Breached Dams, Unreachable People, Harvestless Fields

Foodthink Says

Flood relief efforts in Guangxi are still underway. In the core-affected area of Hengzhou, Nanning, the flood has swept through jasmine, rice, sugarcane and banana cultivation, as well as fishery and pig farming — just two years ago, Hengzhou was still strengthening its farmland irrigation infrastructure, and under the wave of new-style tea beverages, many more people had been expanding their jasmine plantings, making the losses even greater now. Extraordinary disasters have become the norm, and climate change has been written into the 2026 national No. 1 Central Document. How to move from flood control to resilience building, and which risks can be mitigated and which cannot — both rural and urban communities need better solutions.

The Rain Is Too Heavy!

Can the Reservoirs Hold?

On the morning of 6 July, Zhong Luyan, a villager in Zhongtuan Village, Hengzhou, Nanning, received a broadcast warning from the village committee. She saw cadres going door to door, informing residents that the nearby reservoir would be opening its gates to release water and urging everyone to stay safe. Judging that the reservoir near the village had a modest capacity and that her house and fields sat at a higher elevation on the hillside, she considered herself reasonably safe and chose to stay home and watch the situation unfold. Before long, she heard that the dam at Liulan Reservoir, more than ten kilometres away, had breached. Yunbiao Reservoir, five kilometres from Liulan and likewise on the upper reaches of the Yu River, experienced overtopping at the same time.

◉ Reservoirs in the Yu River basin, a tributary of the Xijiang, where dangerous conditions have emerged. Liulan Reservoir and Yunbiao Reservoir feed into the Yu River via the Zhenlong River and Yunbiao River; both rivers originate from Zhenlong Mountain, the area that received the heaviest rainfall this time. In addition, floodwaters from the Dongban River and Shidiao River on the west, and from the Huanglian River–Liju River on the east, flow into the Yu River. Image source: Foodthink

Zhong Luyan was “lucky” — the reservoir’s release water did not flow through the jasmine fields on her hillside; only a fraction of an acre of her terraced plots were submerged. Yet the mobile phones of many more Hengzhou farmers we tried to reach were unreachable due to signal loss. Online distress posts show that the entire Zhenlong Township in Hengzhou had lost contact, and as of the morning of 9 July, the signal had still not been restored.

In Dage Village and Beicun in Hengzhou Town, which were farther from the breach, villagers’ houses were temporarily spared, but floodwater accumulated to as much as three metres deep, and nearly 10,000 mu of jasmine and rice fields belonging to over a thousand villagers were submerged.

Since 3 July, affected by this year’s Typhoon No. 10, Maysak, Guangxi has experienced historically rare, widespread and sustained heavy rainfall, with over 77 per cent of townships across the province receiving torrential rain or worse. According to Xinhua News Agency, by 11:00 on the morning of 9 July, a total of 64,500 people had been relocated and resettled in Nanning, of whom 54,500 were in Hengzhou and 9,321 in Binyang County. In addition, 375,000 people across the province were affected, with 39 deaths and 9 missing; the area of damaged crops reached 12,900 hectares.

The most closely watched event of the flood was the breach of the Liulan Reservoir dam on the morning of 6 July.

Liulan Reservoir sits on the Yunbiao River, a tributary of the Yu River, in Liulan Village, Xiaoyi Town. It is the largest medium-sized reservoir in Hengzhou, responsible for irrigation and domestic water supply for 170,000 people across four townships and 46 administrative villages, with a stable irrigated area of 157,300 mu. It also serves as an important backup water source for the Hengzhou urban area. According to public reports, the reservoir underwent systematic repairs in both 2009 and 2023. Media investigations have found that cumulative investment exceeded 400 million yuan.

Yet at 10:00 that morning, the dam tore open in an instant, ripping a gap fifty metres long, and floodwater surged straight into the downstream villages and stretches of farmland. Villages were swallowed within moments by murky water several metres deep; the ground and first floors of many homes were completely submerged. Roads, power and communications were cut off on a wide scale, and numerous villages were cut off as islands, out of contact with the outside world. A local villager interviewed by Phoenix Net said, the most terrifying thing was that even after the flood release, the water level did not drop.

At 11:30, Nanning raised its flood-response emergency level from Level 3 to Level 1.

