This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Bats with Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang, K-Stone

News Week in the Hill, my colleague and co-host. Headlines from Radio Free Asia.

China planned to flood villages to spare Beijing sparks clashes in Hubei Province, Subhead.

Residents guard local levies for fear officials will inundate their homes in the middle of the

border as a photograph accompanying this Radio Free Asia picture.

The streets are flooded, the people are in pontoons, they're rescuing each other.

What is the intention of the central government to sacrifice the city to protect Beijing? Is that the intention here?

That's exactly the intention. And it becomes politically volatile, not only because people's homes are being flooded,

but there is a narrative among the Chinese people that it is not Beijing that's being protected.

It is a particular part of Beijing, which is a project of Xi Jinping, a new area.

And so it's added to the anger of all of this.

So let's have always been a plague for Chinese rulers going back millennia.

And now we're seeing this play out in 2023.

We welcome our colleague Charles Burton of the MacDonald-Laurie Institute.

Charles, the photographs are shocking if the explanation is accurate.

Do you, where, where in Chinese history is there a place where you can sacrifice a whole region to protect your backyard?

Well, I think that, you know, certainly the people living in that area of the Washington,

which has a population of some 600,000 and odd, are seeing the government as a hostile force because the government has decided to move the waters or prevent the waters from going to Beijing.

And the place that Gordon's talking about is Yongan, which is the under construction purportedly new grand capital of Beijing that Xi Jinping will transfer his rule from.

And the, the large airport at Dushing, but the upshot is that those people have got 23 feet of water in their town.

But the government did not provide adequate warning that they were planning to redirect the water into this particular place to keep it away from the new show place capital Beijing and the airport.

So there's been considerable loss of life.

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