People living in Wuhan, the central Chinese city that bore the brunt of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, have been told stay indoors once more after record rainfall prompted authorities to raise the city’s emergency response to the second highest-level.
A prolonged period of heavy rain is the latest disaster to strike China, where people are only just recovering from the coronavirus outbreak.
State media have been accused of downplaying the severity of the floods, emphasising the heroic efforts of emergency workers by publishing prominent images of soldiers rescuing trapped residents.
Residents waded waist-deep along waterlogged streets in Wuhan, filled after a record 426mm (16.8 inches) fell between Sunday and Monday morning. Authorities raised the four-tier emergency warning to level two on Monday, predicting more severe weather in the coming days.
The country is braced for more flooding, after weeks of what has been for some regions the heaviest rainfall in decades triggered severe flooding and mudslides in almost every province, affecting more than 20 million people and resulting in direct economic losses of at least £4.7bn.
China’s national weather service has issued rainstorm warnings for more than 31 consecutive days. “This has rarely been seen in recent years,” the state-run People’s Daily wrote on Weibo. At least 121 people have died or gone missing and more than 875,000 people have been forced to relocate, according to China’s ministry of emergency management. But internet users have questioned why the rains have received so little attention.
“Why does our official media say nothing about the severe floods in the south of our country,” one user wrote on Weibo. Another said: “The topic of flooding is like a tattoo – covered up.”
Mingbai Zhishi, an independent social media account or “self media”, wrote: “The floods raging in the south will not be quiet, but unlike in the past, the media are not rushing to report it. It really is quiet.”
Several areas of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital, have already flooded. Torrential rain in Jingmen flooded shops and supermarkets. Helen Hai, 25, in Changyang county east of Wuhan in Hubei province, described driving and passing landslides and rocks falling along the mountain roads. The windscreen wipers were useless against the fast and constant downpour.
“It was like driving blind, like driving in the water,” Hai said. The rains, which flooded areas like hers last weekend, were unceasing. “The rain poured non-stop from morning until night. It was very frightening and I feel it is very unusual.”
Elsewhere, in the city of Tongren in Guizhou province in the mountainous south-west, the floods formed a giant waterfall in the city centre. In Chongqing, in Sichuan province, more than 100,000 people were evacuated as dozens of homes were destroyed.
On 29 June, after weeks of heavy rains and floods, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, gave his first public statement on the crisis, calling on the country to “put people first and value people’s lives most in the fight against the floods”, according to the official news agency Xinhua.
Experts say officials are also obscuring the danger of the dams in rivers across southern and south-western China where the floods have been the worst. “This is their tradition. They never disclose how the disaster is made or why it has happened,” said Wang Weiluo, a Chinese hydrologist and outspoken critic of the giant Three Gorges hydroelectricity plant.
“Most people think floods are caused by extreme weather but it is mainly caused by the discharge of reservoirs and the result of flood control works,” he said.
Wang believes the actual losses may be greater than official reports. The recent example of the coronavirus outbreak, where authorities at first did not disclose the risk of contagion and punished whistleblowers such as Li Wenliang, a doctor, is instructive, according to Wang.
“Blocking information is the beginning of a disaster. Any flood starts when the information is blocked. Just like Li Wenliang said: ‘A healthy society should not only have one voice.’ “In China, there is only one voice of the central meteorological station and when that one is wrong, everyone gets the wrong information.”
Hai is not surprised that the authorities would want to downplay the crisis. “It is very common. They have been doing this for a long time, not just with flooding but also other problems,” she said. “It is hard for me to judge the government data but I tend to expect the real situation is worse than they claim.”