Gathering monsoon challenges China afresh, flash floods hit its struggling economy hard

Central and southern China were on high alert for more flash floods on Friday as the annual East Asia monsoon gathered pace and extreme rainfall threatened disruption in the world’s second-largest economy.

Red alerts, the first for this year, were issued late on Thursday covering the provinces of Anhui, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou, and Guangxi region, state news agency Xinhua reported, citing the water resources ministry and national weather forecaster.

Extreme rainfall and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges for policymakers as they threaten to overwhelm ageing flood defences, displace millions, and wreak havoc on China’s $2.8 trillion agricultural sector.

China’s rainy season, which arrived earlier than usual this year in early June, is usually followed by intense heat that scorches any crops that survive waterlogged soil, depletes reservoirs, and warps roads and other infrastructure.

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Economic losses from natural disasters exceeded $10 billion last July, when the rainfall typically peaks.

Damage was triple that amount in 2020 when China endured one of its longest rainy seasons in decades, lashed by rain for more than 60 days, or about three weeks longer than usual.

On Thursday, heavy rain in southern Hunan triggered the largest floods since 1998 in the upper and lower reaches of the Lishui River after its water levels breached the safety mark by more than two metres.

Videos uploaded to Douyin, as TikTok is known in China, show the river spilling onto main roads and carrying debris downstream.

In the hilly metropolis of southwestern Chongqing, apartment blocks were submerged in muddy waters and some vehicles were swept away as floods gushed down streets, according to state media on Thursday. In some cases, the waters almost reached the top of power lines.

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Nearly 300 people were evacuated from towns and villages in a mountainous county in Chongqing, where cumulative daily rainfall had reached 304 mm (12 inches), with at least one local river swelling by 19 metres due to converging precipitation from the mountains, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

On Wednesday, power supply was disrupted in the city of Zhaoqing in southern Guangdong province as flood waters rose more than five metres above warning levels, breaking historical records, local media reported.