Peasant army battles against nature as flood waters threaten to engulf thousands of homes

An estimated 10 million Chinese soldiers and peasants were keeping anxious watch as flood crests were poised to sweep over dykes tomorrow, threatening to wreak havoc in China's heartland.

An estimated 10 million Chinese soldiers and peasants were keeping anxious watch as flood crests were poised to sweep over dykes tomorrow, threatening to wreak havoc in China's heartland.

On Thursday, the authorities, armed with emergency powers, had forcibly evacuated 600,000 people from around Dongting Lake in Hunan province. If necessary, their fields and homes will be inundated to allow the flood waters to subside.

More than 760,000 people, including 10,000 troops, are reported to be piling up the sand bags around a complicated network of polders and dykes which have created some of the country's most fertile and productive rice paddies.

On the eastern side of Dongting, a body of water the size of Luxembourg, 10,000 farmers in reed hats and wielding picks and hoes patrolled stretches of the embankment yesterday, just south of the city of Yueyang. "If a hole were to open up, we'd have a problem," said one.

All around the lake and beyond it was the same story – countless thousands on the alert for any leak from the giant lake and the four swollen rivers which feed it.

In some places near Yueyang, they lined up – on a perfect summer day of warm sunshine and blue skies – to pass bags filled with rocks to plug small leaks.

In one village about six miles south of Yueyang, water from Dongting breached a wall of sandbags late on Thursday, virtually submerging a collection of one-storey houses, witnesses said.

This year the flood season may not be over for another 50 days, according to weather experts. They forecast more rain, which will test the country's readiness even after tomorrow's peak passes.

"The worst is yet to come," a senior water expert said. "More soldiers are standing ready and will build temporary dykes atop the lake's major flood-control embankment if rain continues to push up the water level there."

Zhang Shuofu, the man in charge of the province's battle against the lake, said: "If this was 1998, then the waters would definitely have broken the banks by now."

So far the economic damage has not matched that of the 1998 floods, which caused damage estimated at $36bn (£24bn) and killed – by official estimates – about 4,000 people. Unofficial reports claim the death toll was much higher.

Yu Changming, his second-in-command, said: "This month's rain has come fast and the coverage area has been very wide.But because of the steps we've taken since 1998, we've been able to successfully fight back the waters."

The floods present a political test for the Premier, Zhu Rongji, who won a great deal of credit for his handling of the 1998 floods.

A failure will also deepen the split within the leadership on the right strategy to stop the potential disaster. Despite the vast sums lavished on the network of dams, including the controversial Three Gorges Dam, upstream of Dongting, the inundations have been growing worse almost every year for the past decade.

In response to the 1998 floods, Mr Zhu radically switched the focus of China's traditional approach to its perennial summer floods from engineering to the environment. He ordered a logging ban on the upper reaches of the Yangtze to curb soil erosion, and forced 2.5 million peasants to move from their homes to restore the lakes to their pre-1949 size.

China has now built more large and small dams across its rivers than any other nation and is still committed to an extensive dam and hydro-power construction programme promoted by the many engineers in the top echelons of the party.

The strategy has shrunk the natural reservoirs along the Yangtze, which absorbed the flood water overflow and replaced them with a string of man-made reservoirs. Since 1949, two thirds of the lakes in the Yangtze's middle and lower reaches have disappeared.

Their total surface area shrank from 7,000 square miles to 2,700 square miles in just 50 years. Dongting Lake shrank so dramatically that its capacity fell over 25 years from 14.7 billion cubic metres to just 0.5 billion cubic metres.

In the same period, as much as one billion cubic metres of sediment, washed down the Yangtze's tributaries in Tibetan regions, were deposited on the bottom of the lake so the level of the lake's bed has been rising by 1.45 inches a year.

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