Zhuozhou flooding: Systemic shifts needed to counter the sacrificing of populations
Zhuozhou flooding: Systemic shifts needed to counter the sacrificing of populations
WRITTEN BY DR JULIA TEEBKEN AND JIACHANG TU
3 October 2023
Another summer passes by with extreme weather events affecting several regions across China, such as smouldering heat in the northwest and heavy rainfall in the northeast. Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei made headlines in late July 2023 as flooding lasted for over a week, killing dozens of people and displacing over a million people. Zhuozhou — a city with a population of 718,000 — was even more severely hit, and international news outlets were quick to jump on the story of higher government levels sacrificing Zhuozhou as a flood retention pond. Hebei Party Secretary Ni Yuefeng had expressed the importance of diverting the floods away from Beijing. On Chinese social media as well, the outcry of affected citizens about sacrificing Zhuozhou has been severe and triggered social protest against the lack of political response.
Although flood protection through retention is a controversial political issue that often results in conflict, it is a common climate adaptation measure. Despite being an extreme case, the Zhuozhou response is congruent with existing policy plans in China. In 2005, to protect critical cities and areas, the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) published the National Retention Basin Master Planning (NRBMP), announcing 94 retention basin areas to withstand a maximum 1-in-100-year flooding scenario. The NRBMP policy stipulates that “no organisation and individual can pause and delay when the retention basin area is under function, and if it happens, the local government [has the authority to] enforce it”. This explains and contextualises Ni Yuefeng’s statement. In 2020, 13 Hebei regions were planned as retention basin areas and seven of them were already in operation during the record rainfall in late July 2023. Zhuozhou is about 17 kilometres away from Xiaoqinghe — one of the retention basin areas managed by the central government — which has been greatly affected by the record rainfall, allowing for this policy to be implemented.
Notwithstanding current debates and controversies regarding Zhuozhou, the deliberate sacrifice of certain populations is neither a new topic nor limited to China. Still, similar to the 2021 floods in Henan, which for the first time prompted the central government to conduct an in-depth national-level investigation into a natural hazard event, people are asking whether the recent Zhuozhou incident could have been prevented. With growing international scholarly evidence that marginalised (urban) populations must be protected against maladaptation, more frequent extreme events, and the longstanding experience with storms in China’s north, pressure on policymakers is rapidly growing.
Emerging national public adaptation efforts
In addition to existing policy measures like the NRBMP, the Chinese central government is responding to these pressures by rapidly expanding its public adaptation efforts. The second National Adaptation Strategy (NAS II) was published in 2022. It not only develops a long-term planning horizon but is also the first known governmental climate adaptation strategy globally that sets a goal of achieving climate resilience by 2035. At the national level, China is said to have continuously improved the institutional mechanisms for addressing climate change. This includes different strategies, work plans, and pilot programs at different levels of government and across different sectors (e.g., agriculture, forests, urban-rural development, tourism, and water). Government entities with new mandates for climate change adaptation planning have also been created, such as the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) and the Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM).
The sacrificing of certain parts of a population is not limited to China and is happening across the world already, which makes addressing underlying structural issues a global concern.
Yet, several issues remain, such as implementation deficits, central-local disconnects, and weak adaptation planning in rural areas. Although the NAS II outlines several weaknesses in China’s current adaptation planning and aims to address urban-rural problems, it remains unclear how this shall be done. Provincial and municipal governments have published and updated adaptation policies, based on the legal framework for flood risk management introduced by the 1980s Water Law and Flood Management Law. However, the adaptation policies are vague, and implementation depends on provincial and municipal governments’ flood risk management understanding and capacity. Depending on the occurrence of specific events, policy amendments (also known as hongtouwenjian) are issued. For example, about two weeks after the record rainfall in late July 2023, Baoding published an amendment adaptation policy on how to act in this specific context.
