“I never thought that the drop in temperature would be that hefty,” “Jimu News” quotes a farmer from Guyuan County, Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province.
There had been a blue alert of cold weather, issued by the Zhangjiakou Meteorological Obervatory on Thursday afternoon (August 25), saying that temperatures could be as low as 1 to 4° Celsius in Kangbao County, Guyuan County, Shangyi County among other places in the morning of Saturday (August 27), and suggested that farmers took precautions.
The farmer sensed frost when waking up and then found frozen water in the courtyard’s basin. Rushing to his fields, he found that leaves of zuchini as well as zuchini in its early stages had been killed.
“Jimu News” got similar accounts from other farmers, but does not quantify the overall damage done in the region. The quoted farmer estimates his personal damage at about 40,000 yuan, while in a normal year, he would have made 80,000 yuan RMB from 10 mu. This year, his picking season would end one month early.
A trader from Shandong Province is quoted with expecations of higher prices. Some kind of common beans (芸豆) are said to have been at 9.4 yuan per kilogram on Friday, but to have risen to over 14 yuan per kilogram by Saturday.*) Some areas had even stopped production, the trader is quoted.
Also from the trader’s point of view, based on five years of his own activity, frost has been early by one month, as it would usually be expected in late September.
Some web pages with the “Jimu News” article have been removed. The above draws on news.cnhubei.com content (also removed), but it still seems to be available elsewhere.
As custom at Radio Taiwan international‘s (RTI) German service, there will be a number shortwave broadcasts directly from Taiwan this summer, as announced here.
Weekday
Dates
Friday
July 30, August 6, August 13, August 20.
Saturday
July 31, August 7, August 14, August 21.
Sunday
August 1, August 8, August 15, August 22.
On each of the above days, there will be a broadcast on 11705 kHz from 17:00 to 18:00 hours UTC and one on 9545 kHz from 18:00 to 19:00 hours UTC.
We can probably expect one hour of different program items per day, at 17:00, repeated at 18:00 UTC. RTI’s German program output per day is about sixty minutes, but routinely, only half of it is aired on shortwave, as regular broadcasts via the Kostinbrod relay in Bulgaria are only 30 minutes long. The remaining half is provided online.
The following is an excerpt from an article published by Daily Economic News (每日经济新闻) online (每经网), from Shanghai. Before and after the translated paragraphs, it addresses more global aspects of the current heatwave.
Links within blockquotes added during translation.
[…]
It is said that the trusty brothers from the Northeast are packing to leave for the South, to avoid the heat …
据说东北的老铁们已经开始收拾去南方避暑的衣服了…..
In Shenyang, the maximum temperature has recently reached 37.6 degrees C., which is the second-highest temperature ever recorded in Shenyang ever since weather recording began. A Liaoning Satellite TV reporter took a thermometer onto a bus without air condition and actually measured 46 degrees C.!
As a result, there aren’t enough air condition installers in the Northeast! Gomei‘s official Weibo channel says that only during the last week of July, sales of air conditioners in the Northeast’s three provinces rose by 1,726 percent, and even by 3,545.4 percent in the Shenyang area, compared with the same period last year, with several tens of thousands of air conditioners waiting to be installed.
And it’s not only the people who can’t stand it, it’s the sea cucumbers, too!
不光是人受不了，海参也受不了了！
According to Securities Times, Mr. Wang, with a cultivation experience of over ten years of working 240 mu of sea cucumbers on the Jinzhou coast, found in a first assessment that the losses this year are at least 2 million. Mr. Wang told a reporter that the maximum water temperature for sea cucumbers is 32 degrees C., and that once this limit is reached, they won’t last for more than 48 hours. After 48 hours, they will melt, and the high temperatures of this year have already lasted for nearly a week.
Reading this, condescending smiles may appear on the faces of the little Southern companions: Coming to the South to escape the heat? Isn’t it obvious that calorization is normal here?
看到这，南方的小伙伴可能要轻蔑一笑：来南方避暑？难道你们不知道南方的人可都是要热化了吗？
According to Central Meteorological Station statistics, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Zhejiang and the central western areas have seen ten to eighteen days of temperatures of more than 35 degrees C. since July 10.
