Why Does Xi Jinping Suddenly Talk About “Don’t Waste Food”? Is a Food Crisis Looming in China? Will Xi Jinping Be Ousted?
Hello, everyone! Welcome to “Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng”.
Recently after the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP’s head Xi Jinping gave “an important instruction” about stopping food waste, the CCP’s state media has made a lot of fanfare about it. What does this mean?
Also, when more than half of China is suffering very bad flooding situations, why didn’t Xi Jinping go to the affected areas to lead the disaster relief efforts, but went instead to northeast China to inspect the cornfields ? Is it really because a food crisis is looming in China? Will China go back to a food rationing system like before? How was life under the rationing system?
Also, as it seems that the CCP’s mysterious annual “Beidaihe Meeting” has finished, what has happened at the meeting? Are the rumors about recent coups in Beijing and Shanghai real? Will Xi Jinping be ousted?
Today I will talk about all these issues.
No More Food Wasting
On August 11, the CCP’s mouthpiece Xinhua, published an article titled “Xi Jinping Gives Key Instructions to stop food and beverage waste”. In this article, Xi quoted a famous Chinese poem, “Who knows that of our meal in the dish, every grain comes after hard toil?” He said that the amount of food that goes to waste in the country is “shocking and distressing”, “We should still maintain a sense of crisis about food security. The impact of this year’s Covid-19 pandemic has sounded the alarm.”
Xi also called for more efforts to strengthen legislation and supervision and establish a long-term mechanism that will resolutely stop food wasting.
Immediately a "Clean Plate Campaign" was launched nationwide. Wuhan Catering Industry Association urged restaurants in the city to limit the number of dishes served to diners - implementing a system where groups must order one dish less than the number of diners.
In other words, under this so-called "N-1" system , a group of 10 people can only order 9 dishes.
Following Wuhan’s "N-1" system, Liaoning province started to promote “N-2”, which means 10 people can only order dishes for 8.
Universities throughout China all put up slogans, such as “The Food, Hey, Tastes So Good! Saving Food, Hey, Feels So Wonderful!” “Empty Your Plates, Don’t Be Wasteful Boys and Girls”, “The Tiny Rice Grain Is Patting You, Please Don’t Waste Me.”
Short-video and social media platforms said they will punish users seen to be wasting food in their broadcasts, cracking down on so-called “big stomach kings”.
Xi Jinping: “I Care Very Much About Food Security”
Prior to these events, on July 24, after being absent from the public eye for quite some time, and amidst severe flooding situations in 27 provinces, Xi Jinping suddenly appeared in Jilin Province and visited cornfields there.
During this inspection, Xi Jinping said, "I care very much about grain production and food security,” and he demanded that Jilin make efforts to ensure food security, accelerate the transformation of agricultural development, and provide more experience in developing modern agriculture.
You know, in China, when the CCP and the CCP’s propaganda machine start to stress on something, or talk about how we must do well on something, it is always a sign that huge problems must have already existed in this area. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have talked about it at all.
So as soon as Xi Jinping stressed “food security”, and even mentioned about passing laws to punish food waste, people immediately viewed it as a sign that a food crisis must be looming in China.
A Year of Disasters
Is there hard evidence?
On August 12, China’s State Administration of Grain and Materials Reserve officially reported that as of August 5, wheat production in the main producing areas was about 43 million tons, a decrease of 9 million tons compared to last year. This report quickly sparked a lot of public discussion, as worries about wheat and rice production reduction has been spread for quite a while now.
I believe that this kind of figure is nothing surprising for people who have been following situations in China closely this year. So many natural and man-made disasters have happened.
Actually, a friend of mine living in New York told me that this year, in Jiangsu province, which is one of the most important grain-producing provinces, the summer wheat harvest was only ⅔ of the average level. He knows this because his family runs a food business in Jiangsu.
According to popular Chinese financial analyst Caijinglengyan, in addition to the impact of epidemics on spring planting and hailstorms in the northeast and other regions, the northern drought is also serious, wheat production in Henan, Shandong and Anhui province generally reduced, some places by about 20-30%. This number is in line with what my friend told me.
Caijinglengyan also mentioned that in previous years, after harvesting wheat, farmers directly transported it to the flour mill to sell or store it there. But this year, most farmers stored wheat at their homes instead.
In addition to wheat, the floods that are now spreading across China's 27 southeastern provinces pose a huge threat to rice production, as the southeast is the main rice-producing area in China. This year's persistent floods and high water levels have wiped out the rice crop in many major rice-producing areas.
