Missile strikes by Israel and the United States against nuclear sites in Iran have topped headlines across the world last month. In China, where the story trended on the hot search (热搜) lists of Baidu, WeChat (微信) and RedNote, it also drowned out news of record-breaking floods that displaced more than 400,000 people in Hunan province alone.
Beginning June 18, heavy rains triggered the worst flooding since 1998 in Hunan, inundating entire cities. Similar flooding struck Guangdong province and the municipality of Chongqing. Despite affecting hundreds of millions of Chinese in the region, the domestic disaster struggled for attention as social media feeds filled with news of US missile strikes on Iranian nuclear sites — and warnings from Chinese state media that that American bunker-penetrating bombs would make the world a more dangerous place. (Read more of CMP’s analysis here on the sidelining of flooding coverage last week.)
With floods this past weekend inundating parts of the western province of Guizhou for the second time in the space of a week, the domestic blind spot toward the severe flooding season in China’s media seems now to have eased moderately, with the official Xinhua News Agency reporting in a release shared across multiple outlets that “the flood disaster in Rongjiang County, Guizhou Province, has been tugging at everyone’s hearts.”
