When it rains it floods - but it's not the weather's fault

No one blames China for this summer's early rains, but nor can Mother Nature be accused

REMEMBER THE Chinese floods of 1996, when around 3,000 people died and the economic cost was officially put at nearly pounds 17bn? Or perhaps you recall 1995, when the toll was nearer 4,000, and one-sixth of China's farmland was inundated? Or 1994, with 4,300 casualties? Or 1991, the worst floods this decade - until the water levels set new records this year?

The world can be forgiven for falling prey to flood fatigue when it comes to China. Long before the television pictures, there is a terrible inevitability about the flood season. By early June, Peking has usually warned of impending disaster and ordered the provinces to safeguard the country's 245,000km of dykes. Within weeks, water levels somewhere have reached "historic levels", millions of homes have been washed away, even more millions of peasants are camped out in makeshift tents on the top of the dykes, and medical teams are warning of the onset of disease.

And so it is this year. Only worse, at least in the scale of the flooding. The official death toll is above 2,000, with another month of the flood season still to go. Almost 14 million people have been relocated, and 5.6 million homes destroyed. All of which begs the question, why does flooding on this scale happen, year after year?

The government last week blamed "abnormal weather" - early rains, historically intense downpours, heavy snow in Tibet, and that hardy scapegoat, El Nino. The propaganda was all about the Communist Party's anti-flood efforts and the heroic deeds of the People's Liberation Army. Zhou Wenzhi, Vice- minister for Water Resources, said: "It proves once again the Chinese people's ability to overcome, under the leadership of the Communist party and governments at all levels, not only the difficulties brought about by the financial crisis in South-east Asia, but also serious natural disasters".

No one blames China for this summer's early rains, but nor can Mother Nature be accused for many of the underlying reasons for China's water mismanagement. It is not just flooding. Every year, China also sees severe drought, 300 cities suffer from water shortages, and in more than half of them, the water is too polluted to drink.

Water is a huge challenge for China, and Peking is still inclined towards big solutions. Hence the pounds 16bn Three Gorges Dam project, which Peking claims - and critics strongly dispute - will solve forever the Yangtze river flooding. On the drawing board of China's hydro-engineers are even more ambitious schemes, such as the diversion of water from the upper reaches of the Yangtze northward to the Yellow River, and a massive hydro- scheme on the Tibetan plateau. But environmentalists, inside and outside China, say Peking still puts too little effort into down-to-earth measures - whether trees or leaking pipes.

Take the perennial Yangtze flooding, particularly bad this year. Since the Communist victory in 1949, massive deforestation above the upper reaches of the Yangtze has led to extreme soil erosion. Increased water run- offs then wash silt into the river and tributaries. Year by year, this sedimentation clogs the upstream storage reservoirs and gradually raises the level of the river bed along its course. The government's belated tree-planting programme will take decades to repair the damage.

In the middle of the reaches, pressure of a fast-increasing population, plus Mao's edicts to the peasants to plant rice, have destroyed the natural flood-retaining features of the geography. Look at a map of central Hubei province, for instance, and the Yangtze flows through a low-lying basin of interconnected rivers and lakes. Left to its own devices, Yangtze floodwaters and local rainfall would engorge the lakes and flood nearby land, thus reducing the flow in the main riverstream. Much of this flood- prone land should simply not be lived on.

But over the last 30 years, millions of Chinese peasants have been encouraged to drain Hubei's natural marshes and lakes to create new fields. Subsidiary dykes have been built to stop tributary rivers and lakes overflowing onto this new farmland. During the flood season, this means that more flood and rainwater is channelled straight into the Yangtze.

New local industrial development has been taking place without regard to flood issues. Yang Qian, at the Ministry of Water Resources, has said: "Some [town] even built factories in low-lying regions without any flood- control facilities. Even river courses are cut as sites for building residences or industrial projects".

In 1995 alone, China drafted 19 laws and administrative regulations including an anti-flood law, and 18 policy papers on water resources. Yet the floods go on, and usually it is the farmers who pay the price.

It is the subsidiary dykes behind the Yangtze's main dykes which have started collapsing over the past two weeks, inundating villages and farmland. In other areas, local officials, as in Jianli yesterday, are destroying these dykes, as part of government policy to relieve the pressure on the main river in order to safeguard cities such as Wuhan, the industrial capital of Hubei.

This year, the devastation has already been enormous. In some areas, farmers privately blame local government officials for leaving flood precautions too late. There are also allegations that money for anti-flood preparations has sometimes been diverted. Construction of the Three Gorges Dam, under way in the west of Hubei, may also have lulled flood-control officials into a false sense of security, and wrongly dissuaded them from spending tight budgets on renovating the dykes.

The Peking government maintains that the Three Gorges Dam will solve the Yangtze's flood problems. Zhao Chunming, at the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, said last week: "If we had the Three Gorges Dam, the levels in the lower reaches would not be so high, and the situation would not be so urgent. So it is absolutely necessary to have this project". Those who argue otherwise say that the dam reservoir will not be big enough, given a two-month flood season, and that the whole project is flawed.

None of this is debated in China's official media, where the Three Gorges Dam and flood-control policy in general is not to be questioned. Nor does the local media do more than selective reporting on the floods. Foreign journalists are generally refused permission to travel to flooded areas, and a TV crew that did had its tapes confiscated.

With water levels still rising towards the 1954 record, one just has to take the word of Fan Baojun, Vice- Civil Affairs Minister, that "the public is quiet and society is stable".