Power supply shortages in many parts of China.
During the cold winter, Chinese provinces have been rationing electricity, and the outside world is concerned about whether it is related to banning coal burning in Australia. Experts believe that the power shortage crisis is actually caused by “man-made disasters”, including “imbalance between supply and demand caused by planned economy” and “political liquidation”.
Power cuts in Zhejiang, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces were followed by blackouts in Guangdong province, and netizens posted notices of Shanghai’s blackout on the Internet. Parts of Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Foshan and Zhuhai were also without early warning.
In Yiwu, Zhejiang province, Chinese netizens reported that small businesses and factories were unable to produce because of power cuts. Residents also reported that besides having to climb 30 floors to work, they did not even use air conditioning in cold weather and even had problems heating themselves. In some cities in Zhejiang and Hunan provinces, traffic lights were closed after midnight. The Communist Party responded by saying it was implementing an “orderly electricity use” policy.
Chinese companies: don’t make money in the second half of the year
Power outages without warning caused small businesses and factories to be unable to produce. Some Owners of Chinese enterprises complained that they could not start work in the first half of 2020 due to the epidemic, and finally waited until the end of the peak season. They were ready to operate at full capacity and deliver orders. They wanted to recover the losses, but they were confronted with the crisis of power ceiling. There was also a heated discussion on the Internet, “We cannot make money in the first half of the year, and we cannot make money in the second half of the year.”
Zhang Yushao, a political commentator, researcher and deputy secretary general of the Cross-strait Policy Association, said in an interview that the power rationing in some Chinese provinces caused by the sanctions on Australian coal mines was actually a fake issue. According to the data, “The proportion of China’s coal imports from Australia for power generation is not high.” He believes that the real problem lies in the Chinese Communist Party’s policy of energy conservation and carbon reduction. Artificial regulation leads to the imbalance between supply and demand of fuel media.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Australia exported A $64 billion worth of coal in 2019. Japan is Australia’s biggest customer, accounting for 27% of total coal exports (worth A $17 billion). China is second, accounting for 21 per cent of coal exports (worth $13.7bn). India is in third place, accounting for 16 per cent of coal exports (worth $10.5bn).
‘China is a big coal producer,’ Ms. Zhang said. ‘The biggest source of coal for China is still from within China, such as the Fushun coal mine in northeast China.’ The Communist Party has sanctioned Australia because China is a major market for Australia, but Australia is not a major supplier of coal to China. With anti-communist sentiment running high around the world, it is natural to blame the communist Party for China’s power shortage, but that is not the real factor.
Brownouts are a man-made disaster for two reasons
Zhang explained that China is facing a power rationing crisis mainly because of “imbalance between supply and demand caused by planned economy” and “political liquidation”.
The crisis is related to China’s energy transformation, energy conservation and carbon reduction in recent years. He argues that the communist Party’s 13th Five-Year Plan is drawing to a close, and that the green GDP target must be met to make the transition to the 14th five-year plan, thus limiting coal miners’ production. However, the price of media and electricity in China is determined by the government, not by the open and free market. Instead, the market is regulated by human beings as a plan to achieve the goal, thus creating a mismatch between supply and demand. Coupled with the policy of “the state advances and the private sector Withers” in recent years, the state has become more interventionist and the market economy, prices and supply and demand have become so dysfunctional that the result has been a market collapse, as the Party has always done.
“South coal to north” private enterprises in the south become the target of the operation
The outside world noted that most of the power shortages and brownouts this time are in the more developed provinces in the southeast.
According to Zhang, this is a political conspiracy. The most developed places in China are Yiwu, Ningbo, Wenzhou and other places in Zhejiang province. In the past, private enterprises developed most vigorously in China. Zhejiang, China’s economic pioneer and richest province, has been among the hardest hit by the power cuts.
Yiwu, Zhejiang province, has the title of “world capital of small commodities” and is an important town of commodity manufacturing. According to media reports, yiwu is not only shutting down all street lights at night, but also forcing factories to cut operating hours by 80 percent by the end of 2020.
In the past, the planned economy of the Communist Party of China had the policies of “south-to-North gas transmission” and “South-to-North water Diversion”. Zhang said it was now “sending coal from the south to the north”. In the early days of reform and opening up, deng Xiaoping, the former leader of the Communist Party, stressed the need to allow some people and regions to become rich first, so that economic development would move from the south to the north and from the East to the west. Now these newly rich regions and private companies are the targets of Beijing’s top brass.
In the past, he said, the booming areas were in the Yangtze River Delta and the southern special economic zones. The Communist Party is now putting pressure on places that have become rich first to supply limited media to the north, leading to power cuts in Zhejiang, Hunan and other provinces.
According to Zhang, the Communist Party is trying to use restrictions on coal to save Zhao, not only by draining money from private companies, but also by shifting the focus of the epidemic.
This is a particularly cold period in the middle of a severe winter in China. Coupled with the precipitous impact of the epidemic, not only many industrial and commercial institutions have also encountered difficulties, and the lives of the people have been severely affected. But in the Eyes of the Communist Party, the economy must serve politics, so the lack of electricity and the suspension of power supply have hidden political considerations, Mr. Zhang said. This blackout crisis is a man-made disaster.
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