The need for transformative responses
In light of the dominance of technocratic responses and policy incrementalism, calls for transformative adaptation are becoming louder globally especially when it comes to addressing the root causes of vulnerability, such as economic, cultural, political, and urban-rural inequalities. Debates in China are picking up as well, but transformative adaptation remains, with few exceptions, underconceptualized. The demand for transformative responses puts additional pressure on (adaptation) policymaking at multiple levels of government. Zhuozhou represents several core tensions exacerbated by the rapid intensification of climate change, interacting with other stressors like uneven land development and urban expansion. It is also representative of the challenge of multiple governmental entities and levels having to act in concert with limited capacity to do so.
Meanwhile, the utilisation of policy mechanisms, such as flood retention areas, is furthering existing sociopolitical tensions. China adopted a series of integrated flood management policies after the 1998 mega-flood. However, the effects of socio-economic developments and urbanisation are too great for flood management to effectively address. For example, there are inequalities in who can enjoy the benefits of ecosystem services, such as water flow regulation services (also known as flood regulation services). Through its use of lakes, reservoirs, and dams to control the water flow, these services can mitigate extreme events, but their efficiency varies due to differences in factors like population density, urban expansion and planning, and water resources. Zhuozhou, located in the Haihe River region, faced high pressure of water flow regulation services due to huge water demand (from agriculture, urbanisation, and population density) and huge water shortage (from uneven distribution of precipitation and water pollution). The pressure of water flow regulation services is not limited to flood risk management and impacts livelihood exposure. Therefore, there is a need to pay close attention to the effectiveness of water flow regulation services, which refers to the volume of wetlands that are often included in the Ecosystem Function Conservation Areas (EFCAS). Maintaining these central ecosystem service functions will be an important task in the future.
To date, however, adaptation incrementalism persists when it comes to addressing the root causes of human vulnerability globally, with China being no exception. In China, this relates especially to the rural-urban pecking order, where adaptive capacity deficits are being detected especially in rural areas. Without proactive adaptation strategies and policy efforts across the spectrum, these socio-political conflicts will become much more common. Further, there is a need to plan ahead and consider the distributional effects of climate adaptation and environmental and disaster risk reduction policymaking. For instance, examining how hukou reform and adaptation effectiveness interrelate is crucial.
Thinking outside the adaptation box?
The sacrificing of certain parts of a population is not limited to China and is happening across the world already, which makes addressing underlying structural issues a global concern. Among other things, there are disparities between urban, peri-urban, and rural regions. The way that urban expansion occurs exposes certain livelihoods to be more vulnerable to the risks of climate change than others, with only certain parts of the population experiencing the benefits of public (adaptation) interventions. In the rush to further expand urban areas, maintaining ecosystem service functions that can regulate flooding events presents another area where more attention is needed.
The standard adaptation portfolio has many things to offer. Improved risk communication and awareness-raising are important. Better assessing the distributional impacts of climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts is likewise necessary, so that these types of socio-political conflicts can be avoided in the future. It is also important to study how compound risks and a variety of different stressors — such as the geographic location of mudslide-prone areas coupled with the occurrence of multiple climate-sensitive hazards — act in concert.
However, unless we ask ourselves what kind of future we want to live in, how much inequality we are willing to allow, how much we can continue exploiting nature, and which kinds of cities we want to live in the future, the sacrificing of certain parts of society will continue. It is time to think more creatively outside the adaptation box. If we look at marginalised populations and the prioritisation of certain (urban) areas and people as part of strategic public policy efforts, the sacrificing of populations is the norm rather than the exception. Addressing the root causes of vulnerability will require efforts far outside the ordinary disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation interventions toolbox. In China, addressing urban-rural gaps will require a shift away from current human-to-human and human-environment relations.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biographies
Dr Julia Teebken is a political scientist researching the governance of climate change adaptation and inequality across different political systems. Jiachang Tu is a doctoral candidate researching the relationship between flood risk management and urban structure type in cities in China and Vietnam. Both work at the research and teaching Unit Human-Environment-Relations at the Department of Geography at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.