98 Chinese Rivers Surge Above Flood Warning Levels | China In Focus

Welcome to China in Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer, our top story. A dramatic rescue as record flooding hits southern China. A whopping 98 rivers have swelled past their warning levels and the water is still rising. Officials say the situation will soon get worse. Does the U.S. Defense Department know where its money has gone? A report is saying no and that the agency failed to keep adequate track of its funds going to Chinese research labs. Some of those labs are home to dangerous forms of virus research. Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubling down on the China threat. He's calling out Beijing's biggest infrastructure outreach project, the Belt and Road Initiative. And a Chinese rocket mistaken launched over the weekend, ending in a crash plus an explosion that sparked a fire. Record flooding is plaguing China this season. Torrential rain has caused 98 rivers in the country to exceed their overflow warning levels as of Monday and authorities are warning that it's about to get worse. The near 100 rivers are spread out across three major river basins in southern China and more rain is already on the way. Forecasters say the downpour will continue through Tuesday and Wednesday. In Anhui, over 190,000 residents have been evacuated following alerts that local rivers surged above warning levels and continued to rise. Media reports say flooding in certain rivers is expected to last until mid-July. The warning comes as parts of southern China are already reeling from massive flooding. Provinces that are hit the hardest, Hunan, Guizhou and Jiangxi, over one million have been affected by the flooding in Jiangxi alone. In Guizhou, floodwaters have submerged trees and solar panels. One house was carried away by the murky current. Power is out in two-thirds of a local town. In Hunan, a video clip shows a resident trapped by floodwaters. In another clip, a man on a rescue boat threw a rope to a man drowning. The latter got a hold of a stick extended from the rescue boat and appeared to swim towards safety. In another city in Hunan, a mudslide destroyed a house and toppled trees, even carrying a few of those trees downstream. Elsewhere in the province, over 100,000 have been evacuated. Some schools have suspended classes. Authorities expect heavy rain in central and Shocking revelations involving U.S. defense spending. According to an audit by the Inspector General of the Pentagon, the U.S. Defense Department did not keep adequate track of its funds going to Chinese research labs. In other words, the Pentagon does not know if it's funding potentially catastrophic biological research in China, like research on coronaviruses at the To learn more about how concerning this is and what can be done to boost transparency, Kevin Hogan with NDD's Good Morning spoke with Steve Yates. He's a former White House Deputy National Security Advisor and the chair of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute. Well, it's kind of a stunning admission. It's one of those things where maybe it's a sure sign you have too much money if you can't tell where all of it is going, but you'd think if you were going to put priority, you would maximum put priority on making sure that it's not going to harmful research that can hurt other people and also not go to adversaries that have proven willing to hurt the United States. That's extremely disappointing finding and certainly much more oversight and accountability is required. Congress has been trying to prevent funding for gain-of-function research to going to adversaries like China, and this Inspector General report just underscores that. So what needs to be done to bring more transparency to the Defense Department to ensure that the U.S. is not funding any harmful research in China? Well, first and foremost, I think there's a process issue in Congress where a lot of these appropriations and bills are just so big and voluminous that normal human beings don't read through all of them. And so we're going to have to find ways to make sure that because they're spending too much money on too many things, they're not accidentally programming things that are obvious problems. The other is that there should be a deliberate policy in place. Given what happened with COVID-19, there should be no funding for research in China unless there is an affirmative certification that it won't go to these harmful purposes. That will be problematic due to lack of transparency in China. So for the time being, no money for research in China. Well, Stephen, on that note, here's what the Senior Vice President of the White Coat Waste Project said. The DoD is shipping U.S. tax dollars to places like China. It's being involved in these institutions that are connected to the CCP and the PLA, and then there's no oversight for the money when it gets there. Is there any solution to that? Yeah, there really isn't a solution when you're dealing with a very non-transparent country. And other than to say, we're not going to send money from, say, our defense budget, which should be sensitive to anyone, unless we can give an affirmative whitelist to who it's going to and how it's being used. And if we don't have that kind of transparency and accountability, then no funding. It should be fairly simple. And there are alternatives. We can do this research with friendlier allies and others who abide by normal protocols for transparency and accountability. It doesn't need to go to China. So why would any defense spending go to China in the first place? My assumption is because it was cost effective. I put in air quotes. And perhaps they thought that Chinese researchers were willing to push the horizons on research that others might find too risky or as more regulated in their government and economic system. And so in some ways, the lack of ethics and accountability in China might have been seen as attractive to those who were pushing the horizons and maybe sensibilities of what we should be doing in this area of research. Well, thank you for bringing awareness to this topic. Steve Yates, former White House Deputy National Security Advisor. My pleasure. Thank you. