1931 China floods

In the summer of 1931 the Yangtze, Huai and Yellow river systems of central and eastern China flooded on a huge scale. Dikes broke, farmland disappeared under water, and the city of Wuhan stayed flooded for about three months. Tens of millions of people were affected. Estimates of the dead range from about 400,000 to as many as four million, with a figure near two million often cited, mostly from drowning and then from famine and diseases such as cholera and typhoid.¹²

The weather did the first work. A severe winter left heavy snow in the mountains, spring melt swelled the rivers, and unusually heavy rains and a run of storms in July and August fell on already full channels. But human factors made the damage worse. Wetlands that once absorbed floods had been drained for farmland, forests were cleared upstream, and dikes were poorly maintained. The Nationalist government in Nanjing, formed in 1927 and still fighting warlords and Communists, and had little capacity for relief. A National Flood Relief Commission, led by the finance minister T. V. Soong, coordinated aid, helped by a foreign loan of American wheat.¹³

The disaster struck just before Japan's invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, further straining the government. Later governments invested heavily in dikes, reservoirs and hydrological monitoring on the Yangtze, a policy trend that led to the Three Gorges Dam, completed in 2006.¹