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Reports and videos smuggled out of heavily flooded areas in Hebei, northeast China, this week indicate that villagers have spent much of their week defending their homes from Communist Party officials trying to flood them to redirect water away from Beijing and Xi Jinping’s pet project, the planned future metropolis of Xiong’an.
“Video clips of scuffles, lengthy altercations and clashes with police have emerged on social media in recent days,” Radio Free Asia (RFA) documented on Friday, “showing embattled rural residents facing off with officials who want to flood their homes and farmland to protect Beijing, as well as ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s pet project — Xiong’an New Area.”
China has experienced an enduring wave of civil disobedience and outright anti-communist protest for nearly a year, when nationwide protests against the country’s “zero-Covid” policy of large-scale city lockdowns and mass imprisonment of patients in quarantine camps erupted in November. The protests succeeded in forcing the government of genocidal communist dictator Xi Jinping to “optimize” the policy to end the widescale lockdowns in the immediate future. The human rights organization Freedom House documented over 2,000 “dissent events” in China attracting at least 29,000 participants between June 2022 and April 2023.
The flooding is a result of the devastation caused by Typhoon Doksuri, which has worked its way along the northeast coast of China, endangering not just the capital but heavily populated areas such as the city of Tianjin and Heilongjiang province. As of Thursday, Communist Party officials estimated that 1.23 million people nationwide had been evacuated from their homes to save them from flooding.
In Beijing, Communist Party leaders congratulated themselves for an allegedly swift response to the devastation this week. In Hebei, the province that surrounds the Beijing metropolitan area, Party officials have faced growing public outrage after openly encouraging the government to redirect water toward their communities to save Beijing, home to the nation’s most powerful elites.
The head of the Party in Hebei, Ni Yuefeng, wrote a message on social media this week stating that Zhuozhou, home to 600,000 people and one of Hebei’s most severely flooded areas, must “resolutely serve as a moat for the capital,” encouraging the deliberate flooding of his province to safeguard Beijing.