In particular, areas such as the Poyang Lake basin and the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, such as the Jianghan Plain, are likely to see a significant reduction in rice production this year.
Apart from drought and floods, locust swarms have also occurred in Yunnan, Guangxi and Hunan province this year, coupled with disasters such as the "food killer" or meadow moths. China's food supply may have already hit the red line. This year's widespread reduction in grain production will surely happen.
Problematic Grain Reserves
In ancient China, if there was a year of disaster, the government would open the granary and release the grain reserves.
However, China's current grain reserves situation is very worrying.
On July 12 this year, a woman released a video of her inspecting the granary of the China National Grain Reserve Group Corporation at Qinggan County in Heilongjiang Province.
As one can see in her video, all the corn grains in the granary are moldy. She says the corn smells terrible and can be crushed with a finger. She also says that 20 centimeters thick of "sifted matter" were mixed in the corn grains that were sold to her.
After this video was released, the China National Grain Reserve Group Corporation refused to admit that there was a quality problem with their reserves. Instead, they issued a new regulation, saying that in the future, nobody is allowed to go into the granary with a cell phone or other cameras.
If you search with the word “granary” in Chinese on Chinese social media platforms, you can find a lot of videos showing granaries on fire, such as this one showing a granary in Shanghai on fire on Dec. 13, 2019. This one is also in Shanghai, on July 5 this year. This one is at Duyun City in Guizhou province on July 1 this year. This one is in Ningyuan County of Hunan Province in March this year.
Why did all these granaries catch on fire? The theory is, because there was no more grain, or not enough grain inside them. So officials set them on fire to hide the problems.
Therefore, even the food authorities may claim that China has this much grain reserve according to the numbers they gather from local food officials, who knows how many of the granaries are actually empty, or full of moldy grains?
Local Authorities Bracing for A Food Shortage
A relative of my friend in New York is a former CCP official in the food management system in Jiangsu province. This relative is now running his own grain company. Ten of his granaries are rented by local food authorities for official grain reserves. He has 11 more granaries for his own company.
My friend said that he learned from this relative that the actual official grain reserves could only be half of what is reported.
He also said that in previous years, his relative sold grains to Shenzhen to make more money, as the price in Shenzhen was higher. But this year, local authorities did not allow this relative to sell grain to Shenzhen any more. Instead, they bought all grains reserved in 10 out of his 11 granaries. His relative only has one granary left for his own use. This indicates that local authorities are preparing for future food shortage.
Another obvious sign is this: In previous years, after some grain was reserved for more than two years, the quality was no longer good, as they were not taken good care of. This kind of old grain was usually sold to prisons for prisoners to eat, or to animal food processing plants to be made into food for animals.
However, this year, they have stopped doing this, which means, no more old grain was sold to make space for new grain. Everything has to be kept.
Importing Food Has Also Become a Challenge
The latest official news is, on August 17, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released a report and predicted that in the next five years, China could run short of 130 million tons of food.
We all know that China is a net food importer. Every year it imports over 1 trillion tons of food, and 80% of soybeans have to rely on imports.
This year, with the pandemic affecting many countries. Some countries have limited the export of food; and foreign currency reserve of China is also shrinking due to a variety of reasons. All these add additional challenges to China’s food security.
The “Supply and Marketing Cooperative” System
Another thing to take notice is, in recent years, the so-called “Supply and Marketing Cooperative” system from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s started to appear again in China.
What is “Supply and Marketing Cooperative”? It was the system adopted by the CCP before the so-called “reform and openess to the outside world” policy. Under this system, the government set the prices for everything, and bought and sold everything, too. There were no private companies or free markets.
According to Xinhua, 95% of small towns had resumed the “Supply and Marketing Cooperative” in 2018. There were altogether over 30K such “cooperatives” in China.
A National Rationing of Everything
Accompanying this system in the 1960s and 1970s was the national rationing of virtually everything.
I remember in my childhood, up until when I went to university in the 1980s, we had all sorts of vouchers for different things: Rice voucher to buy rice, flour voucher for flour, meat voucher, oil voucher, tofu voucher, sugar voucher, textile voucher...etc. Without a voucher, even if you had money, you couldn’t buy those things.
And how many of those things could we have?
I remember each person could have 0.2 kg, or about 0.44 pounds of pork and cooking oil per month. I have two younger sisters, so there were 5 people in our family.
So, for our entire family, each month we had only 1 kg, or 2.2 pounds of pork and cooking oil.