Hao Nan, founder of Zhuoming Xinyuan, analysed that in this round of extreme rainfall in Guangxi, the sheer volume of rain and its relentless persistence were the key factors that aggravated the disaster. He drew an analogy with the still-vivid memory of the “7·20” catastrophic downpour in Zhengzhou, Henan, where the weather had been calm before a sudden burst of intense short-duration rainfall. In this Guangxi event, however, prolonged heavy rain over the preceding days had already saturated the soil and pushed the rivers’ capacity to their limit. Just as the water infrastructure was on the verge of failure, the final hours brought another wave of even more extreme rainfall. “This kind of rain is the most deadly. It’s like getting pumelled in a boxing ring — you’re already staggering, barely able to stand — and then suddenly a few more heavy blows come.”

Analyses show that this typhoon followed an unusual track, and the heavy rain did not dissipate even after landfall. According to statistics, within the 24 hours from 08:00 on 5 July to 08:00 on 6 July, southern and eastern Guangxi experienced very heavy to extremely heavy rain. Rainfall exceeded 400 millimetres in eight counties and districts, including Binyang County in Nanning, Qinnan District in Qinzhou and Qintang District in Guigang. In Luxi Town, Binyang County, rainfall reached 713.3 millimetres.

◉ Daily rainfall map for Guangxi (08:00, 5 July 2026 – 08:00, 6 July 2026). Image source: Meteorological Bureau of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region

The Pearl River Basin Commission disclosed that within just two days since 4 July, 77 rivers in the Xijiang main stem and its tributaries — including the Liu River, Yu River and Gui River — in the Pearl River basin had experienced floods exceeding warning level. On a single day, the water levels of 40 small and medium rivers surpassed the highest recorded flood on instrument record.

Under the sustained rainfall, by 9 July, at least 12 reservoirs in and around Hengzhou had encountered dangerous conditions, including overtopping — where flood levels exceed the design flood level at which a structure can reliably perform its flood-control function — as well as partial breaches and (dam) collapses. In addition to the nine reservoirs reported on the evening of 7 July, including Liulan Reservoir and Yunbiao Reservoir in Nanning and Guigang, Sancha Reservoir, Niangshan Reservoir and Wangtiandang near Hengzhou also issued flood-release warnings, with severe flooding downstream.

Hao Nan explained that a reservoir’s design flood level is a critical safety threshold. If danger arises while the water level remains within the design flood level, it is usually related to the quality of the structure itself. But once the level is breached and exceeds the structure’s predetermined load-bearing capacity, the engineering safety guarantee no longer applies.

“We used to design a cluster of reservoirs to handle a 100-year return period disaster, but that level of protection no longer holds. A ‘100-year’ event could now come every five to ten years. Extreme rainfall records will be broken — not just here, but elsewhere in the future as well,” Hao Nan stated firmly.

So what is to be done? He recalled a remark by a hydraulic engineer that had left a deep impression on him: “We need to shift from ‘it must not flood’ (we dare not let it flood) to ‘we are not afraid of flooding.'”

“Small water belongs to people; big water must be left to the water,” another senior hydraulic expert explained to Foodthink the approach to managing a flood exceeding design standard. When extreme rainfall triggers a flood exceeding design standard, inundation is unavoidable, but a series of measures can be taken to enhance the resilience of the affected communities — including building capacity to withstand impact, recover and rebuild quickly, and adapt to changing conditions — thereby strengthening risk management.

He went on to say that, at present, the water-resources system’s measures to address flood hazards are primarily “flood control,” but risk prevention and resilience-building measures go beyond its mandate. In adapting to climate change, there is still much work the water-resources department can do.

The Agricultural Irrigation System

Built at Great Cost, Met by This Mega-Disaster

It is not just hydraulic infrastructure but also agricultural irrigation systems that must now factor in climate resilience. This flood, driven by extreme precipitation, struck not only villages and farmers but also dealt a severe blow to Hengzhou’s agricultural industry built around the Liulan Irrigation District.

When Foodthink placed its call, Liang Dongcai, a villager in Beicun, Hengzhou Town, Hengzhou City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, had just finished a full day of inspection rounds and was finally having dinner. On 5 July, the day internal flooding struck Guangxi, he had not closed his eyes all night, helping to evacuate injured villagers.

