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    China Power Outages Close Factories and Threaten Growth

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    High demand and soaring energy prices have forced some factories to shut down, adding further problems for already snarled global supply chains.DONGGUAN, China — Power cuts and even blackouts have slowed or closed factories across China in recent days, adding a new threat to the country’s slowing economy and potentially further snarling global supply chains ahead of the busy Christmas shopping season in the West.The outages have rippled across most of eastern China, where the bulk of the population lives and works. Some building managers have turned off elevators. Some municipal pumping stations have shut down, prompting one town to urge residents to store extra water for the next several months, though it later withdrew the advice.There are several reasons electricity is suddenly in short supply in much of China. More regions of the world are reopening after pandemic-induced lockdowns, greatly increasing demand for China’s electricity-hungry export factories.Export demand for aluminum, one of the most energy-intensive products, has been strong. Demand has also been robust for steel and cement, central to China’s vast construction programs.As electricity demand has risen, it has also pushed up the price of coal to generate that electricity. But Chinese regulators have not let utilities raise rates enough to cover the rising cost of coal. So the utilities have been slow to operate their power plants for more hours.In the city of Dongguan, a major manufacturing hub near Hong Kong, a shoe factory that employs 300 workers rented a generator last week for $10,000 a month to ensure that work could continue. Between the rental costs and the diesel fuel for powering it, electricity is now twice as expensive as when the factory was simply tapping the grid.“This year is the worst year since we opened the factory nearly 20 years ago,” said Jack Tang, the factory’s general manager. Economists predicted that production interruptions at Chinese factories would make it harder for many stores in the West to restock empty shelves and could contribute to inflation in the coming months.Three publicly traded Taiwanese electronics companies, including two suppliers to Apple and one to Tesla, issued statements on Sunday night warning that their factories were among those affected. Apple had no immediate comment, while Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.It is not clear how long the power crunch will last. Experts in China predicted that officials would compensate by steering electricity away from energy-intensive heavy industries like steel, cement and aluminum, and said that might fix the problem.State Grid, the government-run power distributor, said in a statement on Monday that it would guarantee supplies “and resolutely maintain the bottom line of people’s livelihoods, development and safety.”Still, nationwide power shortages have prompted economists to reduce their estimates for China’s growth this year. Nomura, a Japanese financial institution, cut its forecast for economic expansion in the last three months of this year to 3 percent, from 4.4 percent.A power generator at a shoe factory in Dongguan. The rental and fuel costs make electricity from the device twice as expensive as when the factory was simply tapping the grid.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesThe electricity shortage is starting to make supply chain problems worse. The sudden restart of the world economy has led to shortages of key components like computer chips and has helped provoke a mix-up in global shipping lines, putting in the wrong places too many containers and the ships that carry them.Power supplies are little different. Compared with last year, electricity demand is growing this year in China at nearly twice its usual annual pace. Swelling orders for the smartphones, appliances, exercise equipment and other manufactured goods that China’s factories churn out has driven the rise.China’s power problems are contributing in some part to higher prices elsewhere, like in Europe. Experts said a surge in prices in China had drawn energy distributors to send ships laden with liquefied natural gas to Chinese ports, leaving others to scurry for further sources.But the bulk of China’s power problems are unique to the country.Two-thirds of China’s electricity comes from burning coal, which Beijing is trying to curb to address climate change. Coal prices have surged along with demand. But because the government keeps electricity prices low, particularly in residential areas, use by homes and businesses has climbed regardless.Faced with losing more money with each additional ton of coal they burn, some power plants have closed for maintenance in recent weeks, saying this was needed for safety reasons. Many other power plants have been operating below full capacity, and have been leery of increasing generation when that would mean losing more money, said Lin Boqiang, dean of the China Institute for Energy Policy Studies at Xiamen University.A workshop producing shoe parts in Dongguan. Prices for the components have already increased 30 to 50 percent from last year.