Villagers living in the rural Chinese Lujiang county, in Anhui province, have accused the government of deliberately flooding their lands to protect big cities and expensive manufacturing assets from damage, according to an Epoch Times report released Thursday.
Chinese officials estimated Friday that flooding from torrential rains and swollen rivers has affected almost 70 million people and caused at least $29 billion in damage this year.
The anti-communist Epoch Times talked to some unhappy residents of rural Lujiang county in the Anhui province who believe the authorities intentionally damaged their local dike, causing it to fail under the pressure of heavy rain and divert storm water onto their land.
Lujiang was cut off by the resulting floods for 40 days, with little in the way of supplies. The floods displaced thousands from their homes and most have not yet returned. Government officials have made vague promises to help them pump floodwater out of their buildings, but have not provided a timetable, so they are forced to live in rental properties. A man named Chen said the only government assistance he has received for his family of four is “a bag of rice and a bottle of cooking oil.” He said he lost both his home and his business properties to the floods.
“I spent most of my life savings on the store. There are also debts and loans … us ordinary people have unspeakable hardships,” he said.
Chen said the authorities ordered residents of his Shidaxu village to evacuate the night before the dike inexplicably collapsed, leading the locals to suspect the dike was deliberately sabotaged by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials who decided losing the village and its 16,000 acres of farmland was preferable to leaving the dike intact and allowing floodwaters to surge onto more valuable property elsewhere.
“It’s hard to swallow,” Chen said of the official story behind the dike collapse and flood.
“Why didn’t the government admit that the water was released, but talked about a dike collapse? Why? We have made such a big sacrifice. Don’t we deserve an explanation?” he asked.
Chinese officials admitted to deliberately destroying a number of dams, including some in Anhui province. Such extreme measures were meant to avoid total catastrophe and protect the most valuable assets in the Yangtze River region, including the massive Three Gorges Dam. Many area residents complained that their homes, businesses, and farmland were sacrificed by deliberate flooding to relieve pressure on the dam.
Officials in hard-hit Hunan province pledged on Friday that they would complete reconstruction by the end of this year and make new residences available for people who lost their homes by the middle of February 2021. Eastern China is still suffering from a good deal of flooding at the moment, making those targets seem rather ambitious.
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