China's infrastructure still has deadly issues
Flooding, mudslides and droughts caused by extreme weather conditions have plagued China the last few months. Is the government doing enough to mitigate risk?
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On Saturday 20th July, a bridge collapsed in Shaanxi province, causing 25 vehicles to plunge into the river below. As rescue efforts were mounted the death toll rose slowly, now standing at 15, with the search still underway for missing people. The cause of the incident, according to authorities, was a flash flood triggered by unusually heavy rainfall.
This is not the only recent major disaster to strike as a result of extreme weather coupled with poor infrastructure. In July alone there have been floods in Henan and Shaanxi, mudslides in Jilin, and another bridge collapse in Sichuan. These aren’t even the only bridge collapses this year – in May, another highway caved in after heavy rain in Guangdong, leaving at least 36 dead. People are flocking to northern provinces to escape scorching temperatures as high as the mid 40s, the same regions that were suffering from drought not a month ago. Meanwhile, the government has issued an orange rainstorm alert for Beijing this week, expecting flooding in the mountainous regions surrounding the capital. No precautions or evacuation plans have been announced.
Residents and tourists in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, shield themselves from the scorching sun on July 22. The Hangzhou meteorological observatory issued a red alert for high temperatures on the day, with the maximum temperature in some areas reaching 40.4°C, making it the hottest day since the beginning of summer this year. China Daily
I’ve written before about how China’s infrastructure still struggles to keep up with increasingly extreme weather conditions, especially in newly built urban areas where the right levels of flood management just haven’t been implemented. Heavy rain and poor building management aren’t the only problems though. China also has problems when there’s not enough water, with local governments often having to stoop to relatively low-tech solutions like water deliveries on foot or by truck to make sure rural residents don’t go too long without fresh water. These issues have persisted for decades, and seemed to have increased in their intensity in recent years.
But in the interceding years, I never see much news about great efforts being made to solve basic problems. Year after year, the same issues crop up – villagers dying in mudslides, cars falling off broken, flooded bridges, urbanites drowning in cars and train carriages – and yet no announcement from the government about grand plans to ensure this will never happen again. This is despite the fact that so much of the country is dependent on functional infrastructure, and so many areas suffer from poor weather management. The entire food system of the country, for example, relies on small-scale producers collaborating with freelance harvesters, who can’t work in waterlogged fields, but who have limited ways to improve drainage. This small but seemingly solvable problem has been left to cash-strapped farmers to deal with, and so they deal with it the way they always have. They wait it out and hope for the best.
The current problems are not due to old, crumbling infrastructure that needs to be updated either. The Shaanxi bridge that collapsed was only built in the last 5 years. This is a problem with modern standards and planning – China is so focused on building as many highways as possible, it’s forgetting to make sure that they’re futureproof. China is much richer than it was 50 years ago, and with the investments being made in science and R&D, should have developed much more robust infrastructure, especially considering that floods of biblical proportions have been the norm throughout Chinese history.
Core problems and limited solutions
These issues are highlighted often in the media and academic literature. The risk of flooding is increasing as areas become more built up, replacing absorbent grasslands and wetlands, and displacing the most socioeconomically vulnerable. In a study of 239 cities, approximately 70% have seen a rise in urban flood hazard, and increasing urbanisation was a contributing factor 90% of the time. Around 60% of the North China Plain, the major bread basket in China and one of the most densely populated in the world, is at risk of worsening droughts due to regular heat waves if water management resources are not greatly improved.
These issues are costly. As one article points out, when it comes to damage to China’s railways: “The South, East, and Central provinces have a high risk of rainfall-induced hazards, resulting in the average EADs of 184 million RMB, 176 million RMB, and 156 million RMB, respectively”. Another adds that the expected annual damage of Chinese roads under river floods ranges from 2.04 to 3.42 billion USD, and expected annual network efficiency loss could be as high as 31%. The costs of the infamous Zhengzhou flood in 2021 alone – in which over 300 people died and 50,000 houses were destroyed – are estimated to be around RMB 53.2 billion (~US$8 billion).
