Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: Floods prompt mass evacuations in Beijing, a viral video of bullying sparks protests, and another trade deadline looms over the United States and China.
Floods Rock Beijing
More than 80,000 people have been evacuated from flood-prone areas in Beijing as the capital prepares for additional heavy rain after devastating rainstorms killed at least 44 people late last month.
The city appears to have dodged the latest developing storm, and today, officials lifted the severe weather alert. But the ongoing disaster highlights just how vulnerable China’s capital is to weather events, especially as climate change accelerates.
During summer storms, Beijing’s streets often become rivers—or more commonly, open sewers.
This can be deadly. In a 2012 storm, at least 79 people died in heavy rains, some drowning in their cars trapped in underpasses, others perishing in flooded basement apartments or underground homes. That death toll is likely an undercount, as Beijing’s most vulnerable residents—migrant workers—are also some of the least tracked.
One of the paradoxes of Beijing is that while it has a serious problem with flooding, it simultaneously has a severe water shortage.
Beijing has just 150 cubic meters of fresh water per capita available annually from local sources, putting it far below 500 cubic meters per capita—the global standard of “absolute” scarcity. That’s also using the official population figure of around 23 million people, which may be an underestimate, as Chinese metropolises are incentivized to undercount their citizenry.
Because of its size and location, the choice of Beijing as China’s capital doesn’t make a lot of ecological sense compared to China’s other historical capitals, such as Xi’an or Nanjing. But Beijing was preferred by northern conquerors, most notably the Mongol Yuan empire (1271-1368), for its proximity to their homelands. After the fall of the Yuan, the Han Chinese Ming Empire eventually moved the capital back to Beijing in 1421 as an act of defiance to the nearby steppe powers.
But historically, Beijing’s population was far smaller than today, hovering at around a million people until the foundation of the People’s Republic of China saw it grow to today’s scale. With a fraction of today’s population, there was much more water to go around.
Nowadays, other water-scarce northern cities such as Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, regularly impose water usage restrictions on citizens.
But Beijing doesn’t, chiefly because so many important and powerful people live there. Despite authorities’ best efforts, illegal wells are common, especially for use by water-intensive spas. Such over-exploitation of aquifers, legal or otherwise, has caused groundwater levels to plummet.
Instead of restricting usage, Beijing uses its political power to extract water from elsewhere in China, most notoriously through the ongoing South-North Water Transfer Project that launched in 2003. The project has kept Beijing viable for its ever-growing population, but in turn has devastated the rural communities to the south forced to give up their water.
Sometimes Beijing also has too much water. Roughly 70 percent of the capital’s rainfall comes in the summer, especially in July. Agricultural and irrigation changes over centuries have left Beijing unusually vulnerable to summer flooding, with many lakes destroyed and new crops resulting in the removal of protective vegetation.
Although Beijing has expanded its green space in recent years, its massive urban sprawl over the last four decades has eaten up rural areas, paving over fields that once absorbed water.
That’s compounded by Beijing’s outdated drainage system, much of which was built to poor-quality Soviet standards and hasn’t been replaced since the 1980s, despite top-down initiatives to modernize infrastructure. Officials tend to prefer glitzy, high-tech conference centers, high-speed rail, and skyscrapers to the unglamorous and invisible work of fixing sewers.
Climate change, meanwhile, has changed storms of last month’s scale from once-in-a-lifetime events to regular disasters.
Beijing is far from the only area in China to have serious water problems. Flooding has become a regular peril in the south, while urbanization and loss of groundwater are causing many cities to slowly subside into the ground.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has promoted the development of “sponge cities,” adopting practices that better allow landscapes to absorb, store, and release rainwater. But despite winning plaudits from Western environmentalists and urban planners, making cities “spongy” has largely failed to prevent flooding in China.
What We’re Following
Bullying protests. A video of a 14-year-old female student being sadistically bullied by her classmates has gone viral in China, prompting protests in the city of Jiangyou, where the event occurred, and arrests of protesters. Police also claim to have apprehended the bullies.
Bullying is common in Chinese schools, especially of poorer or lower-class students. (That played a role in the anger here, due to rumors—which police claim are false—that the bullies in the video are daughters of a police officer and a lawyer.) This bullying incident has further fueled anxieties around schooling among parents—already intense given the cost burden of raising children and the huge wealth disparities within China’s education system.
These factors, among others, are causing authorities to increasingly worry about the collapsing birth rate. A new government policy offers modest child care subsidies to parents to help offset costs, but that’s unlikely to move the needle, given that China remains both a middle-income country and the second-most expensive place in the world to raise kids.
Diaspora snitches. Chinese students in the United Kingdom are facing increasing pressure to inform on their classmates for perceived party disloyalty and to harass academics who take a stand on human rights issues, according to a new report from U.K.-China Transparency, a think tank that focuses on Beijing’s influence in Britain.
I’ve heard similar stories from both mainland students and academics in the United States, where clashes among students over Taiwan and Hong Kong have sometimes played out violently. But China has more cards to play in the United Kingdom, where financially strained universities remain dependent on Chinese students who pay full price for their degrees.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- Is This the Start of a U.S.-China Friendship? by Graham Allison
- Kissinger, Brzezinski, and the Promise of Realism by Daniel Fried
- The Trump Trade Tracker by Rishi Iyengar
Tech and Business
Trade deadline. The 90-day reciprocal tariff pause between the United States and China is due to expire on Aug. 12. But it seems highly unlikely that U.S. President Donald Trump has the appetite to go head-to-head against China again, with administration officials already signaling another extension and Trump snubbing the Taiwanese president last week in pursuit of a summit with Xi.
Of course, the increasingly erratic president may shift gears at any moment, but Beijing has also been reminding Washington of its grip on critical minerals, continuing to limit their flow to U.S. defense and security manufacturers.
If another diplomatic clash between the United States and China does come, it may stem from China’s closeness to Russia, with Beijing defiant over recent U.S. demands that China cease purchasing Russian oil.
EV price wars. Beijing is attempting to halt the electric vehicle (EV) price war that has driven prices to record lows and endangered the future of manufacturers, who are producing at a loss, and suppliers, who are being stiffed by even the largest firms.
Regulators have said they will name and shame firms engaging in price wars. Xi has warned several times in recent weeks against “involution” (neijuan), a popular buzzword adopted by the party in the last year that refers to self-defeating competition and shrinking inward.
Neijuan is part of the increasingly common argument from Xi and others that investment is becoming too limited, focused primarily on EVs and artificial intelligence. Chinese investors are even more prone to herding than their American counterparts, flocking to sectors seen as having the party’s blessing.