Do you guys even read your own links? From your article:

In the first half of the year, wind and solar farms produced more electricity (560 billion kWh) combined than the country's hydroelectric dams (450 billion kWh) for the first time.

China's energy transition is real and is proceeding rapidly.

But coal-fired generation and production is still likely to increase for at least the next several years because of the country's inherited reliance on coal-fired units and the need to meet rapid load growth.

And nowhere in there does it say that they are mining/importing/using record levels of coal. It's saying they haven't shut down coal power as much as they would like because of a protracted drought. I am assuming you are not an idiot and understand that droughts are not controlled by the government.

Your article goes out of its way to point out that the high coal usage is NOT a result of Chinese state policy (unlike Europeans, such as Germany recently, and the US, which use fossil fuels over renewable resources as a matter of policy).