That’s why we seldom ate meat. Sometimes when we had sausages, each of us could have only 2 or 3 very thin slices, and those thin slices were put into our bowls. Inside our family, we also did rationing for everything.
That was how difficult life was in my childhood.
Even after I entered the university in 1984, we were still using food vouchers. I remember at that time, there were often some small traders sneaking into female students’ dormitories and yelling “Food voucher for socks! Food voucher for socks!” That means, we could exchange socks with food vouchers if we had any extra.
Will China Go Back to the Old Days?
Will China go back to those days? Talks about China going back to the planned economy have been going on for a while. With the international environment having changed dramatically for the CCP, and with the CCP faced with many challenges from all fronts, nothing is impossible.
As a matter of fact, many ordinary Chinese citizens have started to hoard food ever since the pandemic happened. The problem is, as we can hardly get any real numbers from the CCP’s official reports, it is very hard to estimate how bad the situation really is.
We can only hope, tragedy like the Great Chinese Famine in which 40 millions were starved to death won’t happen again.
But hard times seem very, very likely for the Chinese people who live in the CCP’s kingdom of lies, deceits, cover-ups and brutality.
What Has Happened at Beidaihe? Will Xi Jinping Be Ousted?
In our episode on August 6 about CCP’s slip going public, I talked about the CCP’s mysterious annual meeting at Beidaihe, in which the most important issues of the country are discussed and decided; and this Beidaihe meeting usually happens in late July to early August, but nobody knows the actual date, as the CCP never announces it.
This year, judging from the public appearance of the top CCP leaders, we have noticed that this year’s Beidaihe Meeting was longer than usual, has lasted for 2 weeks and has just finished.
Why do I say so?
Yesterday (August 17), Xinhua reported that Xi Jinping had sent a letter to congratulate a conference of the National Youth Federation, and that Wang Huning, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP, attended the opening ceremony. Wang Huning is regarded as the chief advisor of Xi Jinping.
On the same day, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang hosted a State Council executive meeting and talked about economic issues. As there are no photos or videos of this meeting, people assume that it was a virtual conference.
Anyway, the fact that both Xi Jinping and Li Kejiang started having activities let people believe that the Beidaihe Meeting has finally finished.
Why was this year’s Beidaihe Meeting longer than usual? It was said that the internal fighting had been very intense, as many CCP seniors were very unhappy with Xi Jinping’s handling of many things, including the trade war with the US and Hong Kong.
According to exiled Chinese billionaire and whistleblower Miles Guo, or Guo Wengui, on August 13, that was the date when the Beidaihe Meeting was still going on, there were two failed small scale coups in Beijing and Shanghai, and that Xi Jinping was very much frightened because of those attempts.
We have no idea how true this information is. From what we can see in Xinhua’s report, Xi Jinping still has his three titles on when he emerged again from the Beidaihe Meeting. What are his three titles? General Secretary of the CCP, which means he controls the party, Chinese President, which means he controls the country, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, which means he controls the army.
However, from the fact that both he and Li Keqiang didn’t personally, or physically, appear in the public events in Beijing, people think that they may not be staying in Beijing at all. Especially for Xi Jinping, he might feel that it is not safe for him to stay in Beijing.
Cai Xia, a former professor at CCP’s elite Central Party School, who was just expelled from the party yesterday (August 17) for openly criticizing Xi Jinping, said in an interview with Radio Free Asia that Xi Jinping is facing widespread opposition in his own party, and that getting rid of Xi Jinping has become a consensus within the party.
However, Cai Xia said that it is very difficult to rely on the internal CCP force to replace Xi Jinping, as Xi had broken up the whole party and there was no space or atmosphere for normal exchange of views among party members. So it was impossible for other CCP members to organize themselves to do something together.
By the way, Cai Xia also said that she felt honored to be expelled from the CCP, as she has no intention to associate with the CCP “mafia”, and is glad to be back in the ranks of common folks.
That’s all for today. Truth, no matter how inconvenient it is, does save lives. Please subscribe to my channel, share it with your friends and family, and check out my other videos.
Thank you. See you next time!
8/18/2020
***************
Truth Saves Lives. Subscribe and support! 真相能救命。請支持！
Subscribestar 會員頻道： https://bit.ly/3fEzeJB
YouTube 油管：http://bit.ly/2uBfJPr
GoFundme 衆籌：https://bit.ly/2zx6LVw
Patreon 網站：https://bit.ly/3cvBy3H
Paypal 捐款：http://paypal.me/JenniferZeng97
