Pride and prejudice: China’s LGBT crackdown

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist In New York. I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Bangladesh and northern India are suffering their worst floods in recent memory, with millions displaced. But thanks to increasingly effective architectural and social adaptation efforts, the death toll has been far lower than expected. And every year, our sister company ranks the world's cities to determine the best places to live. Which city came out on top this year? Let's just say there's no hiding from the truth. But first, it's Pride Month. In many countries, Pride is a time when people of all sexualities and genders are celebrated with music, dancing and copious rainbow flag. But Pride started as a protest to reject the shame felt by lesbian, gay, bi and trans people. And these protests were often stamped down by local authorities. In some countries, they still are, including China.

China's only large LGBT celebration, Shanghai Pride, hasn't occurred since 2020, when police interrogated several of its organizers.

Alice Su is a senior China correspondent for the Economist.

It's never been easy to be gay in China. The government cares very little about the rights of sexual minorities if it acknowledges them at all. That being said, there is a fairly significant LGBT community. There were NGOs that were functioning and they were allowed some space in the early Years of Xi Jinping's reign, even as other parts of civil society were going through crackdowns, human rights lawyers, labor rights activists, feminists, a lot of the LGBT community was still able to meet and to have events and to do some kind of advocacy under the radar up until recent years.

And what happened in recent years?

Well, up until last year, a lot of universities in China had very active LGBT student associations. They were able to hold activities. Oftentimes they weren't officially registered, but they had large social media accounts, and it was the first place where many people in that community could express themselves for the first time. So last year, all of a sudden, most of these groups, social media accounts were suddenly closed. Around the same time, some of the larger non government organizations in Beijing and in other cities were also shut down. But another part of it is increasing control over what can be shown in the media. There's this Chinese term, ngan pao. The best translation I think of it is sissy men. And they said, we no longer want to see these kind of effeminate sissy men on Chinese media. The Education ministry has also called for strengthening physical education classes. They want to cultivate masculinity and prevent the feminization of boys. And all this is linked to the rise of nationalism under Xi Jinping and this particular vision of a strong China with strong families and strong men.

Do people have any recourse to push back against this at all?

So I did meet one man, Mr. Peng. He founded this organization called LGBT Rights Advocacy China. And they wanted to use lawsuits to make progress on sexual minorities rights. Conversion therapy was very popular, which is a type of so called therapy where mental health practitioners try to change people's sexual orientation and turn them heterosexual. And in 2014, he, he wanted to file a lawsuit against some of these clinics that were operating out in the open, advertising, send your gay sons to us and we can convert them, we can make them straight. The problem is that they couldn't find anyone who had gone through that therapy who would be willing to take up the lawsuit. So finally, Mr. Peng decided he would go through conversion therapy himself. And he told me what it was like. He told me he was lying on this soap sofa, hypnotized. He was feeling safe. He was feeling that he could trust the therapist. And then they told him to imagine a sexual scene with a man, and if he felt any sort of reaction in his body to that imagined scene, then he should move his finger. He did move his fingers. And then he felt a sudden pain. They had given him an electric shock. Mr. Peng says that he screamed. He was really surprised because even though he knew that this conversion therapy would involve electric shocks, he didn't expect that it would come at that moment. Right when they had built up this sense of trust and relaxation in him, he jumped out of the bed and he asked what they were doing. He said, you really made me feel fear. And they told him that that's exactly what they wanted. This is how it works. Every session will have you relax, will have you think of this thing that you enjoy, that you're attracted to, that makes you feel good, and then will shock you. And in that way, we'll condition you so that you no longer enjoy it, and you associate it with. With pain and trauma.

Alice, that sounds horrific. What happened afterward to Mr. Peng?

Well, later on, Mr. Peng told me that he was surprised at how traumatized he was by this event. He didn't go back for any further sessions, but it was enough for him to take that experience and to go to court. So he sued the clinic, and to his great surprise, he actually won that case. The clinic was forced to apologize. And most important of all, while the court came out with a ruling which stated that same sex attraction is not an illness, at that time, that was a huge victory because it sparked public conversation in China. Chinese media covered it. Even state media covered it. Looking back, that was really a remarkable state of openness in China in that the media could even talk about this at all. At the same time, in China, just because you win a case and because the judge says something in the ruling, it doesn't mean that that will change the law. And so there still is no ban on conversion therapy. And sadly, in the last few years, things have actually gone backwards for the community.

So why is the party now cracking down on LGBT people?