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is doubling down on the Chinese regime's threat. He spoke to the Brookings Institute just one week ahead of the 75th NATO summit in Washington. NTD's Washington correspondent Jack Bradley has more from the State Department. Secretary Blinken called out the Chinese regime for supplying Russia with what it needs to carry out its war with Ukraine. This includes 70 percent of Russia's machine tools and 90 percent of its microelectronics, which are used to make missiles and tanks. For Europe, that means that one of the arguably the biggest security threat that they face, the biggest since the end of the Cold War, China's playing a role in fueling that. Secretary Blinken also called out the fentanyl that's sourced in China. An April report by the House Select Committee on the CCP found that the Chinese regime directly subsidizes the manufacturing and export of fentanyl precursor chemicals. That's often mixed in or disguised as other opioids, so the user doesn't even know that they're taking a fatal dose. The number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 49 is fentanyl. Secretary Blinken also pointed to the Chinese regime's Belt and Road Initiative, which is a series of infrastructure projects in over 100 different countries, but it has saddled many of those countries with billions in debt and failed projects. As long as it's investment, it's the kind of investment that creates a race to the top, not a race to the bottom, not piling debt on country after country, not bringing in your own workers to build a project, not doing something that turns out to have really shoddy standards so that it falls apart in a few years, not ignoring the environment, not ignoring the rights of workers. When it comes to China, there is a fusion between the military and civilian sectors, and anything that quote-unquote civilian investment does automatically becomes the property of the state and the property of the military. And last week, the State Department released its annual Trafficking in Persons Report, which cited concerns of human trafficking at these Belt and Road projects. Reporting from Washington, D.C., Jack Bradley, NTD News. A mistaken rocket launch in China lit up the sky over the weekend. The craft was accidentally launched during a test and later crashed in central China on Sunday. The rocket exploded, causing a fire. The company that owns the rocket says that there were no casualties, but Beijing does have a history of under-reporting casualty information. NTD can't independently confirm if that's true. The first stage of the rocket detached from its test bench and crashed in hilly areas a mile away. A rocket has several stages. After the fuel in the first stage is exhausted, the first stage falls, and the second stage ignites to keep the rocket moving. This explosion follows another rocket incident that happened last week. Video clips circulating online appear to show a rocket booster crashing into a Chinese village. In a separate video, large pieces of debris appear scattered near a resident's home. Some speculate the components came from a Chinese satellite. U.S. officials have long criticized the communist regime over its handling of rocket debris. Zooming in on China's accidental rocket launch, a major question is rising. Could Beijing accidentally launch a missile that's able to reach the United States? We spoke to Rick Fisher, senior fellow of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, for details. When it comes to this Chinese rocket that accidentally launched, China also has a lot of missiles with reports saying some of them could hit the continental U.S. Could we see something similar where one of those is accidentally launched towards the U.S.? If so, can the U.S. block that? Well, the space launch vehicle first stage, that was part of the recent accident, very likely could not reach orbit and thus could not reach the United States. So the Americans are safe from that kind of accident. Now, on the moon, the Americans will be vulnerable to Chinese planned accidents. The Chinese moon landing vehicle will enter lunar orbit with two stages, its landing vehicle that will take people to the surface of the moon, and then a booster vehicle, a booster vehicle that will be used to lower the altitude of the landing vehicle. And once it has accomplished that mission, the booster vehicle separates from the landing vehicle and then crashes into the moon. That will be a real threat to American moon bases and the moon bases of our allies. Speaking of the moon, China's Chang'e-6 lunar module did just collect samples from the dark side of the moon. This is a move in which Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls a key milestone for China's, quote, eternal dream. Given that, how do these two superpowers, the U.S. and China, compare when it comes to this space race? Well, it's a very close race at this point, Tiffany. The Americans could very quickly pull into the lead if the Starship is successful, if the Starship becomes a true 100-ton conveyance. However, China does have a real control over the American space program in terms of creating conflicts on Earth. For example, the October 7, 2023 Hamas war against Israel was essentially made in China. It was Chinese economic and military technology support that allowed Iran to turn Hamas into an offensive force, into a proxy. And Iran trained and even led the Hamas war. Brutal, nasty, just awful, awful war. And Iran has prepared Hezbollah to the north of Israel to conduct an even more devastating war. If the United States were drawn into this war, or drawn into a war that China could start against Taiwan, or a war that China has facilitated, let's say, on the Korean Peninsula by turning North Korea into a nuclear missile power, all of this would immediately affect the funding of the American space program, one yuan. They will want to keep the lead. They will want to take advantage of any slowing down of the American space program because their goal is hegemony, hegemony over the Earth. Quite concerning indeed, Rick Fisher. Thank you so much for your time. Tiffany, thank you. That's all for today's China In Focus on YouTube. We're now sharing a shortened version of our program here after being demonetized for three years. If you'd like to support us, consider donating. Find us at donorbox.org slash china-in-focus or subscribe to our partner platform Epic TV, where you can watch our full episodes. Just click the link down below. Here's what to look out for in our second half. Starting Monday, foreigners entering China's borders could have their phones and other devices confiscated for spot checking. China says the rule is to protect its national security, but officials elsewhere in the world point to Beijing's vague definitions. A 17-year-old Chinese athlete is dead after a sudden collapse. His condition deteriorated mid-match during an international badminton tournament. Now questions are rising about why the on-site medical team was delayed in responding. Empty shopping malls seen across China. Residents in different parts of the country tell NTD that the economy remains grim. More on that after the break here on China In Focus. Thanks for watching China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. See you tomorrow.