October 5, 2024

Authored by James Gorrie via The Epoch Times,

At this point, China’s declining economic situation is well documented. The damage is too large to cover up with propaganda, and the Chinese people know it. Even the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) 75th anniversary was austere. Negative economic factors have been building for years.

China was already having problems in 2018 and 2019 with the Trump administration’s imposition of steep tariffs on Chinese goods. But the COVID-19 pandemic and the CCP’s extreme “zero-COVID” three-year lockdown period made China’s economic downturn much worse.

China Is Being Tested

As we approach the last quarter of 2024, the CCP is being tested by unprecedented domestic economic conditions. As a result, civil unrest is 18 percent higher than last year. The slowdown has many facets, of course. We’ll name just a few in this space.

One big factor is the real estate sector, which is about 30 percent of GDP. It continues to crater, and at the time of this writing, there is no recovery in sight. Home prices and sales continue to decline. What’s more, Chinese consumers are buying less, with consumer spending making up just 38 percent of GDP. By contrast, that figure is 60–70 percent in developed countries.

Sloth and Disillusion

Not unexpectedly, unemployment among China’s youth (ages 16–24) had been at least 21 percent and likely higher when the CCP stopped publishing unemployment figures in June 2023. Then, in December of that year, the CCP released new statistics from a new method of measuring youth unemployment, which did not include students. That new approach dropped that figure down to 14.9 percent, but that’s still almost three times higher than China’s national rate of 5.1 percent.

High jobless rates for young people hinder future growth potential and have added to the “lie flat” trend amongst many in China’s new generation, who have little hope of or ambition to obtain the lifestyle that their parents enjoyed.

Sloth and disillusion are hardly the stuff that strong economies are made of. The risks and dangers of disaffected youth movements are not unknown in China. The ghost of Tianuare still haunts Chinese authorities, even though the surveillance and control that the CCP has over its people is light ahead of the Tiananmen Square era of 1989.

Embedded Political and Industrial Policies

Still, there are embedded economic realities that can’t easily be changed. Party doctrine dictates that China’s top economic advantage is found in its low levels of domestic consumption and high savings rate. These two factors mean domestic capital flows directly into the state-controlled banking system, which it can then allocate to specific industries. This gives the Party tremendous control over industrial policy and private capital.

For instance, China’s economic and development structures are geared toward high levels of industrial output. That may seem fine, but because China’s political organization and industrial arrangements within the Party are focused on large production capacity and not innovation or differentiation, the outcomes are massive overproduction that is often well beyond global demand and unprofitable factories.

Constant oversupplies, from electric vehicle batteries to electronics, result in Chinese manufacturers dumping massive amounts of cheap products into foreign markets, triggering trade friction such as tariffs and other retaliation, which also make conditions worse in China.

In short, China’s distorted industrial policies tied to a graft-loyalty political system have made it incapable of changing without disrupting the CCP structure and the loyalties that come with it.

No Stopping the Downward Spiral

For these reasons and others, over the past several years, China has found itself in a downward spiral of deflation, falling domestic consumption, and declining confidence in the CCP. What’s more, there are few real options that won’t threaten the CCP’s grip over the country. It must be made clear, however, that with its surveillance capabilities, the Party can handle a loss of confidence in the eyes of the people, but it can’t survive a loss of power. The two are not the same.

What the CCP will do is continue to support some critical areas of the economy, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and military enhancements, while letting other sectors flail without little or no bailouts. Some sectors will eventually return, but not in the near future. This is clear to many within and outside of China, as billions of dollars in investment and capital continue to exit China.

Wolf Warrior Diplomacy Is Alive and Well

This brings us to China’s so-called wolf warrior diplomacy approach toward other nations, which it adopted in 2019 on the cusp of the COVID-19 outbreak and global criticism of Beijing’s disastrous handling of the pandemic. China was already under economic duress due to the rising trade war with the United States. Some observers attribute this approach to personal ambition among China’s diplomatic personnel and/or an attempt to improve the perceived investment environment in China.

Neither makes any sense when it’s understood that Xi Jinping is not allowing diplomats to make their own rules and policies, and pre-wolf warrior investment levels were high. Why would the CCP authorities imagine that increasing aggression on the global stage would make more countries want to invest there? They don’t.

A more realistic rationale for China’s rising aggression on the world stage is that Beijing feels the need to control the narrative at home and intimidate the rest of the world. The spillover between a declining economy and rising unrest is clear. At home, the CCP needs to blame the West and other foreigners for its blatant economic failures not only for exculpatory purposes but also to whip up nationalism and justify further aggressions as economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

Some observers have concluded that Beijing’s days of wolf warrior diplomacy are now over. Current events, however, defy such a conclusion. These include the Chinese regime’s provocative incursions with military planes and boats into or near territorial waters or air space of the United States, Taiwan, and the Philippines, border battles with India, as well as a desire to expand control of the South China Sea. On the global stage, as the return to bullets over diplomacy rises, Beijing sees an opportunity to influence and/or intimidate other nations.

