China’s worst drought in at least six decades has hit several provinces in the country, drying up rivers including large stretches of the country’s longest, Yangtze river, and lakes, wilting the critical autumn harvest and forcing industries to a grinding halt in some regions to ration power to be diverted to households.
Record-breaking temperatures have left hundreds of thousands without access to drinking water and have threatened livestock.
The National Climate Centre (NCC) recently announced that the “…comprehensive intensity of the regional heatwaves that have hit China since June 13 is the strongest since 1961 when the country started to keep complete meteorological records”.
The Chinese economy is set to take a hit from the widespread drought even as industrial production and domestic consumption continue to reel under Covid-19 related lockdowns and the country’s “zero-Covid” strategy.
China’s national observatory reissued an orange alert for drought on Sunday (August 28) as heatwaves persist in multiple regions, continuing now for nearly 80 days.
“Parts of Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Hubei, Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou, Chongqing, Sichuan and Tibet have experienced moderate to severe droughts,” the National Meteorological Centre (NMC) said, according to official news agency, Xinhua.
The Chinese water resources ministry said that since July, the drought has affected over 821,000 hectares of farmlands in several provincial-level regions including Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Anhui, covering a massive chunk of landmass.
Critically, the worst affected areas cut through industry-heavy provinces following the flow of the Yangtze river and its riverine basin, which stretches from coastal Shanghai in the east to Sichuan province in the southwest.
This heavily populated and big industrial hub is home to hundreds of million people and contains several manufacturing hubs including the megacity of Chongqing, among the four directly administered municipalities besides Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.
“Since July, most areas of the Yangtze River basin have experienced high temperatures, and there has been 45 % less rainfall than the average over recent years,” Xinhua reported
The drought and accompanying heatwave have come at a critical period for the growth of China’s autumn harvest, accounting for 75 % of the country’s annual grain output, Chen Tao, chief forecaster of the NMC, told official news agency Xinhua recently.
Commercial crops in south China, such as tea trees, citrus fruits and mangoes are fragile to heatwaves, said Chen.
By early August, high temperature weather had already lasted for 51 days, covering an area of more than 5 million sq km and affecting a population of more than 900 million people, according to Chinese official media.
“The highest temperature of 131 national weather stations has reached or exceeded the historical record. The highest daily temperature in Lingshou, Gaocheng, Zhengding City in Hebei Province and Yanjin City in Yunnan Province even reached 44°C,” CGTN, China’s official English television channel, reported early August.
China declared its first drought emergency of the year in the third week of August.
Economy
Premier Li Keqiang, who is in-charge of the economy, last week announced a 19-point policy package at a State Council (China’s cabinet) meeting on Wednesday
Besides an additional 300 billion yuan ($43.72 billion) package announced toward the development of financial tools, support worth 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) will go toward supporting the troubled real estate market, and for disaster relief in drought-stricken areas.
“Given the current circumstances, we must seize the window of opportunity and maintain the appropriate policy scale…This will expand effective investment, boost consumption, and help keep economic activities on a steady course,” Li said.
“The big package was a clear acknowledgement the Chinese economy is still struggling, as it continues to be battered by Covid lockdowns, a downward spiraling property sector, and drought-induced power shortages that have paralysed a number of key factories,” the China-focused, SupChina.com reported.
China’s economic growth forecasts for 2022 has been downgraded to 3% or under because of the heatwave by Goldman Sachs and Nomura, much below the 5.5% growth target that the Chinese government had set earlier this year.
“It (the drought) will affect those big energy intensive industries and it will have[a] knock-on effect throughout the economy and even to the global supply chain,” Dan Wang, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank China told CNBC.
Climate change
“The drought and heatwave over the last few weeks have certainly put China under a stress test. It is the closest we’ve come so far to a national awakening to the impacts of climate change,” Li Shuo , a senior global policy advisor at Greenpeace, China, said.
The truth is with the climate crisis intensifying the frequency and severity of extreme weather events will only grow. China is not immune from this global challenge, Li added.
“Already this summer, we’ve seen wildfire and water depletion putting ecosystems along the Yangtze River under pressure. We are also only beginning to grapple with the tremendous social and economic impacts of the climate crisis.”
The heatwave could also “strengthen China’s desire for energy security, which often means more coal power plants,”. Li said, adding that it would be ironic if the latter happens, as more coal will only exacerbate the underlying climate challenge.
Politics
For President Xi Jinping, 2022 has turned out to be his hottest summer in years.
The worst heatwave and drought have come in the run-up to the twice-a-decade Communist Party of China (CPC) Congress, to be held later this year, where Xi is expected to continue as China’s leader for an unprecedented third term.
Xi and the CPC top leadership were already dealing with the economic impact of the unrelenting Omicron-led Covid-19 outbreaks across China when the rains dried up in July.
After re-emerging from the secretive CPC conclave at the Beidaihe sea resort town, Xi called on local authorities to work to relieve the severe drought in some provinces threatening power supplies and further impairing economic growth.
First Covid-19 outbreaks and lockdowns and now the drought and power outages have hit at the core of the CPC’s legitimacy among the people: economy.
But it’s unlikely that even a sagging economy will have an impact on the upcoming CPC Congress – at least now.
It’s likely that Premier Li will be the top leaderships’ visible face when an announcement needs to be made on the economy while Xi will be shielded.
Also, tension involving China, the US and Taiwan might have come at the right time for Xi, helping whip-up nationalism over the “reunification” of Taiwan to distract attention from the real issues plaguing the economy.