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The flooding this year in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River was the worst since 1998. But many experts say the resulting devastation was far less severe than it would have been a few years ago, thanks to "greener" policies on the floodplain promoted in recent years by Premier Zhu Rongji.

Many experts also say – and have been arguing for years – that the Three Gorges dam is and always will be useless in preventing the kind of flood that occurred this year around Dongting Lake in Hunan province, 500 kilometres downstream of the dam.

The 2002 flood was the most common type on the river, caused by incessant rain falling in areas downstream of the dam – and combining with floodwater from rain-swollen tributaries that join the main channel of the Yangtze below the dam.

News stories about Yangtze flooding frequently repeat dam proponents’ flood-control claims for the Three Gorges project. "The controversial Three Gorges Dam now under construction upstream is meant to bring the Yangtze under control, but that will not be finished until 2009," BBC News Online said in an Aug 25 report. The same point was made in a Reuters dispatch the following day (in "Chinese peasants brace for lake flood peak, mood calm").

What neither story made clear is that the Three Gorges dam could be of no use in controlling this summer’s floods around Dongting Lake, which were caused by heavy rainfall in the local area – hundreds of kilometres downstream of the dam.

More than 4,000 people – including about 1,000 in the Yangtze River valley – died nationwide in the 1998 floods. This year, about 1,500 people died in floods across the country, but no fatalities were recorded in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze, the Xinhua news agency said yesterday.

Wang Shucheng, China’s Minister of Water Resources and vice-director of the national flood-control bureau, said during a recent inspection tour of the flood-hit region in Hunan that he was happy to report that none of the embankments along the river or around Dongting Lake had collapsed this year. He attributed this to better preparation for this summer’s inundation, which included the dyke-strengthening program that has been a central plank of the floodplain policies promoted by Premier Zhu.

Mr. Wang said that focusing on the construction of high dams and big reservoirs to reduce flood risks is not a good idea. The water minister criticized officials "who are used to spending big money on building dams and reservoirs" but who ignore flood-management strategies "that can achieve harmony between people and nature." Building modern, flood-control management systems is "much more important" than building dams, Mr. Wang was quoted as saying in a Sept. 3 report in China Coal Industry News (Zhongguo meitan bao).

After the severe floods of 1998, Premier Zhu – who is no great fan of the Three Gorges project – pledged to address the flooding problem in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River by banning logging in the upper reaches and investing tens of billions of yuan in fortifying the river’s 3,500 kilometres of embankments.

The plan also called for moving 2.5 million people out of flood-prone areas in Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and Anhui provinces, to restore some of the original Yangtze floodplain and make more room for floodwater when it arrives.

China has spent 40 billion yuan (almost US$5 billion) on strengthening the Yangtze dykes since 1998, according to Cai Qihua, head of the Changjiang Water Resources Commission. "As a result, the reinforced embankments … are still in good shape, despite the fact that this year’s flood situation is quite similar to that in 1998," Ms. Cai was quoted as saying in an Aug. 29 report carried by the official Chinese media.

Dongting Lake – China’s second-largest freshwater lake, and bigger than Luxembourg – is a major focus of the campaign to restore the Yangtze floodplain. While cropland has been carved out of the lake for centuries, the process accelerated in the past 50 years as state development policies and population growth put increasing pressure on China’s wetlands. As a result, the lake’s ability to accommodate surplus water during the annual flood season has been drastically reduced.

Edouard Vermeer, a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands who is an expert on China’s water resources, says farming practices upstream of Dongting also led to soil erosion that helped to shrink the vast lake. "The lake has been reduced in size by about 80 per cent since 1950, so what used to be a natural catchment area for the Yangtze River has now become very shallow indeed," BBC News Online quoted Prof. Vermeer as saying.

Government policies that are aimed at reversing the damage include a ban on upstream logging, subsidies to encourage the conversion of farmland to forest along the river, and relocation of people from areas most at risk of flooding. "In all fairness, the Chinese government has done a lot since 1998. But one should realize that it’s a huge river and the problems go back centuries," Prof. Vermeer said.

Flood-management strategies that focus on environmental rather than engineering solutions – and that are now favoured by senior Chinese leaders centred around Premier Zhu – have long been promoted by Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Chen Guojie, among others. Prof. Chen, who works at the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment in Chengdu, Sichuan province, outlines his ideas in a book on Yangtze floods published by Beijing’s Sciences Press. (Chen Guojie’s chapter in the 1999 book is now available in English for the first time, on Three Gorges Probe.)

Prof. Chen describes the different types of Yangtze floods – including this year’s typical scenario, in which the inundation in the middle and lower reaches of the river was caused by heavy rainfall in that area. This kind of flood "must not be underestimated," he writes. "And, more significantly, the Three Gorges dam currently under construction will be totally useless against this type of Yangtze flood disaster."

"Successfully managing sedimentation will greatly reduce the risks brought about by floods in the river basin," Prof. Chen writes. Tree-planting along the banks of the river in the upper reaches will help prevent the soil erosion that raises the riverbed and forces dykes to be built ever higher (thus increasing the danger should the embankment ever collapse).

In the middle and lower reaches, meanwhile, "the focus needs to be on making more room for floodwater to pass, by returning some farmland to the floodplain, controlling population growth and farmland expansion in some areas, strengthening the dykes along the river, and so forth.

"Finally, and more importantly, perhaps, we should seek a new development path for the entire river valley based on the philosophy and principles of sustainable development," Prof. Chen writes.

"I would argue for a shift away from the development model that has concentrated on traditional agricultural, toward a new strategy that focuses on developing sustainable tourism, organic foods, herbal medicine, and low-impact animal husbandry and hydropower. The key to successfully dealing with the Yangtze flood problem lies in following a sustainable development path that meets socio-economic development goals while also protecting the environment."