Authored by Edward Carver via Common Dreams,

Local officials, academic researchers, and volunteer responders have raised concerns about chemical and biological contamination brought by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene in the southeastern U.S. last week, which potentially threaten the safety not only of drinking water but also the quality of soil—leading experts to call for tighter regulations on stored pollutants.

Helene struck Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on September 26 and swept through a number of states in the days that followed. Most of the damage came from extreme rainfall that triggered flooding. The storm killed at least 232 people. The biological and chemical threats posed by floodwaters are typically manifold, often containing, for example, e. coli from overflowing sewage systems.

While it’s not yet clear what bacteria or chemicals Helene’s floodwaters may have contained, the storm passed through hundreds of industrial sites with toxic pollutants, including paper mills, fertilizer factories, oil and gas storage facilities, and even a retired nuclear plant, according to three researchers at Rice University, writing in The Conversation this week.

The researchers called for tighter regulations on the storage and release of chemical pollutants. “Hazardous releases remain largely invisible due to limited disclosure requirements and scant public information,” they wrote. “Even emergency responders often don’t know exactly which hazardous chemicals they are facing in emergency situations.”

“We believe this limited public information on rising chemical threats from our changing climate should be front-page news every hurricane season,” they added. “Communities should be aware of the risks of hosting vulnerable industrial infrastructure, particularly as rising global temperatures increase the risk of extreme downpours and powerful hurricanes.”

The devastation of infrastructure and the lack of drinking water in cities such Asheville, North Carolina, has rightly received national media attention following the storm. In North Carolina alone, more than 700,000 households lost power, and 170,000 still didn’t have it as of Thursday.

Yet the National Weather Service warns that while floodwaters can create clear-cut devastation, “what you can’t see can be just as dangerous.” Helene also brought with it public health concerns that are less obvious, including to other, non-public sources of drinking water.

Helene’s floodwaters overran many wells, rendering them unsafe to drink, at least until treatment and testing can be done. North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services advised residents not to use contaminated well water earlier this week.

One problem following Helene is that most studies of flooding’s impact on drinking water have been done in coastal areas, and it’s not clear how they apply to the mountainous areas of North Carolina that took the worst hit from the storm.

“We don’t have a lot of knowledge about mountain flooding, from a hydrology standpoint,” Kelsey Pieper, a professor in environmental engineering at Northeastern University, toldInside Climate News.

“Water velocities tend to be higher in mountain floodings because it’s getting funneled into the valley, where the water is accumulating. In a coastal area, you’re going to see more water spreading out,” she said. “The flooding mechanisms are different, and we know very little.”

Wells tested in eastern North Carolina after Hurricane Florence in 2018 showed some detections of e. coli or total fecal coliform, which were partly attributed to industrialized hog farms in the area, Inside Climate News reported.

Crops are often rendered unsafe after flooding due to biological or chemical contamination, according to Food Safety Alliance. Natural bodies of water are also often unsafe to swim in following floods. Virginia Department of Health and other agencies warned people to avoid them after Helene.

The period after a tropical storm brings increased risk of both biological contaminants, such as bacteria and viruses, and chemical contaminants, such as heavy metals and pesticides, according to the Duke University Superfund Research Center.

Following Helene, a grassroots volunteer cleanup effort has sprung up in western North Carolina, but it brings risks for the volunteers because of the potential contamination.

Another devastating scene due to Hurricane Helene’s impact in several states. We are in the historic downtown area of Marshall, N.C. where the clean up process has started. We’ve seen people with PPE and hazmat suits as we’ve been hearing the mud in this area is hazardous. pic.twitter.com/K52uZceDE4

— Cristina Corujo (@cristina_corujo) October 4, 2024

“We were supposed to get a big shipment of gloves, coveralls, masks, respirators, but we aren’t,” Rachel Bennett, a coordinating volunteer in the town of Marshall, which sits along the banks of the French Broad River, told the Citizen Times, an Asheville newspaper. “So, we’re hoping to get more. Those are the big things because we’re in cleanup right now. We need thick things.”

“Right now, it’s boots, and it’s hard to get people to put on gloves, because when you’re in this, you’re like, ‘I’m already exposed,'” she added.

A Marshall resident conducted a soil test this week but the results haven’t come back yet, the newspaper reported. “All of these rivers should be treated as hazmat sites,” Buncombe County spokesperson Stacey Wood said at a briefing Friday, according to a local journalist. Buncombe County encompasses Asheville and Marshall is just outside it.

The Rice University researchers called for better preparation for future storms in the form of stronger regulation. They’ve developed a map showing the U.S. areas that are most vulnerable to chemical pollution brought on by floodwaters. One hotspot is the area of Texas and Louisiana full of petrochemical industry sites.