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Two years ago, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/21/zhengzhou-china-record-rain-flooding/" target=_blank>nearly eight inches of rain poured</a> on the Chinese metropolis Zhengzhou within a single hour during storms that flooded subways and killed nearly 400 people. In a country with centuries of experience tackling river floods, it was a watershed moment that demanded China confront the growing dangers of extreme weather.

But there were no simple solutions in Zhengzhou; instead, a long list of pipe and pump projects. Although the country’s central government recommended more communities update flood warning systems, it did not introduce a national policy.

Now, the country is reckoning with more unprecedented precipitation — at one spot last week, 2½ feet of rain fell within about 3½ days. The flooding that it caused in Beijing and neighboring Hebei province <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/09/china-flooding-deaths-beijing-rain/7208d420-366f-11ee-ac4e-e707870e43db_story.html" target="_blank">killed at least 33 people</a> and caused damage that could take years to repair: destruction to tens of thousands of homes and dozens of roads and bridges, and inundation of swaths of cropland. The disaster hit on the heels of record heat and, on the other side of the country, drought.

The disaster highlights a pair of challenges testing China’s one-party political system, known for its strong top-down approach. The regime’s power may be leaving local authorities unable or reluctant to respond to extreme weather threats on their doorsteps. At the same time, the party’s recent go-it-alone strategy on climate change — and continued investment in fossil fuels — could only bring more natural disasters upon the world’s most populous country and the rest of the globe.

Before Xi Jinping, China’s powerful leader, ordered action on flood control and relief Aug. 1, local officials in Beijing and Hebei “didn’t dare take charge,” said Wang Weiluo, an engineer and expert on China’s water systems.

“The most important thing during a flood disaster is information. You need to know where the floodwaters are and where they will go,” said Wang, who now lives in Germany. “Without that information, everyone just rushes around like headless flies.”

CHINA DAILY

The same could perhaps be said of communities seeking to prepare themselves for weather disasters to come. The Xi government launched a national effort last year to adapt to a changing climate, laying out broad terms for cities and provinces to assess risks and plan emergency responses, but more specific plans for lower levels of government are not expected until later this year.

At the same time, local officials’ efforts to confront extreme weather risks could, like other climate ambitions, clash with other Beijing priorities, including to combat a slowing economy and increase energy security. In Hebei, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/world/asia/china-flood-beijing-rain.html" target="_blank">there were criticisms</a> that floodwaters surged in smaller towns because of pressure on local officials to prevent inundation in the capital city.

As losses mount from each successive weather disaster, frustration with the country’s approach may grow, said Alex Wang, co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA.

“These are things people will eventually start to blame the party and the state for not addressing,” Wang said.

As the planet baked during a record-hot July, China saw some of the planet’s most intense heat and precipitation.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/08/02/july-hottest-month-global-temperatures/" target=_blank>Record-high temperatures</a> surged above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, approaching 110 degrees, from northern China to its southeastern coast. The heat wave was Beijing’s most severe in decades — temperatures surpassed 95 degrees (35 Celsius) every day for nearly a month straight, breaking a record streak from 23 years earlier.

A high of 126 degrees (52.2 Celsius) in the Xinjiang region of northwest China on July 16 marked a record for all of China.

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Aly Song

Then came an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/01/beijing-flood-rain-typhoon-china/" target="_blank">onslaught of tropical rains from Typhoon Doksuri</a>. Rainfall at a Beijing reservoir totaled more than 29 inches from July 29 through Aug. 2, the highest reading in the capital city in 140 years of record-keeping, according to Beijing officials. The resulting floods in Beijing and Hebei forced 1.3 million people to evacuate.

“The disaster is just the latest in a series of high-impact events which have affected Asia and other parts of the globe this summer, including extreme rainfall and dangerous heat,” Johan Stander, director of the World Meteorological Organization’s services department, said in a statement.

On the other side of the country, meanwhile, years of drought <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-mekong-river-dams-expected-to-worsen-southeast-asian-economies-during-drought-/7211918.html" target="_blank">continue along the Mekong River</a> basin, worsened by Chinese dams and their demand for electricity. The situation is threatening food insecurity from southwestern China into Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

In China, perhaps more so than in other places, there is a clearer link between those weather dangers and the country’s own emissions, said Carter Brandon, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. Brandon said China accounts for more than a quarter of the globe’s annual carbon emissions and over 30 percent of all annual greenhouse gases, which are warming the planet and fueling weather extremes.