First of all, Xi Jinping doesn't trust any sort of civil society, any sort of organization that is not under the direct control of the Communist Party. In the first few years of Xi Jinping's reign, there was space for the LGBT community. They were being seen more in Chinese media and in the public. And a lot of nationalist voices in China started to look at this and to say this is because of Western influence and they want to lead China's youth astray. Nowadays, there has been a big change to the stance of there is a Chinese way of being, and we no longer have to conform to the way that the US Led west does things. There has been this significant return to one of the original ideas of the Communist Party, which is that the way that people think and the way that people behave, it should be molded in a certain way and the party should lead them, and sexual orientation is part of that. What the Chinese authorities would say is a person can be socially engineered and sexual orientation can also be socially engineered. Basically, they can be changed, and they should be. Of course, conversion therapy is not effective, and you can't use that to change someone's sexual orientation. But they want to shape young people and make them normal and healthy according to their own definition.

All right, Alice, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks, John.

Millions of people in South Asia are facing the worst flooding in a generation. The northeast of Bangladesh is largely submerged in floodwaters because of severe monsoon rains. Whole communities have been displaced and farms and businesses lost to the deluge. We have lost our home and all our belongings in the flood waters, says one victim. And the flooding extends to India, too.

So while there are floods every year, these ones are exceptionally drastic. In the northeast of Bangladesh, 83% of the siliet and 90% of the semandran districts have been underwater for several days. The people in the region say that this is the worst flooding in living memory.

Rachel Dobbs writes about climate change for the Economist.

Next door in northeast India, there has been 134% more rainfall than average for this time of year. So even given the fact that monsoons happen every summer, this is exceptional. More than 4.7 million people have been forced from their homes in northeast India. About 4.3 million people in Bangladesh have been affected, and the two countries have reported more than 100 deaths between them in these floods.

Now, obviously, every one of those hundred deaths is very sad, but collectively that seems a fairly low death toll given the extent of flooding that you've described.

So while the death toll will undoubtedly rise, these numbers are still relatively low if you compare them with the deaths from flash flooding in Germany in July of last year. Given that Germany is a far richer country and has about half the population of Bangladesh, 180 people were killed in those floods. So the numbers that we're seeing, particularly in Bangladesh, are lower than you might expect. And indeed, deaths from natural disasters in the country used to be much, much higher. The country is essentially a massive delta. It's crisscrossed by about 200 rivers, and almost all of it is below or at sea level. And so heavy rains and storms there frequently cause rivers to burst their banks. But over recent decades, the mortality from these kind of events has been reduced remarkably. For example, in 1970, Cyclone Bola killed 300,000 to 500,000 people. By comparison, in 2020, Cyclone Am Fan killed just 26 people in Bangladesh, despite being the strongest storm that has formed in the Bay of Bengal since about 1999.

Why such a striking reduction in death toll? What's happened in the intervening 50 years?

Bangladesh has changed the way that it deals with floods and has channeled more resources towards dealing with floods and cyclones and climate disasters. Originally, starting from about the 1960s, the strategy was to try and keep water out by building huge embankments called poldars, which are essentially big dikes, the word is borrowed from the Dutch. These can be very useful for storm surges, but are less useful for monsoon rains. And these kind of large scale embankments are also sometimes quite dangerous in that they lure people into a full sense of security and encourage them to build their homes and settlements in flood prone areas. That means that when they are breached, they can have really, really dramatic effects because there are more people in that vicinity. In more recent years, there has been more success with actually reverting to kind of indigenous practices of dealing with high levels of water, mostly of building mounds of earth on which homes and shelters and then animals are often kept. And because these are individual mounds rather than wide embankments, it means that the floodwaters can go around them. And so you have the benefits of the floodwaters moving across the landscape, but while still keeping people and animals safe.

So, Rachel, are these changes the main reason the death toll has been brought down or have they also done other things?

There have also been very significant developments in how authorities try and prepare people for events like cyclones or flooding. Bangladesh has an incredibly well developed early warning system that operates on multiple levels, including texts, radio announcements, announcements made over the loudspeakers of mosques and volunteers going door to door. There's now a huge network of multipurpose shelters that are used for these kind of events. When Cyclone Bola hit, there were less than 50 shelters on the coastline of Bangladesh. Now there are functionally more than 10,000. There are also coordinated groups of local volunteers. However, it is really important to note that while deaths have been reduced dramatically, that is not the only metric that matters when we're looking at these kind of climate events. Every time people have to evacuate their homes, there are large numbers who cannot go back again or, or large numbers whose livelihoods are destroyed. And with the flooding this year, this will be the crop failure for some farmers, which means that they cannot continue living in the way that they have.

What's the region doing to help people currently affected by the floods.

So the floodwaters have yet to recede. Humanitarian aid groups are working very hard to try and get food and products for sanitation, things like that, to people in the affected areas. The army in both northeast India and in Bangladesh are trying to to reach people who have been stranded. But even after the floodwaters have gone, officials in Assam, which is the state in India, say that they think that this flood has stepped back progress in terms of developing infrastructure like roads and bridges by a decade. So the rebuilding will take a long time and it slows the rate at which progress can be made.

So, Rachel, as you mentioned, Bangladesh is basically one big river delta. It's also low lying, which makes it very susceptible to climate related disasters. I wonder to what extent we can blame climate change for the severity of this year's floods.

