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Combating floods
political and economic rewards”, he wrote in People’s Tribune, an official magazine.
A broader concern for China is that America and its allies are getting better at coordinating efforts to counterbalance Chinese economic and military heft. The g7’s plan was launched two days before the 30 members of nato agreed at a summit to include threats posed by China in a blueprint for its future strategy. The summit was also attended for the first time by the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. A few days earlier, America and four of its closest allies launched yet another initiative, the Partners in the Blue Pacific pact, aimed at offsetting Chinese influence in the Pacific islands.
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In public, China has been dismissive of such efforts. “What the international community wants to see is real money and projects that actually benefit the people,” said Zhao Lijian, a spokesman, after the pgii was launched. Privately, though, some Chinese experts worry that such Western efforts are gaining pace just as China’s image has been tarnished by its zerocovid strategy and support for Russia in Ukraine.
Yet there are reasons to be sceptical of the g7’s plan, too. It is a repackaging of an idea called Build Back Better World that was launched at the group’s summit last year. The rebranding was partly due to Mr Biden’s failure to win congressional support for his domestic Build Back Better initiative, Western officials say. But they also concede that there was little progress in implementing the international plan.
The g7’s plan has roots, too, in an even earlier initiative, the Blue Dot Network, which was started by America, Japan and Australia in 2019 but has made little headway, in part because of differences over climate change. There are also overlaps with the eu’s Global Gateway scheme, launched in December to “mobilise” €300bn ($340bn) in infrastructure investment by 2027, and Britain’s Clean Green Initiative, unveiled a month earlier with a pledge of £3bn ($4.1bn) for sustainable infrastructure in developing countries.
Western officials say these efforts are complementary. But some observers see a lack of new money on offer. They worry that inflation and domestic politics will limit state funding, and the private sector will be wary of investing in unstable countries. “One has to wonder if this isn’t all just too little, too late,” said Matt Ferchen of the Leiden Asia Centre in the Netherlands.
In one indication of how the g7 will try to meet its $600bn goal, the White House listed several ongoing projects that were retroactively included. China did the same when it launched the bri. But the g7 will need to show more substantial results fast if it is to convince developing countries that it offers a better alternative to China’s new Silk Road, rather than a dead end. n
Floods Above the water line
Y I N G D E Improved planning means fewer people are dying from floods
As the waters submerged her village’s ancestral shrine, Yu Jingyu and her family put their chickens upstairs and fled to the upper floor of their neighbour’s taller house. In the bambooclad hills of Yingde, in the southern province of Guangdong, locals say these are the worst floods they have ever seen. The nearby river has risen to its highest level since records began in 1951. “Everything is gone,” says Ms Yu, cradling her baby.
Yet there have been no reported deaths in Yingde in June and July, despite the severity of the flooding. This is telling. Between 1990 and 1999, there were more than 1,000 deaths across China from flooding and landslides every year and, in three of those years, more than 3,000. Since 2011 the toll has topped 1,000 only twice. Data are imperfect and the government tries to hide its failures. But experts agree that the downward trend in deaths from flooding is clear, even though overall levels of precipitation have remained steady and, for the past three years at least, there have been more “intense rain events”.
There are a few reasons for this. First, the Communist Party has spent lavishly to respond to emergencies, especially since a devastating earthquake in 2008, says Scott Moore of the University of Pennsylvania. “Highprofile disasters were perceived as being significant challenges to the Party’s ability to protect the people, which of course it claims to do,” he says. Political pressure means disaster response has become one of the few areas where government departments work well together, he says. Rescue efforts by heroic officials and soldiers also provide good propaganda.
The government has got much better at moving people to safety. In 2020’s rainy season, 4.7m people were evacuated from floods, nearly 50% more than the average of the previous five years. More accurate weather forecasts and fast communications are crucial. Villagers in Yingde were warned on WeChat, a ubiquitous messaging app, that a flood was coming and they should be ready to flee.
The thousands of dams and dykes built over the past few decades are also lifesavers. So many of them block China’s big rivers that officials are running out of good sites to build new ones. The infrastructure came with huge costs in concrete, forced resettlement and damage to the environment. But officials can now protect big cities by holding floodwaters upstream and staggering their release. Not everyone benefits. “The logic is to protect more populated regions,” says Ma Jun, an environmentalist. “But this may induce a cost upstream.” In Yingde some grumbled that their villages were used as a reservoir to protect Guangzhou, a city downriver.
Despite lower death tolls, China’s ageold battle against floods is likely to get harder as extreme weather becomes more common. China is “probably the most exposed of any large country or economy” to climate risks, says Mr Moore. For one thing, river dams do not protect against rising sea levels. More investment in building sea walls will be needed, he says.
Upstream dams do not help much if enough rain falls directly on cities, overwhelming storm drains and sewers. Making cities more absorbent with parks and wetlands can help. China has invested billions of yuan in creating such “sponge cities”. But even these struggle to cope if rains are too intense, says Faith Chan of the University of Nottingham in Ningbo. Floods that killed around 400 last year in Zhengzhou, a showcase sponge city, came after a year’s worth of rain fell in three days.
And although China has reduced deaths from rising waters, it is poorly prepared for the economic damage that they bring. Floods in 2021 caused $23bn in losses, second only to Europe. Only 10% of those losses were insured, according to estimates by Swiss Re, a reinsurance firm. In Europe, in contrast, 32% of losses from floods were insured last year.
Ms Yu and others in Yingde say the floods have cost them tens of thousands of yuan. Most make around 3,000 yuan ($440) a month and few have insurance. What they do possess is the stoicism of the ages in the face of tragedy. “If there’s rice we’ll eat rice,” says one. “And if there’s just porridge, then we’ll eat porridge.” n
