In the summer China experienced an extremely powerful East Asian Monsoon. These frozen reservoirs melted in the spring and merged with unusually heavy rains, engorging rivers and lakes and raising the water table. The winter of 1930-1931 had been particularly harsh, leaving large deposits of snow and ice in the upper catchments of rivers. Whilst the roots of the 1931 flood lay in a slowly unfolding pattern of environmental history, the proximate cause of the disaster was extremely high levels of precipitation.
China flood death toll series#
This combination of unsustainable growth and systemic neglect culminated in a series of catastrophic floods, which struck the Yangzi basin throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, revenue intended for the construction and maintenance of the dykes was often embezzled or redirected for military spending. Although partly the result of unsustainable patterns of agricultural expansion, Zhang Jiayan argues that this crisis also reflected the entrenched political and economic difficulties experienced by governments during the late Qing and early Republic (1800s to 1928). (Accessed at The 1931 flood formed part of a hydraulic crisis that had been unfolding in the Yangzi basin since the early nineteenth century. Source: The Report of the National Flood Relief Commission These periodic crises only began to abate when the state once again began to invest in the dyke network, thereby beginning the hydraulic cycle anew. Eventually the region descended into hydraulic crisis, with low-level water control problems being punctuated by catastrophic flood disasters. As growth surpassed the limits of sustainability, the dyke network struggled to withstand the increased pressure. At the beginning of this cycle, increased expenditure on dyke networks offered communities protection from flooding, thereby facilitating widespread agricultural and economic expansion. Throughout the second millennium CE, the Middle Yangzi province of Hubei witnessed a repetitive pattern of growth and collapse, described by Pierre-Étienne Will as a “hydraulic cycle.” Later Peter Perdue identified a similar developmental pattern in neighbouring Hunan during the Ming and Qing dynasties. During periods of excessive rainfall and poor hydraulic governance, however, rising water and neglected dykes allowed rivers and lakes to reclaim the plains that had been occupied by human beings.
Under favourable meteorological and political conditions the human management of river systems gave rise to a thriving agricultural economy and stable society. Excessive deforestation, wetland reclamation, and the over-extension of river dyke networks transformed regular flood pulses, which were an integral feature of the fluvial ecosystem, into destructive inundations, which wrought chaos upon human communities. Having occupied alluvial and lacustrian plains, agriculturalists exacerbated the natural risk of inundation by transforming the landscape. Flooding was a perennial problem faced by those living in the Yangzi region. The ultimate cause of the 1931 Central China Flood lay in the long-term interaction between human communities and river basins. As such, it is referred to here as the 1931 Central China Flood. Although the flood affected much of the country the core disaster zone was concentrated in eight central provinces.
The Yellow River and Grand Canal also experienced major flooding, whilst there were lessor inundations from as far south as the Pearl River ( Zhu Jiang), which flows through the city of Guangzhou (Canton), to as far north as the Songhua and Yalu Rivers, which flow to the north of Korea.
In Chinese this event is usually described as the Yangzi-Huai Flood ( Jiang-Huai shuizai), yet the disaster was not limited to these two rivers. In 1931 Central China experienced a devastating flood that inundated an area equivalent in size of England and half of Scotland, affected the lives of an estimated 52 million people, and killed as many as 2 million.
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