1931 China Floods: The Yangtze and Huai River Catastrophe

The 1931 China floods were a series of catastrophic floods on the Yangtze, Huai and Yellow rivers in the summer of 1931. Water covered an area of roughly 180,000 square kilometres, submerged the city of Wuhan for weeks and swept through the capital, Nanjing. Deaths from drowning, famine and disease are estimated at anywhere from several hundred thousand to two million or more, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.

Background

China in 1931 was only nominally unified under the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of Chiang Kai-shek, based at Nanjing. Years of civil war and regional conflict had drained public funds, and the great system of earthen dikes that protected the river plains had been badly maintained.

The middle and lower Yangtze and the Huai River valley were among the most densely populated farmland in the world. Millions of farmers lived on low ground behind dikes, growing rice and wheat. Flooding was a familiar risk, as shown by the earlier Yellow River flood of 1887, but nothing in living memory matched what came in 1931.

Causes

Central China suffered drought from 1928 to 1930. It was followed by a winter of heavy snow and a spring of persistent rain, which filled the rivers early.

Then, in July 1931, central China was hit by an extraordinary run of storms. Meteorologists recorded about seven cyclones crossing the region that month, compared with an average of about two. Torrential rain fell on already saturated land, and the Yangtze, the Huai and their tributaries rose to record levels. The Yellow River also flooded in the north.

Human changes to the landscape made matters worse. Over generations, farmers had reclaimed lakes and wetlands along the Yangtze that once absorbed floodwater, and silt had built up in river channels. When the rains came, there was less room for the water to spread safely, and more of it pressed against the dikes.

The floods

Through July and August, dikes broke or were overtopped along hundreds of kilometres of river. Wuhan, then the three cities of Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang, was submerged. In Hankou the river peaked in mid-August around 16 m above its normal low level, and people moved about the city by boat. Water stood in parts of the city for up to three months.

Along the Huai River, which had no proper outlet to the sea, water spread over the plains of Anhui and Jiangsu. On the night of 26 August 1931, a gale drove the waters of Gaoyou Lake against the dikes of the Grand Canal, which broke. The flood swept over the sleeping countryside below and drowned a great many people, though the commonly repeated toll of 200,000 cannot be confirmed. Nanjing, the capital, was also flooded.

Floodwaters also spread along the Han River, which joins the Yangtze at Wuhan, and down the Yangtze towards Shanghai. In many districts the water did not drain away until autumn or even winter, so that farmers could not plant the next crop. Houses built of mud brick dissolved in the water, and whole villages vanished.

Flooding also struck the Yellow River basin in the north, though the heaviest losses came in the Yangtze and Huai valleys. Along the Grand Canal in northern Jiangsu, towns and farmland that depended on the canal’s dikes were left under water for months.

The human toll

Most people did not die in the first rush of water. Millions of refugees crowded onto dikes, hills and city walls, often for months, with little food or clean water. Cholera, typhoid, dysentery and measles spread through refugee camps, and hunger set in as harvests were lost.

A detailed survey led by the agricultural economist John Lossing Buck of the University of Nanking estimated that about 25 million people were affected in the areas studied, with around 150,000 drowned in the first months. Historians such as Chris Courtney estimate total deaths, including later famine and disease, at between a few hundred thousand and about 2 million. Totals of 3.7 to 4 million that circulate widely are not supported by evidence from the time.

Relief efforts

The Nationalist government set up the National Flood Relief Commission in August 1931, chaired by the finance minister T. V. Soong. Its director of operations was John Hope Simpson, a British administrator with experience of refugee relief. The commission bought large amounts of American wheat on credit and paid flood victims in grain to rebuild thousands of kilometres of dikes, an early example of large-scale work relief in China.

International help also came. The American aviators Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, then on a flight to Asia, flew survey missions over the flooded areas in September 1931 to map the damage. But aid reached only a fraction of those affected, and some refugees were turned away from cities.

In Wuhan, hundreds of thousands of refugees sheltered on railway embankments, levees and any other high ground, or in makeshift camps outside the city. Missionaries, foreign relief committees and Chinese charitable associations distributed food and ran clinics, and vaccination against cholera was organised in some places. Even so, the camps remained crowded and disease spread easily.

Political context

The floods came at a moment of crisis. On 18 September 1931 the Mukden Incident gave Japan the pretext to occupy Manchuria, drawing government attention and money away from relief. At the same time, Communist forces were active in parts of central China, and the Nationalist government feared unrest among displaced farmers.

The Communists proclaimed the Chinese Soviet Republic at Ruijin in Jiangxi in November 1931, and Nationalist leaders feared that hunger and displacement would push more farmers towards the revolutionaries. Relief and security were therefore closely linked in the government’s thinking.

By the numbers

Consequences

The floods destroyed harvests and livestock across some of China’s most productive farmland and deepened rural poverty in the early 1930s. They also damaged the reputation of the Nationalist government, which critics accused of neglecting the dikes and responding too slowly.

The relief effort nonetheless left a mark. The commission’s work-relief projects rebuilt and strengthened thousands of kilometres of dikes, and the disaster encouraged Chinese engineers and officials to think about large-scale river management. Many of the region’s people still remembered the flood when the Yangtze rose again in 1954, and later in 1998.

Timeline

• 1928-1930: Drought in central China.
• Winter 1930-1931: Heavy snowfall in the upper river basins.
• July 1931: About seven cyclones bring record rain; the Yangtze and Huai rise sharply.
• Late July-August 1931: Dikes fail; Wuhan and much of the Huai plain flood.
• Mid-August 1931: The Yangtze peaks at Hankou.
• August 1931: The National Flood Relief Commission is established.
• 26 August 1931: The Grand Canal dikes break near Gaoyou.
• 18 September 1931: The Mukden Incident diverts national attention to Manchuria.

Why it matters

The 1931 floods were among the worst disasters of the twentieth century and showed how war, poverty and neglect can turn extreme weather into mass death. They shaped later Chinese flood-control policy, including the vast dam and dike projects of the decades after 1949, and they remain a reminder of how dangerous river systems can be, a lesson repeated at the Banqiao Dam failure of 1975.