News have emerged from China that in order to host the Beijing Winter Olympics, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has directed more than 2 million cubic metres of water to create artificial snow, report Bloomberg .
The 2022, Beijing Winter Olympics will be the first to rely completely on man-made powder/snow and it remains to be seen how effective it will be as China is working to convert the Zhangjiakou region into the Alps.
The upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics will be held at two sites – Yanqing and Zhangjiakou and both these places hardly receive any snowfall and that is why Beijing is diverting around 10 percent of consumable water from a district in Zhangjiakou, which is an already arid region and people in this area rely on agriculture for a livelihood.
According to China Water Risk, an environmental group based in Hong Kong, where the Communist regime has gone out of its way to supress freedom of speech, more than half of Zhangjiakou is “highly water-stressed” and since 2015, China has been investing heavily to turn the agricultural and rural Zhangjiakou into a tourist hub.
According to Carmen de Jong, a geographer at the University of Strasbourg, “There is bound to be some impacts in a region where there is nearly no water in the winter. For half a year, during the snow sports season, the water stays away from the natural ecosystem.”
Also, there are risks when the fake snow will melt, it could be harmful to the environment and such a large scale energy-intensive process could spew tons of planet-warming gases.
China claims that it wants to lift the region’s 430,000 residents out of poverty and over the years Zhangjiakou has witnessed the construction of seven upscale ski resorts and the region receives around 3 million skiers per year.
However, the Chinese Communist Party’s goal, in reality, skewred and the hosting of the Winter Olympics is less to do with poverty alleviation and more to show China’s ‘glory’ to the world.
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