The Chinese Communist Party’s ruling elite, including dictator Xi Jinping, have utterly vanished while typhoon floods ravage provinces such as Hebei this week.
More than a million people have been driven from their homes by the floodwaters, but top officials have not been seen in public this week and rural Chinese are beginning to suspect their towns were deliberately sacrificed to protect more valuable assets.
China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday reported the northern Hebei province struggling against cataclysmic flood waters, which have mercifully begun to recede after 144 hours of torrential rain from Typhoon Doksuri.
“The total precipitation of 27.5 billion cubic meters amounted to twice the total reservoir capacity of all the large- and middle-scale reservoirs across the province,” the Global Times noted.
As of Thursday, the official number of evacuees was over 1.23 million. The refugees were taken to cities closer to Beijing whose flood control and emergency relief facilities have never been used before.
The city most devastated by the flooding was Zhuozhou, about fifty miles south of Beijing. The Global Times was surprisingly willing to mention the growing sense among Zhuozhou residents that their city was sacrificed to protect the national capital:
Some speculation circulating online attributed the waterlogging in Zhuozhou to the flood discharges carried out as part of efforts to protect Beijing. According to Cheng Xiaotao, deputy chief engineer of the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, such speculation is not accurate, since the adoption of flood storage areas is an overall consideration.
National officials predictably shifted blame for the flooding of Zhuozhou to local officials with “a lack of experience with coping with emergencies,” while the Global Times sought to reassure irate residents that China’s 1997 Flood Control Law guarantees compensation for those displaced from “flood detention areas.”
“According to laws and regulations, up to 70 percent of losses can be compensated for houses damaged by flooding, while owners of destroyed crops and lost livestock can be compensated at 40 percent to 70 percent of the average annual output value of the previous three years,” the article said.
Another Global Times piece on Thursday congratulated provincial officials for making good use of Hebei’s “seven flood storage and detention basins” to avert a greater disaster. This article observed that Zhuozhou has the misfortune to be located at the intersection of “multiple rivers” and several of those “flood storage basins.”
“For some villages used as flood storage and detention basins, it will take as little as one week for water levels to recede in elevated areas whereas it will take longer, even up to one month, for the water to recede in low-lying areas,” a water resources official cautioned.
Some of the Zhuozhou refugees had to be rescued from rather perilous situations this week:
At the largest resettlement site in Zhuozhou put into use on the night of Monday, over 2,000 disaster-stricken residents are provided with three meals a day and medical treatment and services in necessity.
A further 39 stranded residents in a residential compound where an underground garage collapsed, suffering water backflow due to flooding in Zhuozhou, have been rescued by helicopter operated by a civil rescue team as of 5 pm on Wednesday.
Moreover, around 2,700 passengers on three trains stranded on the Fengsha railway connecting Fengtai district in Beijing and Zhangjiakou city in Hebei, have all been transferred to safe locations as of Wednesday midnight.
Some of these flood victims doubtless remember the scandals that swirled around China’s deliberate demolitions of dams and reservoirs during the floods of 2020, a strategy that ruthlessly sacrificed small towns and farming villages to protect valuable industrial assets and the massive Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric facility.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Friday reported growing frustration that the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling elite has been missing in action throughout the worst of the flood emergency, possibly because they proceeded with scheduled vacations that are typically disguised as “meetings with experts” at luxury resort destinations.
The head of the Chinese Communist Party’s central secretariat, Cai Qi, announced just such a “meeting with experts” in the coastal resort city of Beidaihe on Thursday. Beidaihe, located east of Beijing, is “like the Hamptons for Chinese communists,” as China Project editor-in-chief Jeremy Goldkorn put it.
“Just like we never know what New York’s financial elite and some of their political friends discuss during their summer breaks at the Hamptons, what happens at Beidaihe stays at Beidaihe,” Goldkorn said, borrowing a slogan normally associated with Las Vegas.
Dictator Xi Jinping was last seen in public on Monday, and neither he nor his second-in-command, Premier Li Qiang, have issued a statement on the flooding.
Numerous other senior Politburo members have vanished as well, although at least Chinese state media “continues to report on their directives but not on their whereabouts.” RFA and several other foreign media outlets reported that Chinese flood management agencies have stopped answering their phones or responding to emails.
Some less cynical observers argued that serious government business does get accomplished at Beidaihe retreats, a tradition that dates back to Chinese Communist Party founder Mao Zedong in the 1950s. The waterlogged refugees of Hebei are not thrilled with the work their top leaders have been doing, especially since one high-ranking official blatantly said Hebei’s small towns were deliberately sacrificed to protect the pet projects of high-ranking Party officials.
Ni Yuefeng, the top-ranking Chinese Communist Party official in Hebei, set off a social media firestorm on Tuesday when he ordered the provinces surrounding Beijing to “resolutely play a good role of moat for the capital.”
Ni added that Xi Jinping’s pet project in Xiong’an, a futuristic city under construction since 2017 that Xi touted as an achievement of ‘millennial significance,” was “the top priority of flood control in our province.” Zhuozhou avoided serious damage from torrential rain ten years ago because the flood waters naturally flowed into Xiong’an, but now that Xi’s toy city is under construction there, the floods have been shoved into Zhuozhou instead.
A hashtag devoted to outrage over Ni’s remarks on Weibo, China’s tightly-controlled version of Twitter, swiftly accumulated over 80 million views. Communist censors quickly deleted the incredibly popular hashtag, but similar eruptions of outrage were touched off by other officials who stressed the importance of protecting Xiong’an and Beijing’s new Daxing International Airport at the expense of lower-priority villages.
Irate social media posters called for the removal of Ni and other top officials, accusing them of putting their careers ahead of citizens’ lives.
“You want to protect Beijing, Tianjin, Xiong’an and Daxing airport? Then we Hebei people don’t need you. Get out of Hebei!” one commenter declared.
Even former Global Times editor Hu Xijin, a reliable Communist Party booster, awkwardly mused on Weibo that callously describing Hebei as Beijing’s “moat,” and telling desperate refugees their lives were less important than the Party’s favorite construction projects, might have been a bad idea.
The anger was further fueled by agonizingly slow disaster response in some flood-hit areas and a lack of early warnings to the people Beijing was planning to flood out of their homes on purpose, contrary to the Global Times’ bootlicking congratulations for a job well done.
“No one ever informed us of the flood discharge or told us to prepare to evacuate,” a dismayed village told the New York Times (NYT) on Friday. “If we had known this information, we would not have left so many things behind. Everything is soaked in water. I can barely calculate my loss.”
The NYT, which is usually sympathetic to communism, noted that while state media organs like the Global Times are promising the flood waters should recede quickly, many of the homes and businesses in Beijing’s “moat provinces” were completely obliterated by the flood waters, so they will need reconstruction rather than repair. Also, many of Hebei’s residents are migrants from other parts of China who will probably not be eligible for compensation.