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesChina’s main economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, also ordered 20 large cities and provinces in late August to reduce energy consumption for the rest of the year. The regulators cited a need to make sure that the cities and provinces met full-year targets set by Beijing for their carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.Besides coal, hydroelectric dams supply much of the rest of China’s power, while wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear power plants play a growing role.China’s difficulty in keeping the lights on and the faucets running poses a challenge for Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader, and the Chinese Communist Party. They have taken a triumphalist stance this year, emphasizing China’s success in quickly eliminating outbreaks of the coronavirus and in winning the release of a senior Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, in a dispute with the United States and Canada.But Mr. Xi risks getting tagged for problems as well as successes. He has moved strongly to quell any opposition within the Communist Party and has extended its reach into more sectors of Chinese life. If people in China begin to point fingers, there are few others to blame.China’s economic rebound from the coronavirus has been driven in large part by heavy investment in infrastructure as well as the rise in exports. Overall industrial use consumes 70 percent of the electricity in China, led by the mostly state-owned producers of steel, cement and aluminum.“If those guys produce more, it has a huge impact on electricity demand,” Professor Lin said, adding that China’s economic minders would order those three industrial users to ease back.Disruptions from power shortages have already been felt in Dongguan, at the heart of China’s southern manufacturing belt. Its factories produce everything from electronics and toys to sweaters.The local power transmission authority in Houjie, a township in northwestern Dongguan, issued an order shutting off electricity to many factories from Wednesday through Sunday. On Monday morning, the suspension in industrial electricity service was extended at least through Tuesday night.Air-conditioners outside a worker dormitory in Dongguan. Factories in the city produce everything from electronics to toys to sweaters.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesThe throaty roar of huge diesel generators rumbled on Monday morning through the streets and alleys of Houjie, where scores of five-story, concrete-walled factories are nestled among low-rise apartment buildings for migrant workers. Air-conditioners were not running as temperatures climbed into the 90s, and only a few fluorescent lights gleamed in some of the factories’ windows.One of the noisy generators rumbled in a 20-foot yellow shipping container behind a factory where workers in bright blue and orange jumpsuits labored to assemble men’s and women’s leather shoes for American and European buyers.Mr. Tang, the general manager, said his factory had already faced especially strict power usage rules because the government labeled it a “low-profit, high-energy-consuming factory.”Along nearby alleys, a warren of small workshops was making insoles and other shoe components for assembly at Mr. Tang’s factory and other similar plants nearby. Prices for the components have already increased 30 to 50 percent from last year as labor costs and raw material prices rise, Mr. Tang said.“Many of us working in this line of business say that we are basically losing money this year,” he said at his factory on Monday morning, adding that power outages began this summer.Mr. Tang had to turn off his generator for two days last week after residents filed noise complaints with the local government. He also rented a metal cage to cover the generator to reduce the din.Some in the neighborhood, particularly shoe component manufacturers, were sympathetic, voicing a mixture of business pragmatism and nationalism.“Although it’s a bit noisy, I understand it,” said Wang Weidong, the owner of a shoe insole processing workshop. “There’s no other way — we will answer the call of the country.”Li You More

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    Mozambique Mints a New National Park — and Surveys Its Riches

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    When you stand in the Chimanimani Mountains, it’s difficult to reconcile their present serenity with their beleaguered past. From the valleys below, enormous walls of gray stone rise above dense deciduous forests. Hidden among various crevices are ancient rock paintings, made in the late Stone Age by the San people, also known as Bushmen; they depict dancing men and women, and hunting parties chasing after elephants. There’s even a painting of a crocodile so enormous that it may forever deter you from the riverbank.As you climb higher, toward Mount Binga, Mozambique’s highest peak, the forests flatten into expanses of montane grasslands. Wild, isolated, lost in time, it’s a place where rich local traditions live on, where people still talk about ancestral spirits and sacred rituals. A local guide there once told me about a sacred mountain, Nhamabombe, where rainmakers still go to make rain.A local guide crosses the Rio Mussapa at dusk.Ancient rock art made by the San