this is all part of the Chinese Communist Party’s obsession with proving that Zero
Covid works. You see, the Party is definitely controlling Covid outbreaks in China. Which means
that they have to blame any new Covid outbreaks as being imported into China.
Like through Canadian mail.
Or fresh fish.
Not sure people are buying that, given the reaction to the fish story. But fear not,
China’s propaganda outlets know what to do. Censor the fish story by blurring it out online.
Seriously, this is what it looks like now.
Gosh, I wonder if people will find it…a little fishy.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.