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Flooding on the Yangtze River, China The Yangtze River in China is the world’s third longest river and is the longest river in Asia. Flooding on the Yangtze has happened often and occurs due to heavy rainfall in monsoon season, snowmelt and human factors. Flooding in China accounts for 70% of economic losses and many people are moved or evacuated in serious flood conditions. Flooding is a big problem for china as it becomes more developed. This map shows the course of the Yangtze River through China. (httpen.wikipedia.orgwikiFileYan gtze_River_Map.png) The Yangtze is also known as Chang Jiang and its basin takes up to one fifth of the Chinese landmass. The river stretches from it source in Qinghai province, 6300km to its mouth around shanghai. The approximate area the river drains is over 1.81 million km sq and all this contributes to a discharge of 31, 900 m (3)/s. The river is a highway through China and can transport goods of all kinds in boats and ships up its course. With the creation of the ‘Three Gorges dam’ ships and other watercraft can now travel further up the river due to the increasing of the depth behind the dam of the river and the new lock system that came with the dam. Boats passing through Shanghai along the Yangtze (httpen.wikipedia.orgwikiFile Yangtze-Ships.JPG) The last major flood was in 1998 when 3700 people died and 15million people were made homeless. The total economic losses from this flood were in the region of US$26 billion. As well as damage to industry, where factories were flooded leading to loss of goods in production and machinery, 25 million hectares of land used for agriculture was flooded. Previous flooding in 1938 was made worse by the fact that the military had damaged or destroyed protective levees and the total deaths came to around 1 million people. The area most prone to flooding is inhabited by around 50% of the Chinese population and in this area the gross industrial and agricultural product is roughly 66% of the Chinese national total. The economic losses due to flooding come to around 3-5% of China’s GDP that was lost. The Chinese government has a complex approach to flood management as the population is so large and there are many major rivers which pose flood threats. The lower reaches of china’s seven major rivers are densely inhabited and land reclamation in these lower regions has led to a loss of flood plain areas and stores of flood waters as well as losses of land which could be used fir extensive flood protection. This land could be rereleased back off of the inhabitants and used for flood protection, much like how the mass movement of people was handled when the gorges behind the ‘Three Gorges Dam’ were flooded. China’s overall flood plan is made up of the following: 1) Storage (of floodwater) in upriver sections as much as possible. 2) In the mid-course and downriver areas flood prone areas are protected against normal flooding of the major rivers 3) Use of levees and storage basins for handling extraordinary flooding 4) Preparation for floods and fighting floods before and during the flood season and relying on a well organized emergency management system. The government has tried to come up with a series of flood control systems which comprise of around 85,000 reservoirs that were constructed in the upriver regions and they are used in conjunction with irrigation and hydroelectric power generation. Part of the system is the extensive length of levees that have been created. The total length of the system of levees is around 250,000km in the middle and lower river courses and they protect 34 million hectares of land for agriculture and around 400 million people. In extraordinary events there are lakes and low valleys that regulate the excessive volume of water. There are around 100 of these together on the major rivers. China also has a large number of pumping stations which are essentially integral to the flood protection efforts and they have had an important role in alleviation of flood disasters in areas which would not naturally be able to drain themselves in the Pumping Station relieving excess flood season. These pumping stations are flood waters also used to pump water for irrigation in the dry periods. Although the Chinese government has contingency and mitigation plans for flooding this is only useful when flooding is imminent or occurring and even then the prevention of large scale effects is low as land is often Chinese military reinforcing flood lost, the recent flood and protection earthquake disturbances in 2008 showed that the Chinese government still had in capabilities and was unwilling to submit to complete salvation of the problem. With flooding still a huge threat to many of those living in the lower regions of the Yangtze and other major rivers, China still needs a future plan of action whether it be increasing flood defences or prevention of extraordinary floods occurring and that when they do they can be managed by the current infrastructure. How could these problems be addressed and in what ways could they be solved? Is the Chinese government still too unwilling to aid the people that inhabit the country it runs?