Missile strikes by Israel and the United States against nuclear sites in Iran have dominated the headlines across the world this week. The same is true on China’s internet, where reports about this latest Middle East crisis — mainly echoing condemnation of US actions by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) as a violation of the UN charter and international law — have trended on the “hot search” (热搜) list of most-read articles on Baidu, WeChat and the Chinese social network and e-commerce platform RedNote (小红书).

The general line in Chinese coverage of that story has been that US attempts to eradicate Iran’s nuclear arsenal through bunker-penetrating bombs will only make for a more dangerous world. “What the US bombs have impacted is the foundation of the international security order,” said the Global Times, a newspaper published under the Chinese Communist Party’s official People’s Daily. 

As this international story has dominated headlines, it has mostly drowned out an important story much closer to home. Beginning on June 18, heavy rains in Chongqing, Hunan and Guangdong provinces triggered record-breaking floods. In Hunan alone, one local river saw the worst flooding since 1998, inundating entire cities and displacing more than 400,000 people. These floods were not as devastating as the ones that struck Henan in 2021, but the damage has still been severe. 

Despite the clear relevance of this story to hundreds of millions of Chinese living in the affected region, the news has not attracted widespread attention in the headlines or on social media. One WeChat post, now deleted (but archived by CDT’s 404 Archive), lamented this overwhelming focus on problems abroad rather than at home. In “Forget the Middle East, Look at Hunan” (别管中东了，看看湖南吧), the writer noted that it took several days for videos of the floods to reach WeChat’s video feeds, and that the flooding barely made the app’s hot search list. Both were instead filled with content about news from Iran. While it is not clear whether the hand of the state or the market is at fault—given there has been state media coverage of the flooding—the article rightly points out the potential consequences of the story not going viral: “The attention of the public can help to guarantee more effective disaster relief.”