It’s hot in China – so hot that the country’s economy is struggling. In the province of Sichuan, where temperatures are currently measuring around 40 degrees, factories have had to temporarily stop production. This has consequences – also for us.
The bad news from China doesn’t stop: Factories in the province of Sichuan now have to stop production for six days. The reason for this is an immense heat wave, the worst in 60 years, according to meteorologists.
84 million people live in the province, and the economy benefits from the lithium and silicon in the region’s soil. This is an essential part of chip production.
Due to the upheavals that the corona pandemic has caused and is still causing in the People’s Republic, there had already been production and thus delivery difficulties. If chip output stutters in China, this will affect the entire global economy.
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In addition to chips and semiconductors, solar panels are also manufactured in Sichuan. Just like batteries, including for the US Tesla group. The authorities in China justify the temporary shutdown of the important industry with the heat wave that is sweeping the country.
In Sichuan, temperatures are currently measured around 40 degrees. People at home turn up their air conditioners, causing power shortages and grid congestion.
Faced with this situation, the government prioritizes people over business. A similar scenario is being considered in Germany, but for the winter. Should not enough gas be available, private households would also be preferred to business in the Federal Republic.
In China and Germany alike, the heat wave has lowered river levels and thus the capacity to harness them for hydroelectric power. Sichuan is the hub for hydropower in the People’s Republic.
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However, the heat is currently not the only hardship that has to be endured: while in the south the heat is tormenting people, animals and nature (so far only half as much rain has fallen as last year), there is torrential rain in the north, which haunt the people.
Both phenomena lead to a failure in the grain harvest, which could become a problem for the food supply in the People’s Republic. Due to this fact, products such as vegetables and fruit are already significantly more expensive than at the same time last year.
China has been struggling with the effects of the corona pandemic and the government’s failed “zero Covid” strategy for months. Entire factories and ports have been closed under this policy, even if only a few Covid cases have been reported there.
This led to a drop in productivity and consumption, a disruption in supply chains and the highest youth unemployment in China’s history. It is now 20 percent, a month ago it was 18.4 percent. The extreme weather now appears to many as the last blow from which the country will not recover any time soon.
For China’s ruler Xi Jinping, all of this comes at an inopportune time. He would like to present himself at the XX. Congress of the Communist Party to be re-elected president. With a record amount of bad news, it doesn’t exactly commend itself for another five-year period.
Xi may now fall on his toes for having spent the past few years trying to bring the country into line. He preferred to devote his time to drafting his ideology, written in three volumes entitled Xi Jinping’s Thoughts.
Alexander Görlach is Honorary Professor of Ethics at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian is currently working on a project on “digital cosmopolitanism” at the Internet Institute at Oxford University and the Faculty of Philosophy at New York University.
Alexander Görlach was a Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in the USA and Cambridge University in England. After stints in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he has focused on the rise of China and what it means for East Asian democracies in particular. He has recently published the following titles: “Red Alert: Why China’s Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Western Pacific Is Leading to a Global War” (Hoffmann
From 2009 to 2015, Alexander Görlach was also the publisher and editor-in-chief of the debate magazine The European, which he founded. Today he is a columnist and author for various media such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the New York Times. He lives in New York and Berlin.
