Fighting the Floods, Together

Relief efforts move into higher gear in response to worst floods along the Yangtze River in decades

- Ge Lijun

Shoveling sand, filling bags with it, and then piling them up one by one on the dam... A video of a petite girl fighting deluge caught the attention of Chinese Internet users in early July. The heroine, Xu Xin, a college student from Jiangxi Province, southeast China, was called in to help protect her village in Jiujiang, a city on the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, from being submerged. Home to more than 46 million people, Jiangxi was the most flood-affected province in China in mid July. According to Zheng Guoguang, Vice Minister of Emergency Management, this year’s average precipitation in areas along the Yangtze is the highest since 1961, up 51 percent from previous years.

In south and east China, the waters of the Yangtze and Huaihe rivers, and Dongting, Poyang and Taihu lakes along the Yangtze, all exceeded alert levels in early July due to continuous downpours. Regions including Chongqing, Jiangxi, Anhui, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu and Zhejiang were affected by severe flooding, causing casualties and property losses.

Safeguarding communities

Xu’s home village is located in the town of Jiangzhou, which has a population of over 7,000. Most of them are seniors and women, as a large number of young people and men have left to study or work in the cities. Faced with the increasingly severe flooding, on July 10, Jiangzhou called on its expatriates to return home and join in the fight against the floods via the Internet. In two days, nearly 3,000 people answered the call.