China mobilizes mass anti-flood effort
By Deirdre Griswold
A disaster seems to have been averted at Dongting Lake on
the Yangtze River in China's Hunan province. Although
torrential rains caused the lake to rise six feet above the
danger level, a huge effort by soldiers and civilians kept it
from bursting its banks and engulfing the 10 million people who
live in the area.
As of Aug. 26, according to the South China Morning Post,
the flood surge had moved downriver to the city of Wuhan.
Officials were cautioning that although the dyke system there
appeared to hold, efforts to strengthen the flood control
system should continue.
Zhou Guiying, 50, said, "We're still a little bit worried
because the waters have not gone down much. There are no plans
to go home. We're staying on the dykes just in case."
China has mobilized 1.1 million civilians and soldiers in a
Herculean effort to hold back the floodwaters. So far, this has
prevented a repeat of the disastrous 1998 floods, when Dongting
Lake burst it banks and killed 100 people.
China for centuries suffered periodic floods alternating
with droughts that resulted in great loss of life and
destruction of property. One of the first accomplishments of
the revolutionary Communist government--which came to power in
1949 after carrying out a prolonged struggle against feudal
rule, expropriating the landlords and encouraging collective
work on the land--was to mobilize millions in building dams and
dykes for flood control and irrigation.
In recent years, China, like many other parts of the world,
has been suffering from more extreme weather as greenhouse
gases emitted mostly in the Western imperialist countries cause
global warming. Even as floods ravage southeastern China, much
of the north and west of the country are experiencing serious
drought.
Mass mobilization, however, and the spending of $1 billion
since 1998 on strengthening the flood control infrastructure,
have prepared China better than most other developing countries
to deal with these grave problems.
An enormous project is now on the drawing board to divert
water from the Yangtze to parched northern regions of the
country through three 1,000-mile-long canal systems. At an
estimated cost to the Chinese government of $58 billion, this
will dwarf any other water-moving project in the world, and
will take many years to complete.
Reprinted from the Sept. 5, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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