There are some ideas floating around for solutions to these looming problems. “Community-based interventions” such as flood resilience mapping, demountable barriers, flood resistant doors, and improving flood awareness and preparedness would help to reduce the heavy losses often suffered in flash floods in urban areas. The government’s national water network to help mitigate flood risk is supposed to be in effect by 2035, introducing flood barriers and reinforced embankments to flood-prone rivers. They have also introduced some pilot programmes, such as the Sponge City Programme (SCP), initiated in 2014 and by 2020 a total of RMB 177 billion (~US$ 28 billion) has been invested to 30 pilot cities”:
“The idea of sponge cities, which is similar to other nature-based approaches, is to use green roofs, rain gardens, grass swales, wetlands to absorb, retain and purify excessive stormwater, only discharging it into the sewer and river as a last resort. Compared to the adoption of nature-based solutions in other countries, the SCP, however, was unprecedented in scale, aiming to achieve the target of 80% of urban areas that should meet the standard of retaining 70% of stormwater in situ by 2030. This ambition is supported by a new 3-year pilot rollout phase from 2021 to 2023, with a first group of 20 cities announced in June 2021 (Figure 1), each receiving funding of CNY 0.7–1.1 billion (~US$ 109–172 million) from the central government.”
– Are sponge cities the solution to China's growing urban flooding problems?, Fu et al.
Clearly some localised measures are working, as China has managed to reach record summer grain production levels this year, despite persistent droughts in the north and flooding in the south. But this increased harvest could also readily be attributed to better production methods, new technologies, and scientifically enhanced crops. And there’s still the autumn harvest to go, which will be the true test of how bad the weather has been this year, and how poorly prepared provincial governments are to deal with it.
But the localised measures groan against the weight that is China’s ever growing urban sprawls. It is the unchecked expansion of solid, impermeable land along major river basins, absorbing 20 million people per year but unable to absorb water, that is exacerbating China’s weather management problems. One study even showed that in densely packed cities like Beijing, if nothing was done to mitigate the effects of extreme weather, “areas classified as high and highest flood risk levels [would] increase by 38.87% and 60.17% from the 2010s to the 2060s.”
China’s extreme growth, which has propelled many of its citizens out of poverty, is also its Achilles heel. It has grown too fast, and in too many directions. There are too many problems emerging at once (some of which we’ll talk about in the next newsletter) and the party-government can only deal with so many problems at a time. Biannual, localised floods and the occasional bridge collapse will have to wait. God only knows how long.
A woman walks through devastated streets in Meizhou, Guangzhou province on June 19. John Ricky/Anadolu/Getty Images
Running out of time
It’s worrying to see, year after year, that improving infrastructure either to forestall or withstand extreme weather never seems to come up as a core priority for the government. China is often praised for its ability to erect new buildings, new railways, even whole cities, even in other countries(!), in record time. China is proud of its towering infrastructure achievements and rightly so – the construction industry was a major stabilising factor for the economy during the Covid years. But what is the point in going fast if the path is uneven? What good are shiny new buildings and expanded metro lines if they all end up under water every 2-3 years?
In the wake of the CCP’s recent Third Plenum, a meeting of the Central Committee which focuses on deciding the course of China’s economic policy, a summary communiqué had this to say about infrastructure:
“We will advance the digitalization of traditional infrastructure, diversify investment and financing channels, and refine the coordination mechanisms for major infrastructure construction projects. We will further reform the integrated transportation system, advancing reform of the railway system, developing general aviation and the low-altitude economy, and optimizing the policy on toll highways. We will raise the underwriting capacity of shipping insurers, help them provide better global services, and introduce new systems and rules on the arbitration of marine affairs. We will improve the mechanisms for the construction, operation, and management of major water conservancy projects.”
There is literally no mention of the need to fortify existing villages, towns and cities against the frequent natural disasters that befall them, or how future projects may ensure that they are not susceptible to a steady stream of ‘once-in-a-thousand-year’ rainfall. The government is a full-steam ahead in its drive to produce and consume more domestically, dutifully ignoring other issues, in what some are even terming a “declaration of economic war”. The 14th 5-year plan does mention the need to create climate-conscious cities, but also promotes the idea of smaller, denser cities, and makes some hand-wavy suggestions about green zones and cycle lanes. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my reading it’s that denser cities are not the answer.
If all the investment goes to production and consumption, and none of it to careful, diligent planning, then China’s people will have a modern technostate with every modern product they could dream of at their disposal in no time at all.
I just hope those products are waterproof.