Since the beginning of this year, the number of high-temperature days has exceeded twenty days in parts of Jiangnan and Huanan, with western Huanghai, central Chongqing, eastern Hunan, southern Jiangxi, southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong among the areas where there were the number of high-temperature days exceeded those in other years by ten days.
Even an African friend says unreservedly that “China is too hot, I’m going back to Africa to get away from the heat.”
连非洲友人都直言：“中国太热了，我要回非洲避暑。”
According to China Youth Daily, young Sami from Ethiopia who is working in Chongqing took a twenty-day holiday from his company in early July because of the heat and returned to Africa. But on his return to Chongqing, it was still “brutally hot”, making him thinking about a second return home, as in his home town, temperatures were only twenty degrees after all, while it was over 40 degrees in Chongqing …
Xiao Bian, as a Northerner who once worked in Africa, tells everyone here that the East African high plains are really cool, and he would therefore persuade the trusty Northeastern brothers that as the South isn’t welcoming, the East African high plains are a bit more understanding …
In fact, it isn’t only China which is being roasted, but the entire northern hemisphere.
其实不光是国内，整个北半球都在经受高温“烤”验。
[…]
The article turns to more serious aspects of the heat from there – global warming – but not without noting that some time in future, the legend of the Mongolian Navy could become true.
“China Quarterly” cooperates with China censors / Taiwan hosts 2017 Summer Universiade / Kim spoils Fun for Chinese Guam Visitors / Red-noticed police / The First “Five Marvellous Years” / Want to be Chinese?
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Doing Beijing’s Dirty Work (1): Academic Institutions
China Quarterly apparently cooperates with Beijing by blocking access to articles and e-books on their website.
Can we expect them to do better? I have my doubts. Their topic is China – and if they don’t cooperate, others will, and might replace the renowned magazine. That’s no excuse, of course, and they could still display character rather than opportunism, but one has to admit that they are facing a tough choice. If they decided otherwise, there would be no academic solidarity – alternative opportunists would chum up to Beijing.
What is therefore needed is a political answer. British legislators will need to make censorship cooperation of this kind illegal, and legislators in other free societies will need to do likewise.
You can’t do Beijing’s dirty work yourself, and remain democratic, liberal, or free.
The public needs to push a political decision. People who care about human rights (those of others, and of their own), should consider to join or support relevant pressure groups, rather than political parties.
If Chinese readers can be blocked from servers in free countries, there is no good reason why we, people who live in (still) relatively free societies, should keep access to them, when Beijing demands otherwise.
This scenario may appear far-fetched now – but what happens at Cambridge now would have been unfathomable two or three decades ago, too.
Besides, no man or woman in a free country should vote for political parties who are prepared to tolerate this kind of practice. Totalitarian challenges must be met with political answers.
–
Taiwan’s Twelve Days of International Fame
The 2017 Summer Universiade started in Taipei, on Saturday.
–
Chinese Holidaymakers: Kim spoils the Fun
Huanqiu Shibao (the Global Times‘ Chinese-language sister paper) worried about unwelcome side effects of the US-North Korean war of words during the first half of the month: More than 26,000 Chinese tourists had travelled to Guam in 2016, the paper noted in an article published online on August 11 – an increase by 11 percent compared to 2015. Huanqiu numbers reportedly provided by the Guam Visitors Bureau‘s China Representative Room, an organization that runs offices in mainland China and in Hong Kong.
Guam is an island in the western Pacific. It is U.S. territory, reportedly within reach of North Korean missiles (provided that the missiles are lucky), it hosts a naval base, an air base, a religious shortwave broadcasting station, and thousands of tourists annually.
The Huanqiu Shibao article also quotes from “Sina Weibo” exchanges between Chinese netizens and the Guam Visitors Bureau, where Bureau staff reportedly posted reassuring replies to questions like “will you soon be hit by missiles?”
Probably given the incomplete state of North Korea’s striking force (God knows where the missiles would actually go if the army tried to fire them into Guam’s adjacent waters), or Donald Trump‘s notoriety as a bigmouth with little consistency, no travel warning appears to have been issued by Chinese authorities. According to the BY article, the China Youth Travel Agency told reporters that
the company hadn’t received a political-risks warning notice to suspend departures to Guam until then, and reminded journalists to monitor the China National Tourism Administration’s travel risk reminders.
