Beijing Newspeak

The water level of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River is at its lowest since records began in 1877. The water level in Chongqing, further upstream, is only 0.35 metres higher than the record low in 1987 and one million people in Chongqing are suffering water shortages, according to a Xinhua report on Monday.

On January 11, Xinhua reported that the Three Gorges Corporation planned to open the dam’s floodgates to reduce the water level in the reservoir from 155 metres to a possible 144 metres - just three months after the level was raised from 135 metres, to much fanfare of course. On January 18, Xinhua reported that the measure had met with little success:

The Three Gorges dam has opened its floodgates to feed the river, but statistics from monitoring stations in central China’s Hubei province and east China’s Jiangsu province have shown no perceptible rise in water levels.

So what effects will all this have on the power generating targets of the Three Gorges Project? The dam generated 49.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006, according to Guess Who (well I do have unavoidable access to the Xinhua database seven hours a day so forgive my bias). This figure was down 16.1 billion kwh from the previous year and well below the target of 62 billion kwh set at the beginning of 2006. The drop was not explicity acknowledged in the Xinhua report but an unnamed official appeared to blame it on the lowest volume of water to flow through the dam area for 137 years.

Even more suprising then are the comments reported in Monday’s Xinhua story:

Sources with the China Three Gorges Project Corporation said the water shortage in the upper reaches had not affected the world’s largest water storage facility.

I’m not a hydrology expert but I do subscribe to the hydropower station formula of less water = less power. If the drought continues, the Three Gorges Corp has a serious problem. It generated less than 50 billion kwh last year and if they continue at that rate, it will generate 250 billion kwh over the next five years. This does not meet the 300 billion kwh of electricity it has already presold to the State Power Grids for the 2006-2010 period. Their long-term plan of producing 84.7 billion kwh of electricity (a stat tacked onto the end of every Xinhua story about the Three Gorges Dam) does look ambitious at this point.

But despite all this doom and gloom over fast-appearing sections of riverbed and reports that severe drought will last until May (and return for 30 days in the summer), Chinese Water Resources Vice Minister E Jingping is warning everyone about the possibility of flooding along the Yangtze. His assertion is of course based on the soundest of evidence: the Yangtze has “not seen serious floods in recent years” so this increases the chances of flooding according to “the law of nature”.

Beijing has suffered sandstorms in recent years so surely it can’t happen this March - according to the law of nature, averages, whatever you want to call it.

Unlike around 60 percent of China’s population I didn’t see CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala. But a few people have told me about a poem read out by children of migrant workers live on the program, which describes their struggle for schooling in the capital. “It is our mothers that clean Beijing’s streets, it is our fathers that build Beijing’s skyscrapers,” goes one line. The people who raised the gala item, a couple of them Xinhua colleagues, said they were genuinely moved to tears by the piece. In fact, the female CCTV presenter, who was jointly hosting the gala, committed the cardinal sin of live television and started sobbing. A story released by Xinhua gave the example of one man (a good friend of the journalist who wrote the article) being inspired to donate 100 yuan to the cause the next day at a donation point in a Temple Fair. Although it should be clarified the donation point was not set up specifically for migrant workers’ children.

My first reaction was to applaud the publicity given to this issue in front of an audience of around 700 million. Yes, it was a piece of propaganda. But it was another example of the problem of migrant children’s schooling being publicised through the state media, something which has become increasingly apparent in recent months. Take this article from China Daily for example, written by columnist Li Xing about the closure of Xingzhi school, one of the largest migrant kids’ schools in Beijing, which reaches the following conclusion:

“But to help schools like Xingzhi to grow and further develop, better policies are needed to address the current divide between the permanent Beijing residents and non-residents and between the so-called public schools and “private” schools, so that all children are able to enjoy free basic education wherever they live, even without permanent resident status.”

Then, another colleague of mine shed further light on the poem recital. She saw the same poem being performed by the same group of children wearing the same clothes on a Beijing TV channel at the end of last year. She picked out different lines from the poem, saying that the poem was quite sensational. “Beijing is not yours (city kids), it is ours!” and “You compare your parents with ours, we will compare our futures with yours!” As my colleague rightly pointed out, this kind of aggressive language emphasises a clear divide between migrant kids and city kids. She wondered what the children reading out the poem really thought about it and hoped they were not being manipulated.

It is difficult to comment properly on the poem when I have never actually heard it all the way through. And I wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway. So it may seem a bizarre choice of topic for a first blog entry. But this is an issue I feel strongly about, having followed it at Xinhua and tried to encourage reporters to cover it properly. We made some headway in the reporting of it last August only for a combination of a lack of bravery on the news agency’s part and the silent treatment from local officials to ensure the stories reverted back to vague promises on improving migrant children’s educational facilities.

The migrant children have read a poem on the biggest TV program of the year. They should not be asked to do it again. Hopefully, it was the kick up the arse the Beijing government needed and this year we will actually see some results.