China floods: rural areas plea for migrant workers to return home and fight deluge
- Urbanisation has long been an engine for China’s economic growth, but this has created an apparent problem in the nation’s vast countryside – a hollowing out of rural areas
- On the flood-battered island of Jiangzhou in the middle of the Yangtze River, the population has plunged 80 per cent in less than a decade
When Zhou Yanfu learned that rising floodwaters were threatening his hometown in eastern China’s Jiangxi province, he immediately rushed home to save his 80-year-old mother.
Two days later, he was called back again – this time to save the town itself.
Zhou, 59, lives and works in the nearby city of Jiujiang, across the Yangtze River from Jiangzhou, an island town in the middle of the river that is desperate for help in fighting massive flooding that has spread to 27 mainland provinces, affecting more than 34 million people.
Carrying nothing but a backpack upon his return, Zhou answered the call by Jiangzhou authorities who issued a desperate appeal for all able-bodied men from the island to return and defend their hometown.
“This is my duty,” Zhou said. “I can patrol, and I can help with the preparations [for flood control].”
Zhou is one of the hundreds of millions of rural Chinese residents who left the countryside in recent decades to live and work in cities amid the most rapid and massive urbanisation push in human history.