Flooding Keeps China Awash in Suffering

The misery caused by China’s torrential rains has spread as the country’s northeast has become the latest region to be engulfed in rising flood waters.

As central China continues to battle the worst inundation by the Yangtze River since 1954, the province of Heilongjiang on the Sino-Russian border was awash Wednesday in water from the swollen Nen River.

Fed by huge downpours over the last several days, the Nen and its tributaries burst their banks, overflowing “one after another” in the worst season on record in the area, the official People’s Daily reported Wednesday.

There was no word on how many have perished in the deluge. But unofficial reports of dozens of people swept away by raging waters in just the last few days throw doubts on the official overall death toll of about 2,000.

Millions more have been left homeless, mostly along the Yangtze in central and eastern China, as soldiers and civilians work 24 hours a day shoring up saturated dikes in danger of collapse.

In all, the government estimates that 240 million people have already been affected by the floods--nearly the equivalent of the entire U.S. population.

“We’re going to have a big, big, big humanitarian crisis on our hands,” said Sharilyn Amy, a spokeswoman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Beijing.

The organization has launched an appeal for $4.2 million to assist flood victims; only about 40% has been collected, including a $250,000 donation from the U.S. Embassy here. Relief teams fear outbreaks of cholera and other waterborne diseases.

In the wake of the disaster, the government also has warned that it will crack down on the disorder that has broken out in flood-ravaged areas.

The Communist Party, in a sign of concern over increasing social instability, issued an emergency circular Tuesday calling on armed police to patrol hard-hit areas and to punish severely those caught looting and price-gouging.

Some of the unrest has been directed at the government itself. Residents have complained of sloth by local officials and of little warning time to evacuate.

Many resisted leaving when the government deliberately detonated dikes in Jianli county to divert water away from the industrial city of Wuhan farther downstream. Vast swaths of farmland were swamped while Wuhan, with a population of 7 million, was spared major damage.

“Everything they own is in their home. Most of them are subsistence farmers, so they are not overly keen to leave,” Amy said. “They want to be close; they want to keep an eye on things.”

The floods, a perennial problem in China, have caused more than $4 billion in damage so far this year, leading some economists to forecast that China’s annual growth rate could drop by as much as a percentage point when the final toll is tallied. Factories as well as farms have been inundated.

“The worst flooding in four decades is having a considerable negative influence on the industrial sector,” Ye Zhen, a government spokesman, told the state-run China Daily in its Wednesday edition. Industrial output should have exceeded 8% in the first half of 1998 but had only reached 7.8%, he said.

The hardest-hit areas include the provinces of Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Anhui, Jiangxi and Jiangsu.

On the washed-out shores of Dongting Lake in Hunan, a catch basin for the Yangtze, at least 300,000 people have set up makeshift shelters of tents and plastic sheeting on the levees.

Four flood crests have already barreled down the Yangtze since the flooding began; more rain on the river’s upper reaches has people bracing for a fifth surge.

Government newscasts have devoted large blocks of time to flood coverage, but they focus mainly on the heroic rescue and dike-fortifying efforts of the People’s Liberation Army, as well as deliver messages of sympathy from top leaders.

Provincial officials have been reluctant to allow foreign media in to report on the disaster.

“They could violate Chinese law if they move around here without official permission,” Zhang Yanfang, a spokesman for the endangered city of Jiujiang, told the New China News Agency.