China Briefing | Untapped potential: investment in China’s flood defences could unleash growth

It’s become an annual ritual and one that’s deteriorating every year. But in 2016 it promises to be one of the worst ever.

Since June, heavy rain has battered much of the country from the south to north, triggering floods and landslides and breaching dykes.

Signs of destruction, broadcast live on national television, are evident everywhere – from villages where houses are buried in landslides and roads and bridges washed away, to big cities, such as Beijing and Wuhan, where partially submerged cars have been marooned on flooded avenues and public transport has ground to a halt. It has given rise to a new spectator sport among the cynics, called “viewing the sea” from one’s balcony.

So far more than 200 people have died or are missing as a result of the floods and landslides, while several million people have been evacuated from their homes and millions of hectares of crops damaged, inflicting losses of more than 100 billion yuan (HK$116 billion).

Yet China is bracing for even worse problems as the flooding season usually peaks in late July and the first half of August.

While officials put the blame squarely on Mother Nature and the effects of climate change, the country’s massive propaganda machine has revved up to trumpet the role of the leadership of the Communist Party in mobilising armed forces and government departments to help tackle such large-scale disasters.