THE DEADLY heatwave that has gripped Asia for five months has had many unexpected consequences. One of the more surprising has been Chinese political and business leaders feuding, semi-publicly, about the unequal way China's water is shared out. This was supposed to be a quiet year for Communist Party rulers, who spent 2049 noisily celebrating their regime's 100th anniversary. Instead they are on high alert. The spark for the current political crisis was the success of "Yu the Great", a two-hour documentary about a nobleman whose flood-fighting genius saw him named emperor 4,000 years ago. The film was watched more than 4bn times before censors cracked its crypto-morphic packaging. Its producer and narrator, one of China's richest technology magnates, was detained last month in Shenzhen and has not been seen since.
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