China turns off lights in ‘Christmas town’ as officials rush to meet energy targets

China turns off lights in ‘Christmas town’ as officials rush to meet energy targets

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But production almost stopped in mid-December, when local officials turned off the lights.

Ma Hairu, who works for a manufacturer that makes paper decorations for Christmas and New Year, said his factory was struggling to meet demand because they could only work part time. “We have a lot of orders, but we don’t have enough time to place them,” he said.

Officials in China’s Zhejiang province are rushing to meet the five-year energy consumption targets set by the central government that are due to expire on December 31. Earlier this month, a local directive instructed companies to stop the elevators below the third floor and use only heating when outside temperatures dropped below 3 degrees Celsius (37 degrees Fahrenheit).

“There is no shortage of electricity [in Zhejiang]. Some parts of the province have taken measures to restrict the use of electricity to save energy and reduce emissions, “said Zhao Chenxin, secretary general of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), on Monday.

The effort to reduce energy consumption has disrupted millions of lives. In Yiwu, a city of one million people, heating was turned off in offices, shopping malls, schools and hospitals, despite daytime temperatures of around 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit).

Even the street lights went out, leaving drivers and pedestrians fumbling in the dark, according to local residents and government notices. Heating was also restricted in the neighboring city of Wenzhou, home to over 9 million people, according to the local government.
China needs an economic revolution to fulfill Xi's ambitious climate agenda

Zhejiang’s sharp cut in electricity consumption highlights the strength and pitfalls of China’s political system. While the Communist Party can make ambitious promises to cut carbon emissions, vigorous implementation of targets can come at a cost to the people they should benefit from.

“A difficult year”

The power restriction in Yiwu first came to attention last week, when photos and videos of dark streets started circulating on Chinese social media.
On Weibo, a Twitter-like platform in China, Yiwu residents complained that street lamps were turned off and had to drive home in the dark amid traffic chaos. The subject quickly gained momentum, attracting 120 million views on Wednesday and thousands of comments.
Yiwu residents drive in the dark while street lights are turned off to save energy.

Some accused the Yiwu government of sacrificing public security to check a box on a political bulletin.

After the online reaction, employees turned some lights back on. “The lights were off for just a few days. Most of them have been turned on now,” a government hotline operator told CNN on Wednesday.

But other restrictions remain in place. Yin Mingfei, a cafe manager at a shopping mall in the city’s central business district, said the heating had been turned off almost two weeks ago and that the electronic advertising billboards and escalators were not working.

A receptionist at Yiwu Central Hospital said the heating in the common areas had been turned off and that she had to put on extra layers of clothing to keep warm. At Weibo, office workers complained of tremors at their desks.

The city’s factories and workshops, whose business already suffered from the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, were ordered to reduce or stop production at a time of flooding orders.

Yiwu has earned the reputation of Santa Claus "real" workshop to produce many of the world's Christmas decorations.

December would have been the busiest time of the year for Liu Lei, who runs a small workshop with his wife in a suburb of Yiwu, making red envelopes for the Lunar New Year. But he was ordered to work two days, two days off until the end of the year to save energy.

“Of course the impact [on my business] It is huge. Red envelope orders are coming, but I can’t do enough, “said Liu.” So, I had to refuse some. “

Goal-oriented political culture

Similar conflicts have occurred in the past – on a much larger scale and for many more months. In 2010, the last year of China’s 11th five-year plan, Zhejiang and more than half a dozen other provinces implemented measures to restrict electricity use.

Some started as early as July of that year, limiting or stopping production in energy-consuming factories and banning air conditioning in offices and schools, according to media reports at the time.
Since coming to power, Chinese President Xi Jinping has waged a “war on pollution”, doubling efforts to divert the country from its dependence on coal, which in 2019 still accounted for almost 60% of China’s energy consumption. More recently, the president made an ambitious promise that China would become carbon neutral by 2060.
Beijing, the capital of China, is often shrouded in heavy winter pollution.
But such well-intentioned efforts sometimes inflict suffering due to poor planning and aggressive implementations. In 2017, a major retrofit campaign to shift winter heating in northern China from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas left some residents and villagers shaking in freezing temperatures, as local authorities banned coal before the furnaces a were installed correctly or the gas supply was stabilized.

“This is common in China. It is the result of a goal-oriented political culture,” said Trey McArver, a partner at Beijing-based consultancy Trivium.

Without democratic elections, most Chinese officials move up the political career in a performance-based assessment system, in which the goals of economic growth, social stability and, increasingly, environmental protection play an important role in their chances of promotion.

Under Xi’s authoritarian regime, local authorities are placed under even more pressure – filtered from the central government – to meet Beijing’s political goals, such as those set out in the country’s five-year plans.

Smoke waves come from a large steel plant in Inner Mongolia, China.
In September, Inner Mongolia officials were summoned by the NDRC to discuss the “serious problems” faced by their energy saving situation, after their energy consumption and intensity exceeded the limits set out in the 13th five-year plan.

The five-year plans are a legacy of China’s command economy during the Mao era. These high-level policy plans set the country’s social and economic development goals for the next period. The 13th five-year plan covers 2016 to 2020.

Competing targets

Zhejiang must cut energy intensity – the amount of energy needed to produce per unit of economic production – by 17% compared to 2015 levels, according to a draft of the 13th five-year energy saving plan launched by the State Council of China.

The province can only consume the equivalent of 23.8 million tons of coal above 2015 to 2020 levels, however, there are indications that it was using a lot.

According to a notice issued by the Zhejiang Provincial Development and Reform Commission in 2019, Zhejiang consumed 87% of its extra energy quota during the first three years of the plan.
In October, the central government sent a team of investigators to Zhejiang to assess its use. The team instructed Zhejiang to “do its best” to meet its goals, according to the Zhejiang Provincial Development and Reform Commission.

The problem with the goals is that there are often more than one for the authorities to meet and are not always complementary, said McArver, the consultant. “The reason why there is a struggle to meet these goals here in the end is because the local authorities have mainly focused on other goals as of now,” he said, such as growth in GDP, employment and government revenues.

China's steel production increased after the coronavirus was blocked.

The outages due to the coronavirus initially helped emissions targets, analysts say, but the rush to revive the economy has delayed it. China’s rapid economic recovery after the pandemic was heavily based on heavy energy-intensive industries, said Li Shuo, a senior climate policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia.

An increase in steel production contributed to a recovery in China’s carbon emissions after a fall during the coronavirus blockade, Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Energy and Clean Air Research Center, wrote in an analysis.

For manufacturers in Yiwu, there was also a recovery in production, after an increase in orders after the summer. But it was short-lived.

Ma, who makes and sells festive decorations, said it was a particularly difficult year for businesses, first because of the pandemic and now because of electricity restrictions.

“We used to have a revenue of more than one million yuan ($ 150,000), but with all the disruptions this year, we really don’t know how much we can make,” he said.

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