CHINA’S CALAMITY

Evening Star, Issue 20958, 24 November 1931, Page 9

CHINA’S CALAMITY

GREATEST MODERN FLOOD It is difficult for people in Britain to realise at all vividly.the extent and terrible effect of the floods in China (says the ‘Glasgow Herald’). The standards set by experience or knowledge in the valleys of the Thames, the Tweed, or the Spey break down utterly when one is confronted with the astronomical size of statistics frpm the afflicted riverine areas in the immense Eastern country. But a glimmer of the reality may be obtained when one realises that the area flooded in the Yaug-tso Valley is almost a hundred miles longer than the length' of Great Britain, and that x-eliable observers state that from steamers in the actual channel of the river no land is visible other than the tops of occasional hills. To complete the picture, the Hwangho also in flood, though not so disastrously as its great sister river to the south, and the Grand Canal joining the two rivers has overflowed its banks. Moreover, the Yang-tse is still rising, and at Hankow the level of the water was 57ft llin above the' normal. The calamity is already regarded as the worst of its kind in the history cf China, and from all appearances it has not yet reached its maximum. By comparison, all other calamities due to natural causes in recent history seem of little account. The disaster had an immediate and natural origin in an exceptionally heavy rainfall in the region of the Upper Yang-tse at the time when the river and its tributaries are normally flooded by the melted snows from the mountains of Szech-wan and Eastern Tibet. Tk > Yang-tse is unfitted to carry an unusually big volume of flood water, because its hanks and the embankments parallel to them have throughout the long period of China's history been so built up owing to the silting of the channel that the bed of the river is now higher in many places than the level of the surrounding country. Instead of being sunk below; the level 1

of the land, like the Clyde or the Manchester Ship Canal, the Yaug-tso is raised as upon a viaduct. Henco when a break occurs in the banks or the river overflows, the inundation assumes dangerous proportions. The present exceptional Hoods are* however, not caused by natural agency, alone. A human one exists- It appears that since the time of the Chinese devolution the river banks and adjacent embankments have been consistently neglected, there having been, we suppose, no settled authority appointed to keep then! in repair during the recent period of internecine strife.The rampant flood waters naturally, found out _ the weak spots, and so ft may be said that the Chinese ate paying in terrible fashion for the neglect of an age-old duty. Already the death roll has assumed alarming proportions, and about 10,000,000 people have been rendered homeless. Other major effects ara famine, a tremendous plague of mosquitoes, and the imminent peril of pestilence, which is being augmented by a hcawave. Famine is inevitable; it may oven continue throughout the. winter and well on into next year if aid does not come t to the people from without. And the inhabitants of the Yang-tse region will not be the only victims, for the region is > the principal granary of China, and in ilormal times supplies half of China’s teeming millions With' food. Hence the outlook before everyone iu the central and southern provinces - s serious in the extreme.