After Covid, China’s Leaders Face New Challenges From Flooding
By Steven Lee Myers of the NY Times
Having brought the coronavirus pandemic largely under control, China’s leaders are now struggling with a surge of crippling floods that have killed hundreds of people and displaced millions across the central and southwestern parts of the country.
Flooding on the Yangtze River peaked again this week, in Sichuan Province and the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing, while the Three Gorges Dam, 280 miles downstream, reached its highest level since it began holding water in 2003.
This year’s flooding has unfolded not as a single natural disaster, with an enormous loss of life and property, but rather as a slow, merciless series of smaller ones, whose combined toll has steadily mounted even as official reports have focused on the government’s relief efforts.
“The Chinese nation has fought natural disasters for thousands of years, gaining precious experience,” the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, declared on Tuesday after a visit to Anhui, another flooded province downstream from the Three Gorges Dam. “We should continue to fight.”
Mr. Xi called China’s disaster relief efforts “a practical test of the leadership and command system of our army.” He met with relatives of three people who died while fighting floods, and on Wednesday he addressed officers of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police, which have been involved in the relief work.
One resident of Chongqing, in a video of the flooding there that circulated on a popular social media platform, said: “The losses have been heavy for many businesses, fighting the pandemic in the first half of the year and flooding in the second half.”
The floods had already caused at least $26 billion in economic losses before this week. At a briefing in Beijing last week, Zhou Xuewen, the secretary general of China’s flood control headquarters, said that at least 63 million people had been affected and 54,000 homes destroyed. At least 219 people have died or disappeared, he said. Read more from the NY Times