people, or Bushmen.It’s not everyday that a country with a past rife with war and environmental destruction fulfills an ambitious conservation goal. But that’s exactly what happened last year in Mozambique when, after overhauling its environmental code, the country officially designated Chimanimani as a new national park.Rain clouds move in as the sun sets, casting the valley in an otherworldly glow.Mozambique has seen its share of heartache, and Chimanimani is no exception. After the country gained independence from Portuguese colonizers in 1975, it was plunged into civil war. As many as one million Mozambicans died. So, too, did untold numbers of wild animals, which were hunted for their meat or whose parts were traded for weapons.The Chimanimani Mountains became a frontline, and their mountain passes became transits for guerrilla soldiers during both the Rhodesian Bush War, which lasted from 1964 until 1979, and the Mozambican Civil War, which stretched from 1977 until 1992.Victor Américo, a student in the master’s program in conservation biology for Mozambican students at Gorongosa National Park, sets a mist net to capture bats.Callie Gesmundo and Zak Pohlen, two ornithologists, pull mites from the feathers of a red-capped robin-chat. The mites were sent to a specialist for further study. (The pair has already contributed to the discovery of a new mite species.)Located on the Zimbabwe border about 90 miles southwest of Gorongosa, Mozambique’s most famous national park, Chimanimani National Park marks the latest triumph in an environmental renaissance for a country where, just 30 years ago, armies were still funding wars with the blood of poached wildlife.Jorge Manuel Machinga, a ranger, leads two botanists, Bart Wursten and Petra Ballings, back to camp. Mr. Wursten has done nearly a dozen field expeditions in the area — and “I still keep finding new species of plants; new to me, new to the region and even occasionally new to science,” he said.Across the country, Mozambique’s national parks authority, the National Administration of Conservation Areas, is working with private partners to bolster wildlife numbers and restore ecosystem function. The most prominent projects are in Gorongosa National Park. More

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    A Long, Lonesome Look at America

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    Twilight falls over a county road in Crook, Colorado.Flags billow along an empty sidewalk in Martin, Tennessee.In Detroit, Oregon, the wreckage from a wildfire sits beneath burned-out hills.These photographs were taken on a 10,000-mile road trip across the United States.They reflect our country’s beauty, loss, confusion, hope, division, grace and grandeur.They’re scenes of an America cloaked in solitude — and of a country on edge.Supported byContinue reading the main storyThe World Through a LensA Long, Lonesome Look at AmericaJan. 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETI was only a few days into a meandering trip across America, and already I was easing into something of a nighttime routine. Earlier in the day I’d pinpointed a promising campsite in Ozark National Forest. Now, I found myself ascending an isolated forestry road to get to it, my tires crackling over its rough, potholed surface.When I could no longer hear the road noise from the scenic highway that carried me into the mountains, I found a small clearing in the woods, shimmied my car into a level position and climbed into the back. Gathering my camping stove, I stepped outside into a light rainfall and, under a tall canopy of trees, lit the burner.All night I’d been enveloped in a thick foggy haze: not much to see, wipers running full tilt. I hadn’t interacted with anyone in days, and now even the landscape was hidden from view. But the rain seemed to be letting up — enough in this small glade, at least, for me to heat a pot of water for a solitary cup of tea. In the morning, I thought, if things cleared, there’d even be hope of seeing the surrounding mountains in their autumnal glory.Lichens on the rock reflect the turning of the leaves at Sam’s Throne, in Ozark National Forest.So it went, it seems, with much of 2020: our lives — and our country — enveloped in a haze of uncertainty, without our knowing whether the next day would bring a modicum of relief or a deepening of our solitude.Cattle in a field near Encino, N.M.Flocks of geese head west over Nebraska.In October I set off on a trip to witness and document this singular moment in American history — to look quietly and intently at our country, to parse its scenery.A polka-dotted awning on a vacant street in Glenwood, Ark.A boarded-up building in Carter, Wyo.The Rio Grande near Taos, N.M.To limit interaction and prevent exposure, I outfitted my car as a makeshift camper van, removing the rear seats and installing a sleeping (and living and working) platform in their place.After stocking up on food and water, I headed southwest from my hometown, Hudson, Ohio, largely avoiding highways and preferring instead to pass more slowly through less populated areas. Most nights I spent at remote, unimproved campsites — away from any developed campgrounds — in our sprawling network of national forests.The fringes of Kootenai National Forest, in northwest Montana.A barn near Libby, Mont.On many of