According to statistics quoted by the article, most tourists visiting Guam are from Japan and South Korea, with rapidly rising numbers from mainland China.
–
Doing Beijing’s Dirty Work (2): Red-noticed Police
The arrest of a German citizen of Turkish origin, Dogan Akhanli, made it into German news during the weekend. According to GfbV, a German organization that keeps track of cases where authoritarian regimes use Interpol to harrass critics abroad, Akhanli was arrested by Spanish police in the city of Granada. Reportedly, Turkey had requested Interpol to issue a read notice to Spain. The dust appears to settle now, and Akhanli is free again, but the organization calls for reforming Interpol and to make sure that it doesn’t become (or remain) a tool for silencing regime critics abroad.
In the same press release, GfbV notes that Dolkun Isa, secretary general of the World Uyghur Congress, had been arrested in Rome, on July 26 this year. Isa was on his way into the Italian senate when he was arrested. According to GfbV, Chinese authorities are now using Interpol’s “red notice” mechanism systematically, to restrict movement of the regime’s critics abroad, and thus creating a de-facto occupational ban against them (Chinas Behörden nutzen die „Red Notice“ inzwischen systematisch, um die Bewegungsfreiheit von im Ausland lebenden Menschenrechtlern einzuschränken und de facto ein Berufsverbot gegen sie zu verhängen).
It certainly wasn’t the first time that Isa had been arrested. In 2009, South Korea arrested him, apparently on arrival at the airport, and refused him entry into the country. Previously, he had been arrested by the UN security service when visiting the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
–
The First Five “Marvellous Years”
China’s state television (CCTV) website reminds the public of CCP secretary general Xi Jinping‘s feats during his first five marvellous years (不平凡五年) in office. On August 14, the media organization published statistics of Xi’s speeches on foreign policy.
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So: Want to be Chinese?
Given that under the secretary general’s correct leadership, China is becoming the marvel of the world (an unscientific condensed international press review by JR with no further sources), it should be no surprise that Daniel Bell wants better international access to Chinese citizenship, for meritorious citizens of the world who would like to share in that glory.
— Note: the following is old news: it’s about articles that appeared during the past two weeks and a half. —
Big sensation? Or was the Xinhua article, published on August 5, making fun of the international press in general, or the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in particular? The headline read Liao Wang Think Tank: Don’t wait for it, Beidaihe won’t happen, and it seemed to refer to an article in Hong Kong’s English-language paper, published on July 30. The headline, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the near-tradtitional gathering of China’s top leaders has been cancelled. But it does suggest that Beidaihe is no longer the place where the big decisions are made: after all, Chinese politics had gradually become more transparent and “regular”, especially after the 18th National Congress of the CCP (i. e. the election of the current leadership) and the Eight Provisions (or Eight Rules). Hadn’t the politburo met on July 20 and 30? One could well expect that issues like the 13th 5-year plan, economic policies, striking the tigers (打老虎, put into quotation marks in the article, and referring to the ostensible fight against corruption among leading cadres) had been discussed there time and again – so what would be the use to go to Beidaihe? “Is it necessary? Is it likely [to happen]?”
Obviously, Beidaihe doesn’t need to be the place where big decisions are made. But it may still be the place. While the CCP is indeed fairly transparent when it comes to the publication of its final decisions, the decision-making process remains as murky as ever.
Maybe that’s why the Xinhua/Liaowang author found speculation about the time and agenda of the Beidaihe meetings so funny. The Economist also got a mention for suggesting that [n]ormally the meetings start in the second week of August and run for seven days or so. This year they started a week early […]. However, the Xinhua article didn’t mention that the Economist referred to reports in overseas Chinese media.
And, as usual, the sources weren’t specifically mentioned, either, let alone linked to, its sources, even though both the SCMP and the Economist article were available online. Maybe they were running counter to the Liaowang author’s message to his readers that Chinese politics had become “more transparent”.
Good weather conditions so far – mostly a good mix of sun, rain and overcast skies. Everything is still lagging behind schedule by a few weeks, as the warm season started late.
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Small grapes, great expectations
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Some of the crops are growing on mini-terraces as the slope would make watering wasteful otherwise.
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Lavender and potatoes
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potato blossom
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Tobacco – only a few rows so as not to exceed the legal limit.
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