Half of Guizhou engulfed in flame/US lobby firms drop Chinese companies

This is perhaps the perfect video to describe China today. Raging fire in the background, old grannies dancing like nobody's business. Meanwhile, U.S. lobbying firms are dropping Chinese companies with ties to the military or the government like hot potatoes. And this 5-10 years ago wasn't like it. So find out the reason why today. Welcome to China Insider, I'm David Zhang. This is Guizhou province, situated in southern China. Its mountainous landscape covering 90% of the province. Half of it is now consumed by the raging fire. And this is a mapping of all of the fire spots that are across the province. Now, Guizhou is the size of Honduras or about 144 New York cities. And half of that is now burning. It's also spreading to nearby provinces to the south as well as to the west. While rescue effort is underway, this censorship and suppression of information has added to the pressure of rescue. The devastation is real. In this video, livestock are ended in the fire for a province that relies on rural country farming and agriculture. This is not the way they want things to go for the new year. This video shows the height in which the fire burns, taller than the trees. People in the video look hopeless as they escape the raging fire. By some information, we now know that the fire started on Chinese New Year rather than recently, and this was February 10th. Many people didn't know about the fire until February 18th, and that was only because videos finally surfaced from Chinese social media. Throughout this whole time, Chinese internet censors have kept the information away from China's hot search topics and focused on celebrity scandals instead. This is very typical. They use things like social scandals or celebrity scandals to divert attention from real issues in China. And they've been given directives for the Chinese New Year to keep all negative information out of people's sight online. Today, most people get their news on Weibo and that's where the trending search terms basically generate the internet directions for the day. People were very angry to learn the fact that what dominated the trending topics online was a story about a 16-year-old boy having a sex scandal with his teacher rather than real issues like this in China. Many people were left shocked that this was something that just recently happened on February 18th when in fact it's been happening for half a month now. This lack of information now people are using propaganda messages to try to divert attention once again, saying that it's the Japanese government doing this because they're somehow jealous of the herbal medicine industry in the province so they burned it down. That's absolutely ridiculous. The Japanese government has no reason to do that. They're also saying that the northern temperature drop as well as snowfall is because of a US weather weapon, which again is also ridiculous. But that's Chinese propaganda. It's also been turned to an all-time high. The Global Times finally published an article on this year's fire in Guizhou, but then looking back at their record, when it was the Hawaiian fire, they actually published 20-plus articles on it, which is interesting considering that every time there's a California fire or the Hawaiian fire last year, it's all over the news in the US and the United States as well as other countries, but then when a massive fire like this is happening in southern China, China seems to not want to talk about it. Rescue effort according to local authorities included nearly 10,000 people across various townships, county levels, and rural areas, but the cause of the wildfire is still unknown. Some believe that it's caused by New Year celebration, including burning papers, including farm plow burning, or something related to just use of fire in general to cook in the rural countryside. But still, it doesn't explain how the massive scale of fire keeps burning across different areas. Some people speculate it could be a retaliation against the government, but just based on the number of disasters that have struck since the New Year period began, it's very interesting and it brings a lot of pain to different areas. We've actually been covering a lot of these disasters recently, as you've seen in my previous videos, so it's unlikely that people are doing this deliberately. They have arrested some so-called arsonists or people who have caused major problems with the fire in this province, but we haven't seen the full investigations into it yet. But typically, the CCP, like this time, they've issued directives to the police station who have sent out messages saying that don't spread the information about the fire, don't film videos, don't panic, right? So we saw these ladies just dancing in front of the fire, but words are getting around still. The videos show just this horror started by the fire, and this is not something that they can cover up anymore. The reason is very simple why they do this. They're very scared for destabilizing because this brings again the blames to the Chinese government, the local government, and it will shift the public opinion. During the Chinese New Year, today is actually the Lantern Festival Day, so it marks the end day for the celebration for the Chinese New Year. During this whole time, the CCP gave directives to the Chinese internet censors to not allow any negative information to flood the internet space, basically, to keep the so-called festivity going. So events like this massive fire, the massive crash in other parts of China, the frozen roads, the snow, the sudden temperature drop, all of these things get covered up. Now, it's very possible that the winter dryness also contributes to the spread of the