Six people have died from floods in China’s Guizhou province, state media said, after more than 80,000 people were driven from their homes this week.
Towns and villages by a key river in China’s Guangxi lay half-submerged as floodwaters from a province upstream roared into the mountainous region, with the expected landfall of a tropical cyclone later on Thursday compounding disaster risk.
The flooding that overwhelmed the counties of Rongjiang and Congjiang in Guizhou province on Tuesday has spread downstream to other parts of southwest China, including rural settlements in Guangxi by the Liu River, which originates from Guizhou.
On Thursday, state broadcaster CCTV said “exceptionally large floods” had swept through Guizhou’s Rongjiang county since Tuesday.
China is enduring a summer of extreme weather.
This week, authorities issued the second-highest heat warning for the capital, Beijing, on one of its hottest days of the year so far.
Tens of thousands of people were evacuated last week in Hunan province – neighbouring Guizhou – due to heavy rain.
China suffers $7.6 billion in losses from natural disasters in H1 2025
BEIJING, July 15 (Reuters) – Natural disasters across China in the first half of 2025 brought direct economic losses of 54.11 billion yuan ($7.55 billion) and affected more than 23 million people, an official from the emergency response ministry said on Tuesday.
A powerful earthquake in Tibet, deadly landslides in the southwestern provinces and widespread flooding in the southern regions were among the most damaging events.
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Among the 23 million people affected by natural disasters, 307 died or are missing, and 620,000 faced emergency evacuation, Shen Zhanli, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Emergency Management, told a press conference.
Some 29,600 houses were destroyed, a 28.7% increase from a year ago, while 2.19 million hectares of crops sustained damage.
The economic losses were 41.9% less than the same period last year, according to a Reuters calculation, when flooding, drought and extreme temperatures cost China 93.16 billion yuan, the highest half-year figure since 2019.
Floods caused the most damage, accounting for over 90% of this year’s total losses at 51 billion yuan, the ministry said.
To mitigate the impact from increasingly frequent extreme rainfall, China has expanded its economic safety net for segments of its population affected by flood control schemes, including pledges of direct compensation from the central government and payments for livestock losses.
The world’s No.2 economy is facing growing threats from extreme weather, which meteorologists link to climate change.
Large swathes of the country have been grappling with torrential rains and extreme heat in recent weeks, with ageing flood defences and infrastructure gaps – such as limited access to air conditioning – exposed.
Dozens of rivers in southwestern China exceeded safe levels last week while more than 10,000 people were evacuated in the remnants of former typhoon Danas.
Meanwhile, surging demand for air conditioning due to sweltering heat has stretched China’s power grid, pushing the national maximum power load to a record high.
The ministry warned that flood and typhoon prevention will remain challenging from the second half of July to first half of August, as rainfall becomes most concentrated and intense in the north and typhoon activity intensifies.
