Inter Press Service
December 13, 2005

The flood crests surging down the Yangtze present a political test for Premier Zhu Rongji and his supporters, who have been trying to take the greener path to ease the toll of perennial summer floods.

Beijing: The flood crests surging down the mighty Yangtze river and threatening to wreak havoc in China’s heartland present a political test for Premier Zhu Rongji and his supporters, who have been trying to take the greener path to ease the toll of perennial summer floods. In response to the devastating 1998 floods, which caused damages estimated at $36 billion and killed — by official estimates –some 4,000 people, Zhu radically switched China’s traditional approach to flooding from the engineering solution to the environmental. He decreed a logging ban on the upper reaches of the Yangtze to curb soil erosion, and ordered 2.5 million peasants to move from their homes in the river’s Jiangnan flood plain in order to restore the lakes to their size of 50 years ago. In 1998, Premier Zhu declared the surging waters a national emergency, mobilized the army and came close to blowing up the Yangtze dikes to protect the big industrial cities in the plain, such as Wuhan and Yueyang. Moreover, the premier seized an opportunity and tried to undertake a policy reversal in dealing with China’s summer scourge. His order for restoration of vast areas of lake and wetlands was something unprecedented in Chinese communist history. Under the slogan “Return the field, restore the lake, build towns,” Zhu also asked communities to plant trees and recreate the wetlands around one of the regions most at risk, the Jiangnan plain around Dongting Lake between Hunan and Hubei provinces in central China. Four years later with many of the people who live on land reclaimed by the Dongting Lake gone, Zhu’s strategy is paying off. “This month’s rain has come fast and the coverage area has been very wide,” says Yu Changming, deputy director of Hunan’s flood control office. “But because of the steps we’ve taken since 1998, we’ve been able to successfully fight back the waters.”