In the low-lying areas around Liang Dong’s home, standing water reached more than three metres deep, and floodwater spilled into many villagers’ houses. In Beicun, where he lives, two natural hamlets were affected: over 100 households and more than 2,000 villagers were impacted. The village’s main crops — over 6,000 mu of jasmine and more than 2,000 mu of rice — were all submerged. Liang Dong’s own jasmine fields were among them.

◉ Jasmine fields submerged by floodwater, photographed on 6 July by villagers in Chaoyang Dadong, Hengzhou Town. Image source: Southern Metropolis Daily

At the end of 2023, the Liulan Irrigation District modernisation and renovation project, with a total investment of 382 million yuan, broke ground. In the spring of 2025, Hengzhou suffered a severe spring drought. Reservoir storage dropped sharply during that period, and large stretches of jasmine fields went thirsty, with bud yields declining. To protect the local pillar jasmine industry, authorities accelerated construction on the renovation project, and a substantial number of lined canal sections came into use successively at the end of 2024 and throughout 2025.

The project’s focus was to line the full 60 kilometres of main and branch canals and straighten the channel routes, thereby reducing water loss during irrigation and ensuring that reservoir water could reach the fields quickly during the dry season. According to the official approval documents for the renovation, the irrigation district’s drainage ditches were designed to a 5-year return period light-rain standard, meeting only the needs of routine field drainage under light-rain conditions. The entire project focused solely on agricultural irrigation needs, with no flood-retention or flood-diversion facilities to cope with extreme, catastrophic flooding.

“There’s no saving them — it’s all one vast expanse of water. My heart is heavy; such good jasmine flowers, drowned.” Liang Dong said that the jasmine plants might still be saved if submerged at this depth for a week, but beyond that it would be too late — root rot would kill the entire plant.

Jasmine is a perennial shrub that, with proper care, can be harvested continuously for more than a decade. If the plants die, everything must start over again next year.

For now, all he can do is devote himself to the emergency. He does not know what he can do once the water recedes. “When the disaster is over, what will I even do?”

The roughly six mu of jasmine planted by village committee member Xie Shunxiong of Dage Village, Hengzhou Town was almost completely lost. Heavy rain had been falling continuously since 4 July, for two full days and nights. Standing water reached two to three metres and had not receded by the night of the 9th.

Dage Village lies close to the Yu River. By the time the floodwater reached the village along the channel, its force had diminished somewhat, so Dage did not end up as the hardest-hit area. Villagers’ homes largely stayed dry, but the low-lying jasmine fields were almost entirely lost.

In the flat, low-lying fields along the Yu River banks, the flood produced an “external flood backwater” effect. Water from the fields should normally drain into the Yu River, but now the river’s level stood higher than the drainage outlets, so the water could not flow out — in some cases it even backflowed into the fields, where it simply accumulated. Xie Shunxiong could only mobilise villagers to run pumps, but to little effect: the water they pumped out had nowhere to go either. The rain was still falling, and all they could do was keep waiting for it to stop.

The double-petal jasmine that Xie Shunxiong grows has a long flowering season, with two peak bloom periods each year — May to June and August to September. If the standing water recedes quickly enough and the plants survive, the jasmine could sprout again in a little over a month, and they might still make it in time for the next bloom. But if the root systems die, they will have no choice but to leave the village — either to tap papaya trees for their sap in nearby orchards that escaped the flood, or to take on odd jobs in factories in Guangdong.

At the going rate in previous years, a single mu of jasmine fields could bring Xie Shunxiong 30,000 yuan in income a year. This flood, he estimates, has cost him close to 100,000 yuan. Dage Village has 1,500 households and 6,700 people in all, and he says the average loss per household is around 80,000 yuan.

“After the disaster, we will do everything we can to push for a subsidy policy,” Xie Shunxiong said. “You really must put forward this suggestion — please give the farmers some subsidies.”

As a member of the village committee, Xie Shunxiong has been out inspecting the damage every morning these past few days, registering the situation of minimum-livelihood and five-guarantee households, checking for damage to bridges and roads, and often not getting a meal until eight or nine in the evening.

When it came to the situation in the village, he paused for a long time. “The scene was too horrifying to bear. Even now, just talking about it makes my heart ache. Over 6,000 people in our village have been affected — I feel so ashamed.” After Xie Shunxiong finished speaking, he hung up the phone in silence.

