Quotes of the Day
Orange island no longer lives up to its name. The citrus trees that once grew here have long given way to a dense warren of houses and shops. And in recent days, the Xiang River's mustard-colored waters have submerged much of the island itself. Anxious residents in skiffs and rafts paddle their belongings to higher ground or to the river bank a few hundred meters away. A dozen families live in the open air on a concrete sidewalk within sight of their flooded homes and businesses. Rao Houxing stacks a few crates of soda and soy milk that he's salvaged from his shop for thirsty neighbors who are reduced to washing their clothes in a river that now flows down the street. Rao glances at his flooded shop, Great Bridge Foodstuffs, and shrugs at the irony. "I'll need a bridge just to reach it," he says.
The rains descended on Asia last week, the peak of the summer monsoon season, and in their wake came death, destruction, and the fear of much worse to come. Tens of thousands of homes have been flooded in northern Vietnam, and an estimated total of 23 million people have been displaced in Nepal, India and Bangladesh. China was the most dangerously poised: the mighty Yangtze River swelled ominously, and the government claimed to have mobilized a million soldiers and civilians to bolster dikes around Dongting lake. By week's end, there was little evidence of immediate danger, but if the lake breaks its banks, the homes of some 10 million people in central Hunan province will be endangered.
On inundated Orange Island, which sits 75 kilometers from Dongting Lake, there were no tears and little anger. This is the fifth time in a decade that the Yangtze and its tributaries have threatened to turn much of eastern China into a lake. Nobody has died on Orange Island this year, although rising water and landslides have killed a thousand people across China since June. (Another quarter of a million, say government officials, have fled for higher ground as floods destroyed 27,000 homes.) This year's flooding doesn't compare to the devastation in 1998, when 4,000 people perished. As the weather improved at the end of the week, it seemed that disaster would be averted. But rains predicted on the Yangtze's upper reaches this week could send another surge of water into the swollen river.
The results were predictably disastrous. The surrounding countryside lost its ability to absorb water from the Yangtze as it flowed from the Tibetan plateau to Shanghai, passing 400 million people along the way. The government tried building dikes and sluices; its ultimate solution, the Three Gorges Dam, is now under construction upriver in Sichuan province. Yet even that grand ambition—turning the upper Yangtze into the world's biggest reservoir—probably won't stop downstream flooding in Hunan, which has four major rivers of its own that often overflow their banks.
The frequent disasters made the government look ineffectual, and that forced Premier Zhu Rongji, himself a Hunan native, to take action in 1998. According to Liang Haitang, a Hunan-based supervisor for WWF, an international conservation organization, Zhu dreamed up "the wisest flood control policy ever issued."
His order, eight lines that read more like a poem than a proclamation, stressed "New homes for the people" and "Provide livelihoods not relief." The aim is, in effect, to go with the flow. The government will move millions of people out of the flood plain around Dongting Lake. Many will give up rice farming for other businesses. Where their homes once stood will be a chain of shallow lakes and wetlands that can absorb the water that surges down the Yangtze and other rivers. Already 1.8 million people have moved, with another million expected to pack up over the coming year. That's roughly twice the number the government is forcibly relocating to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A trip along the lake's southwest corner in recent days showed huge inundated areas where villages had been moved uphill, allowing the government to flood the region without risking life or property. (In addition, dikes have been strengthened and logging banned on the Yangtze's upper reaches: deforestation is a major factor in China's flooding phenomenon.)
Those changes have brought Hu Yunxing's life full circle. Starting in 1972, when she was a 30-year-old peasant living on a commune, Hu spent years hauling sacks of earth to reclaim land as Chairman Mao had ordered. A pumping station worked day and night to lift water from her fields over a dike and into Dongting Lake. But the dike ruptured in 1996 and swept away Hu's earthen house. Her family rebuilt it in brick, which they thought would withstand anything. Then the flood that hit two years later took half of the house away again. "I dreamed of moving higher, but we had no money," she says.
Hu, 67, is finally at peace. The government paid $2,000 to her family to dismantle what was left of their home and rebuild it a few hundred meters away—beyond where the water could reach. The authorities then shut the pumping station and left the dike to rot. The wetland she had once labored to destroy has returned to water; where her old house once stood, her son has floated a huge cage to raise fish. Migratory birds, such as rare swans and spoonbills, have returned to the area. WWF lent Hu enough money to buy a sow, which will give birth in three weeks. Her new ash-colored cement house is hardly palatial—there's a gaping hole where the front door should be because the family ran out of money to finish building. But for the first time in her life, Hu says, "I'm not afraid of the water."
For the policy to work, the locals have to cooperate as Hu did. Some refuse. They pocket the government's money, but leave the pumps running and continue planting in the flood plain. When the government breaches a dike, villagers sometimes repair it so they can continue sowing. "These lands are only half restored," says Yu Xiubo of the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Sciences. But the program is still new. "It takes time," says Jim Harkness, China director for WWF, "for people to lose their nervousness at giving up rice farming." China may have helped create the flood problem that plagues its central region each summer—but at least it has a plan to hold the waters back.
- By Matthew Forney/Yuanjiang
- China struggles to quell flooding and counter the disastrous effects of Maoist agro-policies