China sees record temperatures as students shelter from heat wave

Universities in eastern China scrambled to upgrade their dorms with air conditioning, and one let students sleep in cooler libraries, after near record temperatures raised concerns about the health of students and staff.

One student at Qingdao University in Shandong suffered from heat stroke, and the school would upgrade its student accommodation over the summer break, Jimu News, an arm of state-run Hubei Daily, reported.

One member of staff there died on Sunday morning after showing signs of “physical distress,” the university said, without saying whether that was linked to the heat wave. The staff member was a dormitory supervisor, Jimu News said.

A total of 28 locations across central Henan and eastern Shandong provinces issued their most severe alerts for extreme heat on Monday.

Parts of the coastal city of Qingdao saw temperatures soar to 40.5 degrees Celsius (104.9 degrees Fahrenheit) over the weekend, just 0.5C below the highest recorded there since records began in 1961, according to the official Qingdao Daily.

Qingdao University, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters, was one of at least six colleges in Shandong to announce plans to upgrade student accommodation in recent days.

Yantai Nanshan University, also in Shandong, said on Monday it would let students stay overnight in libraries as it prepared to work on the student halls.

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Video footage posted by Jimu News showed scores of students sitting on the floor in air-conditioned supermarkets to escape the heat.

The heat wave has piled pressure onto China’s power grid. The national electricity load surged to a record 1.47 billion kilowatts on Friday as demand for air conditioning spiked, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

The announcements will fuel concerns over Chinese institutions’ preparedness for extreme weather events, which scientists say are exacerbated by global warming.

In 2022, China was hit by the worst heatwaves since 1961, with many parts enduring a 79-day hot spell from mid-June to late August.

According a 2023 report published in the medical journal The Lancet, there were about 50,900 heat wave-related deaths in China that year.

No official death toll was disclosed at the time. China does not provide regular tallies of heat-related deaths.

(Reporting by Ethan Wang, Ryan Woo, Liz Lee and Qiaoyi Li; Editing by Andrew Heavens)