After Typhoon Haikui left Taiwan and crossed into China, torrential rains caused disasters in several Chinese provinces, adding to the list of floods that China has had this summer.
At 11:44pm on Sept. 7, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) notified local media that “Hong Kong has been informed by the Shenzhen Authority that water would be discharged from the Shenzhen Reservoir from about 0:00am tomorrow.”
The announcement gave local residents and public facilities in Hong Kong’s New Territories just 16 minutes to act. When the time arrived, areas of the New Territories flooded.
In a scene reminiscent of flooding that affected Taipei’s metro system during Typhoon Nari in 2001, water poured into the Wong Tai Sin Station of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway.
Hong Kong and neighboring Guangdong Province in mainland China have seen plenty of rainstorms, but something has changed since the handover of Hong Kong sovereignty from the UK on July 1, 1997, when Hong Kong entered its Chinese colonial era. With the arrival of Typhoon Haikui, the authorities of Shenzhen, which lies just north of Hong Kong, set an ominous precedent by treating Hong Kong as a flood-relief zone.
Hong Kong’s aura as an international city is fading and China has for the past few years been acting with ever greater disregard for international perceptions in pursuit of its political objectives. For example, Shanghai was the first city to be locked down as an extreme measure against COVID-19.
With Hong Kong’s New Territories having been sacrificed to divert floodwater from the Shenzhen Reservoir, more such actions can be expected.
Evidently, Hong Kong SAR’s status is waning in the minds of China’s decisionmakers.
A deeper reason that Chinese authorities have repeatedly used such methods to cope with floodwater is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is prepared to externalize the cost of achieving a specific political goal by shifting it onto the shoulders of anyone it sees as weak and vulnerable. This beggar-thy-neighbor mentality allowed the CCP to starve at least 30 million Chinese to death during the famines of the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962 so that China could export food. In the past few years, China has built many reservoirs in the upper reaches of the Mekong River to retain water for Yunnan, Guizhou and other southwestern provinces, with no regard for the needs of Vietnam and other downstream countries for adequate water supply for irrigation and livelihoods.
Still more recently, China has sacrificed areas such as Hong Kong, Zhuozhou City in Hebei Province near Beijing and Zhengzhou City in Henan Province to protect other areas from flooding.
As China’s economy declines, causing other crises to sharpen, the CCP will try to shift its domestic problems onto the whole world step by step, starting with neighboring countries.
Meanwhile, some of the candidates for next year’s presidential election in Taiwan have actually been calling to relaunch the stalled cross-strait trade in services agreement or using other cross-strait issues to signal their loyalty to the CCP.
In effect, they are showing that if they are elected, they would happily make life easier for the CCP by letting Taiwan be a “flood-relief channel” for China’s economic and political demands.
As Taiwanese think about how to cast their vote in January, they should think carefully about such politicians and how they relate to the Chinese authorities who stand behind them.
Roger Wu works in the service sector.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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