World Perspective / CHINA : Reforms May Make Weather Disasters Worse : Summer floods have killed 4,300 people and droughts have withered crops. With forced labor in decline, rural infrastructure has suffered.

When Typhoon Fred ripped into coastal Zhejiang province late last month, killing 700 and leaving 2 million people besieged by high waters, it marked just the latest in a string of floods and droughts afflicting China this summer.

With a total of 4,300 people already killed by summer flooding, and weeks to go before the rainy season ends, this has been an especially bad year for natural disasters in China.

Nine typhoons have hit the country, compared with five or six in an average year.

Stunned wonderment is the typical response of officials and ordinary people alike to the sudden devastation of the floods.

“The deluge was so serious that it could happen only once in a century. People were not prepared,” Li Dingkun, director of Hunan province’s Civil Affairs Bureau, said after 10 million people in Hunan were hit by flooding.

But what is often called “freak” weather strikes in parts of the country annually. More than 1,000 people were killed by floods last year, and in 1991, the worst year in recent times, 5,113 people were killed, according to official statistics.

As the death tolls and economic losses mount, more voices are being raised to say that something is wrong besides the weather.

While market-oriented reforms engineered since 1978 by senior leader Deng Xiaoping have transformed China’s economy, boosting rural output and bringing new prosperity to cities, the dismantling of the communes also made it more difficult in many areas to organize the construction or maintenance of dams, dikes and water irrigation channels.

Farmers were freed to concentrate on maximizing production from their own plots of land. Village and town officials turned their attention to building rural industry.

But effective ways of replacing the forced labor of the past were often lacking.

As a result, in many parts of the country, maintenance and improvement of rural infrastructure took the back seat. Meanwhile, in some areas, population pressures led to the planting of fields and even building of homes in areas known to be vulnerable to flooding.

Now, when disasters strike, even relief funds may be subject to skimming by corrupt officials.

When the Ministry of Civil Affairs announced last month that it was providing $81 million in disaster aid, it warned that the money should go for food, clothing, housing and medical care of truly needy people.

“Anyone found to have embezzled, diverted or misused the funds will face extremely harsh punishment,” the ministry declared.

Typhoon Fred was especially destructive in Wenzhou, a freewheeling commercial city in Zhejiang that has prospered under free-market reforms. Buildings collapsed, and widespread flooding was caused by broken dams. Embankments along the coast and rivers broke at 770 places, official reports said.

Hardest hit this summer have been half a dozen southern and eastern provinces.

In Guangxi province, next to Vietnam, about 6 million people were reported temporarily homeless from the rains. Economic losses in the province were estimated at more than $4 billion.

“The lesson we have learned from this disaster is that strong flood control measures are vital, and that we have not put enough effort into flood control works,” said Wei Shaojin, a top Guangxi official.

Floods have caused nationwide damage estimated at $17.4 billion so far this year, the official China News Service reported Wednesday. This means economic losses this year are even worse than in 1991, it said.

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In north China, meanwhile, peasants in many areas have seen crops wither and die for lack of rain.

The seriousness of the problem was acknowledged by Premier Li Peng at a recent top-level government conference, according to the official New China News Agency.

“This year’s natural disasters have taught us once again that water conservancy is the lifeblood of agriculture,” Li said, describing improvement of water conservancy projects as a “burning task” for the coming years.