For any individual event, it is quite difficult to establish a direct climate link. But it does seem that climate change is definitely affecting the way in which the monsoon behaves in South Asia. For every 1 degree of global warming, and for reference, the world has warmed by about 1.1 to 1.3 degrees above pre industrial levels. Now it's thought that the monsoon gets about 5% wetter, which means that there is, you know, more water which creates these kind of floods. But it's also becoming more erratic because the weather patterns that influence the monsoon are changing. And that means you're more likely to have sort of sudden torrential downpours and they are more likely to be at slightly unusual times of year. In addition, it's thought that climate change will change weather patterns such that cyclones become more aggressive in the region, even if they do not become more frequent. Bangladesh is also particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. And all of these factors mean that people in Bangladesh will continue having to try and adapt to these changes, but adaptation can only take them so far. Bangladesh is also particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. And all of these factors mean that people in Bangladesh will continue having to try and adapt to these changes. But adaptation can only take them so far. And the only way in which these risks are not going to get exponentially worse and worse, they're still going to get worse, is by CO2 emissions all the way around the world being reduced remarkably.

Rachel, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks, John.

Where would be your ideal place to live? Somewhere with good food and culture? Somewhere that's clean and green? Or just somewhere that's warm and near a beach? Our sister company, the Economist Intelligence Unit, takes that question very seriously. Every year it comes up with a Livability index that ranks the world's cities. And the chart topper in its 2022 index is a place that had previously fallen outside the top 10.

In total, we ranked 172 cities, and we use five broad categories.

Anna Nichols is industry director at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Starting with stability. So that's issues around whether there's a lot of crime, what the international position of the country is. Then we've got a health care ranking. We've got culture and environment, which covers a range of things from corruption to actually the availability of shops and restaurants. We've got education and then infrastructure, which is physical infrastructure in terms of roads and telecoms, communication, also the availability of good housing.

So who came out on top?

This year's winner was one that had previously slipped from 1st to 12th place in our livability index, and it is Vienna, and it has often been a winner in the past. So of the last 10 surveys that we did, it actually came top seven times.

So Vienna came out on top. What did it do so well this year? And why had it fallen out of the top 10 before?

So Vienna does pretty much everything well in terms of our rankings. It actually has perfect marks almost across the board. The only area where it falls down slightly is in culture and environment, and that's largely because there aren't any major sporting events in Vienna that you can go along to. But otherwise it has consistent consistently scored very well in terms of livability. It did fall out of the top 10 last year, and that was primarily because of the COVID restrictions that were in place this time last year when the delta wave of COVID was sweeping across Europe. But now those restrictions have now been largely lifted. So that has obviously just meant that it's bounced back to its usual position in our rankings.

So Vienna won the gold, who won silver and bronze.

So in silver place was Copenhagen, which is again a city that scores very, very highly across the board. And then tied for equal place in third position were Zurich in Switzerland and Calgary in Canada.

And what about the bottom of the rankings?

Damascus in Syria was once again the bottom city. It scores poorly on almost everything apart from the culture and environment ranking, where it scores slightly better. Just slightly above that is Lagos and N. Nigeria. And then we have Tripoli in Libya in third from bottom position. The only good news is that this year, even their scores actually came up very slightly compared with last year, partly because of the lifting of COVID restrictions.

Anna, I wonder whether the war in Ukraine has had much influence on the index.

The war in Ukraine has had an influence on the index. The primary effect that it had is that we had to actually cut Kiev out of the rankings this year because the invasion actually happened halfway through our survey period. And also the other primary effect it's had is that the two Russian cities in our index, so that's Moscow and St. Petersburg, have fallen quite drastically. So Moscow saw its livability ranking fall by 15 places. St. Petersburg slipped by 13 places. It's partly because of just the increased insecurities, obviously, invasion, war happening, but also side issues such as increased censorship and restrictions on the culture and environment generally.

What trend should we expect to see impacting next year's results?

Well, we are not terribly optimistic about trends in terms of livability. The pandemic isn't yet over. So although our core assumption is that there will be new waves of variants, that they won't be particularly impactful on livability, there is a risk that they could be and that in February, March, next year there could be new restrictions in place because of a wave of the pandemic. There's the war in Ukraine, which will continue to be a threat to security, particularly within Europe, but may even spread more widely. And even without escalation, there are side issues from the conflict. So one of them is the influx of refugees in some countries, which may cause tensions. The other is that the conflict has fueled global inflation and dampened global economic growth. And those higher commodity prices, particularly for things like energy and food, could weigh on livability in lots of cities over the next few months. It could even spark some conflict. And even where stability itself is not threatened, the cost of living crisis could dampen government investment into things like infrastructure, healthcare and education, as well as consumer spending that supports things like shops and restaurants. So that could even impact places like Vienna.

All right, Anna, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

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