Googling around a bit, there seems to be a long history of weather-modification news coming out of China. In 2008, according to the Beijing Weather Modificatio

Googling around a bit, there seems to be a long history of weather-modification news coming out of China. In 2008, according to the Beijing Weather Modification Office, China used rockets to make sure the Olympic opening ceremony was rain-free: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/how-beijing-used-rockets-to-keep-opening-ceremony-dry-890294.html https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/how-beijing-use... In 2013, China was producing "55 billion tons of artificial rain a year" according to the China Meteorological Administration: https://qz.com/138141/china-creates-55-billion-tons-of-artificial-rain-a-year-and-it-plans-to-quintuple-that/ https://qz.com/138141/china-creates-55-billion-tons-of-artif... Last year, the CMA spent millions on airplanes and rockets to affect rainfall: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2064729/china-showers-y115b-rainmaking-project-parched http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/206... That said, it's unclear whether cloud seeding actually works: https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i22/Does-cloud-seeding-really-work.html https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i22/Does-cloud-seeding-reall.... An experiment in the US, the Wyoming Weather Modification Pilot Program, gave somewhat positive but inconclusive results on the order of a 5 to 15 percent increase in precipitation amount: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-may-never-know-how-well-cloud-seeding-works/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-may-never-know-how-w... And, sure enough, in 2011, China's rainmaking tech wasn't enough to fix the Yangtze delta drought: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/01/china-drought-weather-modifying-yangtze https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/01/china-dr... To me, all this rain-making news out of China seems like either propaganda or some Chinese government bureau justifying its existence by inflating how much this cloud-seeding technology can actually do. But that's just my feeling from an hour of searching around and skimming articles -- I'd love to hear how I'm wrong!