VOA: New Storms Threaten China

Niva Whyman

Beijing
26 Aug 2002

(Clearwisdom.net) Southern China is bracing itself for heavy rains again threatening villages and cities around the country's second largest freshwater lake with serious flooding. Rain-bloated Dongting Lake has been receding, but new storms could push the water levels back up.

After days of building to dangerous levels, the waters of Dongting Lake in Hunan Province started falling on Sunday. At its peak, the water level reached almost 35 meters, but the flood crest passed safely and the system of dikes around the lake held.

Now another 70 millimeters of rain have been predicted for the region during the coming days, and the people of Hunan are again bracing for possible new flooding.

After days of clear skies and high temperatures, a pre-dawn thunderstorm hit the area of Dongting, but abated after about three-hours and turned to a steady drizzle.

The lake covers 4,000 square kilometers, the size of Luxembourg, and its shores are home to 10 million people.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers have been mobilized in the region, working frantically to protect the dike network. Officials in Changsha, Hunan's capital, have ordered 2,000 troops and 300,000 public employees to help battle the waters.

The authorities have called for renewed efforts to prevent the dikes from collapsing after several days of exposure to the flood waters. television.

As the dikes had been in water for so long, danger could strike at any time, but we are confident to win the battle," said Liu Xinyun, a flood control official, on China's state-controlled CCTV television.

The flood crest is heading towards the industrial city of Wuhan, in Hubei Province, just to the north of the lake, and is expected to hit that city of seven-million people Tuesday.

Officials say embankments protecting Wuhan have been reinforced since 1998, when floods killed more than four-thousand people in China. But the city has been placed on a state of emergency just in case.

And help is coming from outside as well. Reports say Germany, which suffered severe flooding during the past few weeks, is providing one-million sandbags to help protect Wuhan.

More than 900 Chinese have died in floods since the heavy rains began last June.

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(Editor's Note: We are greatly saddened and troubled by the large-scale loss of life and property in China due to the raging floods. Even though China's state controlled television programs are repetitiously chanting empty political slogans while various levels of government officials put on a show of "disaster relief," we see clearly that Jiang and his corrupt officials at each level of government are concentrating their efforts on embezzlement, fraud, bitter power struggles, and persecuting innocent people. Each year there are disastrous floods, followed by "disaster relief efforts" that are too little, too late. Yet these tragedies have been turned into opportunities by Jiang and his cronies to glorify and promote themselves. If they had a shred of a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the common folk and the future of the Chinese people, then the tragedies occurring as a result of the floods in Hunan could have been avoided to a large degree.

The ancients in China emphasized the relationship between man and the heavens, and often drew a direct correlation between a despotic regime and natural disasters. Whenever large-scale disasters occurred, it was commonly believed to be caused by the ruler's greed and atrocities, and the rulers themselves were often forced to admit their culpability, at least in name, to the heavens and to the people. Over the past three years, the disastrous floods in Mainland China have become more and more severe. Meanwhile, over the same period of time the Jiang regime's persecution of the kind people who cultivate "Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance" has become more and more vicious -- Jiang's political group has exhausted great amounts of the country's and the people's resources in order to persecute Falun Gong practitioners, creating countless bloody tragedies. Can this be a coincidence? The widespread suffering caused by the floods in China can certainly be attributed to the corruption and incompetence of Jiang's regime, but the deeper reason may well the persecution being carried out by this evil gang against innocent Falun Gong practitioners. While the dictator is desecrating the laws of heaven, it is the people under him that suffer as a direct consequence.

No matter from what angle, it is clear that under Jiang's despotic rule, the victims are not just limited to Falun Gong practitioners but all innocent people, inside China or abroad, that are within his reach. For the sake of our collective future, let us stop the violence being perpetrated by Jiang's regime together.)

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