China’s Xi visits flood-hit Anhui Province in sign that summer conclave is over

China warned that the massive Three Gorges Dam faced its largest-ever flood surge, as President Xi Jinping toured one of the areas hardest hit by a wave of flooding this summer.

Some 74,000 cubic meters (2.6 million cubic feet) of water per second was expected flow into the Three Gorges reservoir and the Cuntan area in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River on Wednesday and Thursday, the Ministry of Water Resources said. The peak flow was expected to be the most severe since in almost four decades and largest since the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the ministry said.

The dam, which has held back the Yangtze in Hubei province since its completion in 2006, is the world’s biggest power plant and is five times the size of the Hoover Dam in Nevada. Since June, the structure has weathered a bout of severe flooding that has affected more than 63 million people nationwide and caused some 178 billion yuan ($26 billion) of economic damage, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management.

On Tuesday, Xi inspected flood-control measures on the Huai River, another flood-prone waterway in the adjacent Anhui province. Xi urged efforts to modernize flood prevention measures, adding that China had been “fighting natural disasters for millennia,” according to official Xinhua News Agency.

“We will need to continue the fight,” Xi said. “This fight needs to respect nature, and follow the law of nature, and to co-exist with nature harmoniously.”

The floodgate that Xi visited in Fuyang city was near a flood-diversion area where authorities released 375 million cubic meters of water last month, submerging dozens of villages and swamping thousands of hectares of crops. The release of flood water in Anhui’s Mengwa area on July 20 marked the first time in 13 years that authorities had taken such action.

Floods in China’s key farming areas, together with supply disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic and locust swarms, have prompted Xi to launch a national campaign to curb food waste. The trip by Xi on Tuesday highlighted the risk not just life and property, but also the ruling Communist Party, which has been criticized for past struggles to control the country’s flood-prone rivers.

The tour represented Xi’s first public appearance since July 31, when he attended a ceremony marking the completion of China’s BeiDou satellite-navigation system. Such mid-August re-appearances by top leaders are widely anticipated each year as confirmation that the Communist Party’s annual summer meetings in the resort area of Beidaihe have wrapped up, although state media rarely comments on the gathering.

The record floods were unlikely to cause major safety risks to the Three Gorges Dam, the state-run Science Daily has reported, citing its maximum inflow capacity of 98,800 cubic meters per second. Yet as the Three Gorges accelerates discharges to prepare for the inflows, downstream areas of the Yangtze face increased risk of flooding.

Chongqing, the sprawling Southwestern city sitting on the upper reaches of Yangtze, has raised its emergency response level to the highest level. On Tuesday, water lapped at the feet of a 1,000-year-old giant Buddha sculpture along the river for the first time in more than 70 years, illustrating the extent of the unprecedented floods.