my previous trips across the country, my spirits have been buoyed by the fleeting social interactions that occur sporadically throughout the day — at diners, motels, knickknack shops, campgrounds.Traveling in isolation, though, was a categorically different experience.Even in the casual places where travelers still gathered — gas stations, coffee shops, rest areas — there were generally no offhand conversations, no sharing of experiences, no sense of spontaneous connection. Strangers transacted and, still strangers, went their separate ways.A service station in Dale, Ore.Without the promise of social interaction, the landscape itself — both natural and built — became my focus.Often it felt like a companion. Often it felt like a manuscript, open to interpretation.Early morning light illuminates the Guadalupe Mountains, east of El Paso.A pair of deer in McKittrick Canyon.Wintry colors in Prineville, Ore.Reviewing the photographs from my trip, I found that my eyes were drawn to projections of my own isolation: lone structures, unpeopled scenes, solitary sets of tire tracks.The Fox Community Church in Grant County, Ore.A Forest Service road near Sisters, Ore.A vacant strip mall in northwest Tennessee.Looking outward, I saw within.An aptly named business in Ronan, Mont.Silhouettes against the night sky in Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, in central Idaho.What also struck me were the scars. In town after town I saw sidewalks emptied, shops struggling, restaurants barely clinging to life.It all added up to the same bleak assessment: The pandemic has acted like an accelerant, hastening trends toward online commerce that threaten the future of brick-and-mortar stores and streetside businesses — the economic and communal mainstays of small towns throughout America.A café in Ojo Caliente, N.M.A service station in Vaughn, N.M.The economic fallout wasn’t the only visible trauma. In Colorado, Oregon and California, the widespread effects of the worst fire season on record were ubiquitous.Heading west from Fort Collins, Colo., along State Highway 14, I watched as crews scrambled to battle the Cameron Peak fire, the largest in Colorado history. The devastation along Highway 22 in Oregon was astonishing.Handmade signs along State Highway 14 in northern Colorado.A scorched tree trunk in Willamette National Forest.The charred remains of a home in Detroit, Ore.Our country’s political divisions were also omnipresent — in the form of yard signs, flags, billboards.In some places, the public posturing read like communal declarations. More than at other points in recent memory, businesses (as opposed solely to individuals or residences) seemed to trumpet their political affiliations.A politicized marquee on a theater on North Main Street in Springhill, La.A billboard in Carlsbad, N.M.A sign outside a farm in Bossier Parish, La.A roadside stand offering political merchandise in Medina, Tenn.There was, of course, an endless array of beauty. Gazing at the sandstone arches in eastern Utah, standing silently over the pristine waters of the McDonald Creek in northern Montana, looking out at a herd of bison in Southern Colorado, I saw the sublimity and the precariousness of our natural treasures reflected in their own forms.The Corona Arch, near Moab, Utah.McDonald Creek in Glacier National Park.A bison at the Medano-Zapata Ranch, on the eastern edge of Colorado’s San Luis Valley. In the 19th century, American bison were hunted nearly to extinction; fewer than a thousand remained from an estimated population of 30 to 60 million.If much of the American landscape can be read, then much is also continuously rewritten — particularly in our forests, grasslands and wildlife refuges, the arenas for our never-ending attempts to strike a balance between conservation and extraction, between profit and preservation.A U.S. Forest Service sign in Ouachita National Forest.A nearby logging operation.In many ways the trip felt like an extended ode to such places — our national forests in particular.Twelve days and some 4,500 miles in, I woke before dawn in the southern stretches of Bitterroot National Forest, near the border between Idaho and Montana. Temperatures outside had fallen into the low 20s; cocooned in my car, I hadn’t noticed. But, cracking the door open, I felt a rush of cold air.I peered out into the darkness.Clear skies above Bitterroot National Forest.Startled by the cold and beckoned by the Montanan scenery, I opted for an early start, descending the mountains north toward Missoula. I fell into an early-morning trance — until, 20 minutes later, I saw a fellow traveler who’d pulled his car to the side of the road and exited it. He was staring into the distance.I turned to my left, in the direction of his gaze, and saw Trapper Peak, purple and majestic, dressed in unspeakable beauty. Somehow, inexplicably, I hadn’t noticed its grandeur.I pressed the brakes and slowed to a stop some 100 feet away. I, too, exited my car and stood alongside the road.Together in solitude, we took in the scene.Pastel skies at sunrise over Trapper Peak, in the Bitterroot Mountains.Stephen Hiltner is an editor on The New York Times’s Travel desk, where he edits the weekly World Through a Lens column. You can follow his work on Instagram and Twitter.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More