After Typhoon Haikui left Taiwan and crossed into China, torrential rains caused disasters in several Chinese provinces, adding to the list of floods that China has had this summer.
At 11:44pm on Sept. 7, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) notified local media that “Hong Kong has been informed by the Shenzhen Authority that water would be discharged from the Shenzhen Reservoir from about 0:00am tomorrow.”
The announcement gave local residents and public facilities in Hong Kong’s New Territories just 16 minutes to act. When the time arrived, areas of the New Territories flooded.
In a scene reminiscent of flooding that affected Taipei’s metro system during Typhoon Nari in 2001, water poured into the Wong Tai Sin Station of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway.
Hong Kong and neighboring Guangdong Province in mainland China have seen plenty of rainstorms, but something has changed since the handover of Hong Kong sovereignty from the UK on July 1, 1997, when Hong Kong entered its Chinese colonial era. With the arrival of Typhoon Haikui, the authorities of Shenzhen, which lies just north of Hong Kong, set an ominous precedent by treating Hong Kong as a flood-relief zone.
Hong Kong’s aura as an international city is fading and China has for the past few years been acting with ever greater disregard for international perceptions in pursuit of its political objectives. For example, Shanghai was the first city to be locked down as an extreme measure against COVID-19.
With Hong Kong’s New Territories having been sacrificed to divert floodwater from the Shenzhen Reservoir, more such actions can be expected.
Evidently, Hong Kong SAR’s status is waning in the minds of China’s decisionmakers.
A deeper reason that Chinese authorities have repeatedly used such methods to cope with floodwater is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is prepared to externalize the cost of achieving a specific political goal by shifting it onto the shoulders of anyone it sees as weak and vulnerable. This beggar-thy-neighbor mentality allowed the CCP to starve at least 30 million Chinese to death during the famines of the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962 so that China could export food. In the past few years, China has built many reservoirs in the upper reaches of the Mekong River to retain water for Yunnan, Guizhou and other southwestern provinces, with no regard for the needs of Vietnam and other downstream countries for adequate water supply for irrigation and livelihoods.
Still more recently, China has sacrificed areas such as Hong Kong, Zhuozhou City in Hebei Province near Beijing and Zhengzhou City in Henan Province to protect other areas from flooding.
As China’s economy declines, causing other crises to sharpen, the CCP will try to shift its domestic problems onto the whole world step by step, starting with neighboring countries.
Meanwhile, some of the candidates for next year’s presidential election in Taiwan have actually been calling to relaunch the stalled cross-strait trade in services agreement or using other cross-strait issues to signal their loyalty to the CCP.
In effect, they are showing that if they are elected, they would happily make life easier for the CCP by letting Taiwan be a “flood-relief channel” for China’s economic and political demands.
As Taiwanese think about how to cast their vote in January, they should think carefully about such politicians and how they relate to the Chinese authorities who stand behind them.
Roger Wu works in the service sector.
Translated by Julian Clegg
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS