BEIJING, Nov 17 (Reuters) – Central and eastern Chinese provinces faced the worst natural gas shortage in years as supplies were diverted to snowstorm-hit northern China, while producers lacked incentives to expand output because of poor margins, a state broadcaster said on Tuesday.
Gas supplies for taxis in Wuhan, capital of the central province of Hubei, were halted from Monday while 11 industrial companies in Hanzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, were shut as a result of gas shortages, China National Radio said.
The gas shortage in Wuhan reached 600,000 cubic metres per day and pressure in the gas pipeline was at only half the usual level, it said….
Wuhan is one of the ten largest cities in China and a key transportation hub. One would think the city would have a bit more fuel in its reserves.
Things are bad in nearby cities as well:
The supply deficit in Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu province, had reached 400,000 cubic metres per day, 40 percent of its planned consumption volume, according to C1 Energy, an industry information provider.
Emergency measures to curb consumption had also been taken in other cities including Chongqing, Rizhao, Xi’an, Yichang and Yangzhou, but demand was set to rise further because of expected colder weather, C1 Energy said….
Since it’s only mid November, it seems reasonable to expect colder weather in the weeks and months ahead.
The reason for all this chaos, of course, is the recent snows in northern China:
Unseasonably early and heavy snow in northern China had caused 38 deaths as of last Friday and a surge in energy demand.
The power load on the Northern China electricity grid surged to a high of 127.5 gigawatts this month, 26 percent higher than a year earlier. On the Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan grid networks, the load increased 24.7 percent from a year earlier late last week.
So far I haven’t seen any acknowledgment of a problem up here in Beijing. My apartment has had heat for a couple of weeks now and is warm day and night. At the office it’s downright hot, and we have to keep the windows cracked just to get some relief. The heat is oppressive even when we turn the adjustable-flow radiators — the first I have seen in China — to the lowest setting.
So let’s sum up:
The government either induces or tries to take credit for snowstorms in northern China in order to counter an ongoing drought.
In part because the government neglected to sufficient warn citizens of its intent, daily life is disrupted, transportation grinds to a halt, and dozens of people die.
Tens or possibly hundreds of millions are affected by fuel restrictions in central China, while Beijingers lounge around in their toasty apartments and offices.
Indoor heating is still not required in buildings in those same cities, which can get every bit as cold as Beijing.
We’re about two weeks into a 4-5 month period of weather this bad and, at times, much worse.
Now it’s the ladies’ turn, or rather the girls’ turn. A post-match fight erupted after China beat Australia in the U-19 women’s football tournament match in Wuhan. China’s Titan Sports has the best coverage; curiously, its video link to the footage of the violence isn’t working, but another article has a few photos.
I watched a few minutes of the match last night before going to bed. Seemed like a pretty boring match, or at least not one that would lead to a fight.
However following the final whistle, an Australia player fell to the ground while remonstrating with the Chinese, prompting captain Tameka Butt to charge across the pitch and grab the perceived offender.
That sparked a mass brawl as both sets of players and backroom staff charged onto the pitch, with punches thrown.
Shocking enough, but it gets worse:
Once order was restored, several plastic water bottles were thrown from the crowd in the direction of the Australian team – whose ages range from 15 to 19 – as they made their way down the tunnel with local police imploring fans to stop the behaviour.
Soccer players fighting in China? Women arguing in Wuhan? Fans throwing bottles at teenage girls? The reporter unwittingly gets it right: “Order was restored”, at least in China’s soccer universe.
Wuhan made headlines a couple of months ago when the chengguan, “urban management” officers in charge of enforcing public order, simply surrounded and stared at an illegal street vendor until he was shamed into leaving. This was news because chengguan are typically expected to use more forceful methods to clear out the riffraff.
Now Wuhan’s chengguan are taking it a step further and deputizing a foreigner to put help save Wuhan from utter chaos by forcing shopkeepers to move boxes of bottled water off the sidewalk:
They promised end of 2008 and sure enough, with a few days to spare, the Wuhan Yangtze Tunnel is finally open. Started in 2004, this massive project is, in fact, the first tunnel under the Yangtze River and cost RMB1.7-2.0 billion (about USD250-300 million) depending on your sources. Though this tunnel is the first, it won’t be the last as other sous-Yangtze tunnels are in process in both Shanghai and Nanjing.
I remain skeptical that this four-lane marvel (pictures make it look like two) will truly relieve the traffic burden in Wuhan. One article claims travel time is reduced from 30 to 7 minutes. It’s a neat engineering feat, but I’m not convinved that Wuhan couldn’t use the cash for other more pressing projects. Like the horseracing track.
chinaSMACK is one of my favorite new China blogs. It translates some of the hot topics in China’s online forums and bulletin boards, complete with pictures, video, and numerous reader comments translated from the original Chinese posts. The author seems to favor the more lurid stories, such as a confrontation in Wuhan between a Wuhan bus driver and several passengers. Check out the video (the attack begins at about 1m25s):
There is a follow-up post which examines the possibility that the bus driver insulted the girls in the video:
Last week, video footage from Wuhan bus line 519 showed two Northeastern men from Heilongjiang Province ruthlessly beating and kicking the female bus driver. Chinese across the country were outraged, many calling Northeastern Chinese violent animals. But, some Chinese wondered if the video showed the whole truth, noticing that parts of the video recording was cut out.
Soon, other posters claiming to have been on the bus when the beating happened told a different story about what really happened that day between the Wuhan bus driver, the two Northeastern girls, and the two Northeastern young men who eventually beat her.
A couple things from the translated user comments struck me. First, they reveal the strong regional attitudes and stereotypes (Wuhanese as rude; Northeastern girls in other cities as prostitutes) that rarely are reported in English language news about China. Second, many of the users quoted seem to think that, if the bus driver did insult the girls, then it was either acceptable or at least understandable that she was repeatedly and viciously kicked in the head.
Finally, some commenters argued that the attacked must have been justified because no one else stepped in to stop it:
If it was really like how it was reported, that the female bus driver was completely justified and in the weaker position, that the young men attacked her, why did none of the many people on the bus come out and prevent/stop it? Not even anyone to say a word? The answer is obvious, that although the driver was weaker, she was unreasonable, and even her words and performance made the other passengers on the bus feel dissatisfied, such as being tough or viciously cursing people. Of course, it also possible the other passengers were just different and wanted to avoid causing trouble for themselves.
Personally, I think the final sentence is closer to the truth. In eight years of observing fights in China, I have seen crowds gather to watch even the hint of a fight, but I have never seen anyone step in and try to break up a seriously violent fight.
A new Wuhan blog entitled wo zai wuchang has appeared recently. It’s written by an American teaching English at Huazhong Normal University. Aside from a few minor details, the author’s comments and observations are remarkably similar to my own when I first arrived back in 1997. This passage from the September 2 post captures the first-week-in-Wuhan experience perfectly:
The ride from the airport to the university completely blew my mind. I guess I was expecting Wuhan to be similar to Beijing or Xi’an but it isn’t at all. I can’t say I’ve ever been to a more third world city before – everything looks like it’s falling apart. Even entering campus was a shock. I was feeling completely out of place and slightly regretful; however, life can change after a good night’s sleep and a shower. Wuhan seemed better but still not what I was expecting. The girl who picked me up from the airport came by my room to show me around campus and by accident we found out I had to go get an medical examination done with the rest of the new international kids. For everyone’s information, NO ONE wants to get a medical examination in China EVER. It was probably one of the most frustrating events in my life. Total I had to get a chest x-ray, eye test, ECG exam, sonogram, blood drawn, vaccination, and some sort of test to see if you’ve ever had surgery before. There were probably 200 people there for the same things and about 9 doctors total. This entire process took 7 hours. As you may know, there are no such things as lines in China. Things got dramatic every once in a while. While waiting in the epic ECG line about 10 Chinese men cut this Chinese woman and I. She yelled and yelled at them in Chinese and it got pretty out of hand. They ended up shoving her and her daughter around and pushed passed her. I was shocked. To make the hospital experience even more frustrating is the fact that no one in Wuhan except for a small population knows English. Doctors were yelling orders to me all day and I couldn’t understand a single one. I feel lucky that my exam even got finished. I know my parents probably don’t want to hear this but I wonder if any of that equipment was even sterile (save the needles). The hospital was pretty gross. There were cigarettes all over the floor.
Everything at this university is completely unorganized and frustrating. I feel that no one knows what’s going on and if they do they don’t know when and if they have an idea of when it’s only a rumor. I’m sure once classes start everything will fall into place.
This article about Ghanaians in China popped up in my Google news alert yesterday. It contains some letters from Ghanians currently stuck in China, including this one from someone currently in Wuhan:
There are a lot of Ghanaians who are stranded here in China.
Most of them have no food to eat let alone job to do. Especially in Guangzhou many Ghanaians are behind bars for overstaying their visas. . . .
Most of the people here cannot even locate their passport, the reason being either they have been cheated by agents who promise to renew it and could not, so making away with the passport and the money or giving out to a friend to use and could not locate the friend again. . . .
I am writing from Wuhan a province in China. My passport has expired for a year now and I want to go home but I cannot. There is no work for me to do too, I have been hiding here for almost three months without a job.
A few weeks ago SHTig and I were discussing immigration to and from China–for the last couple hundred years, there has been a lot of the latter but almost none of the former. Aside from North Korean refugees, the only other people coming to China in search of a better life are the Africans.
The rest of the country continues to sacrifice for Beijing’s Olympic party. Yesterday SHTig and I visited one of the nicest (and largest) office towers in Beijing. The entire building was frigid–on a Sunday, when perhaps a few dozen people were inside. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports on electricity rationing in Wuhan:
The provincial government decided to cut power supplies to the capital city of Wuhan by 34 percent, the city of Huangshi by 31 percent and Huanggang by 16 percent, the local economic commission said in a statement posted on its Web site.
China, facing its sixth year of electricity shortages, mothballed 3 percent of its coal-fired generating capacity as of July 25 after fuel supplies dwindled, State Grid Corp. of China said last week. Coal stockpiles at Hubei’s power plants have fallen below the “caution line” of 750,000 metric tons, the provincial government said.
“Insufficient coal supplies forced the closure of an increasing number of power plants in the province,” the commission said. “We decided to start rationing power supplies from Aug. 5 in order to ensure basic power demand for the summer and Olympics are met.”
Unfortunately for Wuhan and the rest of China, the current shortage is not being caused by the Olympics alone, but is rather part of a much greater problem:
State Grid said last week 46 percent of the power stations on its network have coal stockpiles below the “caution line” or seven days of consumption. More than 1 billion people rely on State Grid for their power.
The Three Gorges hydropower station in Hubei had a daily output of 440 million kilowatt-hours yesterday [August 5 or 6], or 5 percent of the nation’s total consumption, the Xinhua News Agency reported today.
The earthquake donation roll call extends from the largest companies in China down to the smallest. This photo is from a poster on Hubuxiang, an alley in Wuhan famous for its dozens of stalls selling tasty snacks. About 80 stalls are listed, with individual donations as small as 10 RMB mentioned. Most of the snacks here cost 1-3 RMB, and thousands of people eat on Hubuxiang every day, so 10 RMB isn’t exactly a generous donation, even for these small-time proprietors. I wonder whether those in the 10 RMB group are proud or ashamed to have their name and donation amount listed like this — probably a bit of both.
WUHAN, March 15 (Xinhua) — A five-year pig raising project involving 1.36 billion U.S. dollars in investment launched on Saturday in Hubei, making the central China province the nation’s largest pig raising base.
China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp.( COFCO), the country’s largest oils and food importer and exporter and leading food manufacturer, started the project in Wuhan, the provincial capital.