fire. Now, what social pressure had this event made public add to the rescue efforts and so on? Definitely. Even if the Chinese government tries to cover it up, if more people across the country had known about it, there will be aid, voluntary fire rescue, there will be supports from other countries, and so definitely would have helped with stopping the forest fire. But again, that's not the priority of the government. Their priority is to keep information shut and suppressed rather than allowing countries to help them or people to help them. And so that's very typically the way they do so to maintain stability over everything else. All right, let's look at another development, another story. So Chinese companies like ByteDance, which, you know, TikTok in the United States, you know, you have Huawei or Xiaomi or DGI, whoever, these companies, they hire American lobbying firms to try to get them to talk to lawmakers to help them stay in the country. Now, these companies are often tied to either the Chinese military, the Chinese government, or both. And so many of these are actually on the Pentagon's list for entities with ties to the Chinese military. Now, something interesting is happening. So US lobbying firms, multiple of these, they've dropped some of these companies this week. For example, HeSai Group, a Chinese LiDAR tech company, was dropped by both Atkin Gump, as well as Brunstein, Hayat, Farber, Shrek. Now, Atkin Gump also dropped Xiaomi, who is the Chinese phone maker. And then looking at DGI, the Chinese drone maker, and Complete Genomics, they were both dropped by Vogel. And then there are also, of course, they have ties to the Chinese military specifically because of something called the civil-military fusion, which basically allows civilian technology to be used in a military sense and vice versa. So they're dual use. And so Chinese companies, despite there being civilian companies, actually work to develop technologies used in the military sense. And this actually comes because US lawmakers want to ban these lobbying firms who still have these clients from China from entering their offices. So for them to not lose any more business in the United States, they're dropping the Chinese clients. But actually, I think this is a bigger trend going forward. We're going to see more and more firms or even different sectors, right? You have the K Street lobbying firm in DC, you have Wall Street, you have different trade sectors. You're going to see more firms start to sort of decouple from their Chinese counterparts or Chinese clients because this is basically the trend of the day. And the Wall Street case is very apparent. They're very interest-driven. So where they see the money goes, they go, right? And recently, foreign investment is down 82% in China. And that's a big reason because Wall Street has no more interest in China. And we see it now with the money-hungry K Street as well. They're starting to drop these Chinese clients. And it seems like this is going to be more and more apparent going forward. These people, you know, China's basically lost the throne of attractiveness for foreign investors. But it wasn't like this 10 years ago or 15 years ago, right? McKinsey & Company, which is a US-based consulting management firm, the head of it, Bob Sturfos, in 2020, testified to Congress saying that the Chinese government wasn't on their client list. Now, that's a lie because the Financial Times has found that one of their think tanks that's tied to McKinsey & Company actually did work for the Chinese government developing something called a 5-year plan back in 2015. So the 5-year plan, which is basically a block of the goal setting for the CCP for this 5 years, right? So back in 2015, something called Made in China 2025 was the headline of it. And that's the one where McKinsey & Company helped to contribute to the report. And this all took place in a book called Urban China Initiatives, which let me just show you here. It has the foreword by one of McKinsey's most senior partners in China. And it also draws on work by McKinsey's in-house research arm. And that formed the Chinese government's research for its 13th 5-year plan, which covers 2016 to 2020. So yes, not only did McKinsey's head lie to the American people in Congress, they've been doing the bidding, helping the CCP, the number one enemy of the United States, develop a long-term goal to usurp the United States. So now US lawmakers want McKinsey off of US federal contracts. And rightly so, because who knows if they're still doing work for the Chinese government or not, but the interest was there. And also looking at another firm called IDG Capital, which is tied to Jim Breyer, the husband of the late Angela Chao, who died recently. IDG Capital has been listed by Pentagon as the only venture capital firm in China to be tied to the Chinese military. So these American entrepreneurs are very interest-driven. This was the highlight of the US-China relations before 2016, the pre-Trump era. It was just all about moneymaking with China. It was never about anything else. So at the expense of that, of course, now they're coming back to bite them in the butt because all of their investments in China are being wiped out and China is no longer investable. So will they learn though? Probably not because they're just waiting for another moment or another market, maybe back to China once things are better. But the point is that the trend going forward is moving away from China, whereas the trend back in the days was to go where the interest was, and that was China. So that's it today for the episode on China Insider. If you enjoyed the content, leave a like, comment below your thoughts on these two topics today, and subscribe to our channel. Until next time, bye-bye.