“If Peru doesn’t cut its own emissions, it doesn’t affect what happens in Peru in the slightest,” Brandon said. For China, “it’s not just a global issue; it’s also a national issue. ... Their own emissions are creating their own problems.”

<a href="https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/9/3/nwab113/6311139" target=_blank>Research </a>has found intense precipitation events are increasing in China, especially in the eastern part of the country. That trend is expected to continue across most of the country, according to the World Bank.

Yet acknowledgments of those connections are rare, though they have been demonstrated. Modeling from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Peking University, two of China’s top institutions, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095927322004182" target=_blank>found</a> that during the 2021 storms, human-caused climate change increased rainfall intensity in Zhengzhou and Henan province by 7.5 percent.

China’s climate strategies under scrutiny

The latest weather extremes coincide with ongoing work to upgrade China’s storm water infrastructure, and as the country faces pressure to uphold its climate commitments. So far, China’s leaders are set in their own ways.

As U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry visited Beijing to restart top-level climate talks last month, Xi <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/19/climate-change-heat-wave-china/" target=_blank>underscored</a> that China alone would determine the pace and scale of its ambitions, without outside interference. He added that China was “unwavering” in its commitment to start reducing carbon dioxide emissions before 2030.

But even as China is on target to double wind and solar power capacity to hit 1,200 gigawatts by 2025, its local governments have approved more than 50 gigawatts of coal power, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, in the first half of 2023, <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/8139/chinas-2023-coal-approvals-grow-to-50-4-gw-as-coal-constricts-space-for-energy-storage-climate-solutions/" target=_blank>research</a> by Greenpeace released this week showed.

The country has taken pride in its ability to respond to natural threats in the past. Extensive efforts to divert and control the flow of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, for example, exemplify China’s engineering prowess in the eyes of the country’s leaders.

But the question is how well the country can tackle climate priorities with such strategies.

China’s massive network of dams, reservoirs, canals, dikes and levees was built primarily to handle seasonal runoff and deliver hydropower and running water. It is now increasingly becoming the last line of defense against inner city deluges and the resulting flash floods.

Kevin Frayer

For Liu Junyan, climate project leader for Greenpeace East Asia’s Beijing office, the test of China’s extreme weather response will be how quickly the new flurry of climate research and national risk assessments can be translated into concrete action to improve infrastructure and emergency response systems on a local level.

“Climate change is usually described as a task for national policy and local governments don’t prioritize it,” compared with other targets like delivering economic growth or tackling unemployment, Liu said.

For its part, the national government has approached flooding concerns through high-profile “sponge city” trial zones meant to improve rainwater management — one of Xi’s pet projects. After Xi’s endorsement, an ambitious nationwide target was set in 2015 for 80 percent of cities to build areas of land designed to allow better infiltration and water recycling by 2030. Around $157 billion was spent on these projects in the first five years of the plan.

But the projects provided “insignificant contribution to urban flood prevention” and are really about improving water quality and conservation, but often get confused with flood management, an <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jfr3.12822" target=_blank>academic article</a> published last year found.

There are concerns initiatives like the sponge cities could nonetheless get continued investment over less flashy but potentially more useful projects like upgrading drainage pipes.

And the challenges of retrofitting entire cities for better drainage are massive, said Wang Yue, conservation planning and strategy director of the Nature Conservancy in China program. The group is promoting what it calls nature-based solutions, such as green space and green roofs, which can be planned out in new cities. But in existing megacities wracked by flooding, such as Zhengzhou and Beijing, such solutions are harder and more expensive to accomplish.

“It really takes time to change the city,” she said.

<i>Lillian Yang contributed reporting.</i>

Pulitzer Prize finalist for breaking news, 2016

First place for outstanding beat reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, 2023

University of Maryland at College Park, BA in Journalism

University of Maryland at College Park, Master's of Public Policy

Scott Dance is a reporter for The Washington Post covering extreme weather news and the intersections between weather, climate, society and the environment. He joined The Post in 2022 after more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun.

Scott Dance

Human Rights Press Awards, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong, 2019

Oxford University, BA in Philosophy & Psychology

University of Nottingham Ningbo, MA in Contemporary Chinese Studies

Tsinghua University, diploma in Mandarin Chinese

Christian Shepherd is China correspondent for The Washington Post. He previously covered the country for the Financial Times and Reuters from Beijing.

Christian Shepherd

How floods and extreme heat could test China's one-party system

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