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China’s Rising Waters
by Ernie Diaz
Too much or too little, always in China has it been thus. Especially with water – gasping seasons of drought, followed by deluge, disease, and famine. The Yellow River is called China’s sorrow as often as its cradle, and the Yangtze has overrun its valley more than a thousand times. Placed in that context, the floods now plaguing China have claimed small victory. Juxtaposing this disaster with the true cataclysms in her past is not intended to be impersonal and callous, but rather transpersonal, to prove the depths to which China has been submerged, buoying up and out every time.
The Huanghe Flood of 1931
Not just China’s deadliest flood, but by consensus the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded. The endless silt which gives the Yellow River, or Huanghe, its name piles up into natural dams, elevates the river bed, and changes its course, any event enough to unleash havoc on the vulnerably flat and low northern plain beside it. So was the Yellow River foe as often as friend, from ancient time, ending the Xin dynasty with a change of course and the floods that followed.
But the Huanghe’s most horrific flood still lies in living memory, for some. A crippling two-year drought gave way in early 1931 to a winter of piling snow, then a summer of ceaseless rain, capped off by a cyclone. The resulting flood submerged twenty million acres, and drenched another five million. Chinese historians, who will boast about anything impressively-scaled besides China’s casualty rates, put the death toll from 1.3 to 1.5 million. On a different agenda, climate change mavens stick the figure closer to four million. Either number, and anywhere in between, is inconceivable. The hundreds of thousands who drowned were spared the long horrors afterward, the inevitable famine, cholera, typhus and dysentery that turn a flood’s aftermath exponential.
Despite being remembered as a Yellow River flood, the Yangtze also swelled from two feet of rain that summer, raising it 53 feet above its normal level at Hangkou, and man-high above the Bund. Close to 200,000 died in the Yangtze’s immediate wake, but another 30 million suffered a living death. Selling off wives and daughters, infanticide, even cannibalism – the flood-borne moral horrors then receding into myth visited China afresh, as recorded in contemporary newspapers.
The Huanghe Flood of 1887
Chinese demigod Yu the Great won his moniker, and a crown, for devising ways to dredge and dike the Huanghe. Farmers adhered to his system for millennia, simple wisdom at times, fatal ignorance at others. The plains around Henan’s Zhengzhou lie flatter than a slice of laobing and when heavy rains combined with a rising river bed burst nearby dikes, the Huanghe quickly overran an astounding 50,000 square miles. The declining Qing court was in no position to bail out such a massive chunk of northern China, but journalism extensive enough to record close to a million deaths after the waters had subsided, and pandemic had culled the weak and weary.
The Huanghe Flood of 1938
Third largest in the history of flooding, this disaster ranks first in infamy, and not just because it came so close on the heels of the 1931 disaster. Faced with an Imperial Japanese Army which had already captured Kaifeng and now menaced Zhengzhou, a critical rail center, Chiang Kai-shek rent the latter city’s main dike, to halt the advance ala Moses vs. the pursuing Egyptians.
In this case, however, the National Army sacrificed its own people by deluging some 21,000 square miles, a hydrocaust that easily claimed half a million Chinese lives, if not from the millions of submerged homes than from the starvation and malaria epidemic afterwards. The populace was not even notified, to enhance the strategy’s surprise element. The monstrous stroke gave Chiang Kai-shek time to prepare for and win the crucial Battle of Wuhan, but the victory is cast in dim light by its cost, even more so given the roaring silence granted this otherwise memorable episode of China’s Glorious Resistance against Japanese Aggression.
The Kaifeng Flood of 1642
Chinese leaders have used their long history for justification as often as for enlightenment. No doubt Chiang, considering his ghastly stratagem, remembered the response of the Ming dynasty to the advance of a rebel army led by peasant Li Zicheng. Imperial troops used the Huanghe to wash away Zicheng’s troops at Kaifeng. A thriving city, once China’s capital, was winnowed to half of its previous population: 600,000. Afterwards, Kaifeng was abandoned for decades, until the peerless Kangxi emperor had it rebuilt.
The Bangqiao Dam Flood of 1975
Perhaps as heartbreaking, if not as horrifying to third parties, is a flood bursting through in the face of all modern technology deployed to prevent it. Well, all modern technology limited by bureaucracy. Super-engineer Chen Xing had wanted twelve sluice gates for the Bangqiao Dam; he got five. Similar reductions in safety measures made Chen a vocal critic of his own project, in those days a true act of bravery.
Still, the dam was designed to withstand a once-per-millennium-size flood. The flood that August was a once-per-two-millennia event, a year’s worth of rain falling in just one day. The dam’s failure precipitated a chain-reaction that burst sixty-two other dams, releasing a wave ten kilometers wide and seven meters high. Both severe weather and poor communications hindered evacuation orders, and up to a quarter million Henanese downstream from Bangqiao lost their lives.
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This is the best proof of the existence of global warming! Floods – sea levels are already rising at a rate of 1 to 2mm each year due to expansion of the top layer of the oceans as they warm and the melting of the polar ice caps. The predicted rise by 2050 is between 20 and 50cm. This will cause increased flooding in coastal areas and river estuaries such as Bangladesh and the Nile Delta. London and many other British coastal cities will be threatened also.