◉ At 20:27 on 9 July, the “Quick Help” mutual-aid map mini-program showed a dense cluster of help requests across the Nanning–Guigang area. Image source: interviewee

The Last Disaster That Broke the Flower Farmers

Zhongtuan Village resident Zhong Luyan runs a jasmine eco-farm. She has felt, over the past two or three years, that the weather in Hengzhou has turned strange — and she felt it most acutely last year. “It always feels like there are far more typhoons now, they come so frequently, and the heavy rain lasts much longer. It is nothing like the natural weather we used to have.” In April last year, she witnessed something she had never seen in Hengzhou before: a scene resembling a “sandstorm,” with howling winds sweeping across the fields, churning the air into a grey haze.

“Before, when it got hot in summer, a shower would come and be over in fifteen or twenty minutes. Once the sun came back out, we could start picking the flowers right away. It is very different now. The moment a typhoon hits, we cannot harvest or pick flowers for several days,” she said.

Foodthink consulted specialists in agricultural insurance and found that the insurance products linked to the jasmine industry fall mainly into two categories. The first is jasmine rainfall index insurance, whose coverage period runs from the end of April to the end of October, spanning the jasmine flowering season; the policy stipulates that cumulative rainy days during the flowering period must exceed 95 before a claim can be triggered. The second is jasmine planting income insurance, under which a payout is made if the actual total income per mu across the entire flowering season falls below the target income per mu specified in the policy.

The concentrated heavy rainfall and internal flooding that struck Guangxi this time do not, by the literal definition, meet the meteorological criteria for a jasmine rainfall index insurance payout. Meanwhile, jasmine planting income insurance only saw its first policy issued in March this year, and that first case covered a pilot plot of just 10 mu — it is still in the early, small-scale trial stage.

Several farmers told Foodthink that they had never heard of the insurance products available for the jasmine industry and had never purchased any.

Yi Fujin, a professor at the School of Public Affairs at Zhejiang University, has long studied agricultural policy and agricultural risk management. He said: “Agricultural insurance is in reality heavily dependent on the specific insurance contract; it is not the case that every risk can be covered. If you truly wanted to include all risks, I imagine the premiums would be very high.” He added that it also depends on how the local government actually communicates with the insurer after a disaster strikes.

Against the backdrop of overcapacity the previous year and flower prices that had been depressed for a long time, this flood, hitting at the peak of the blooming season, was a blow compounded on top of one for Hengzhou’s jasmine farmers.

Xie Shunxiong has been growing jasmine for more than 30 years. In those early days, jasmine was a priority industry in Hengzhou. Tea merchants from Fujian would bring in tea leaves, which were then locally processed through the traditional scenting process, in which fresh jasmine blossoms are layered with the leaves to infuse them with fragrance. Beyond that, Hengzhou’s jasmine was also sold to other regions for use in potted plants, essential oils, and fragrances.

Between 2023 and 2024, the new-style tea beverages industry underwent rapid expansion, and products built around a jasmine tea base exploded in popularity, directly driving up the price of fresh jasmine flowers in Hengzhou. Liang Dong told Foodthink that around 2023, the flower price suddenly shot up to more than 40 yuan per jin. Each farm could pick at most 70 to 80 jin a day, and at least 20 to 30 jin.

In Dage Village, where Xie Shunxiong lives, villagers’ annual income per household can reach well over 100,000 yuan at the top end, with a floor of around 30,000 yuan. “Jasmine yields are high. As long as the price does not drop below 10 yuan per jin, farmers will not really be in the red. Rice is only 3 yuan a jin, but one jin of jasmine flowers is worth three jin of rice.”

Such flower prices drew many farmers into the business. They took over farmland that had previously grown sugarcane or watermelons and switched it to jasmine, hoping to ride this round of the market. Liang Dong had himself thought about expanding, but those who could actually lease land and scale up quickly were mostly the larger operators with more capital. According to official statistics, Hengzhou City’s jasmine planting area in 2024 was 129,900 mu, with a total fresh-flower output of 109,200 tonnes. In 2025, the city’s public communications put the planting area at 180,000 mu, with an annual fresh-flower output of 130,000 tonnes.

Hengzhou has also developed a dedicated labour market for jasmine picking. Every flowering season, large numbers of seasonal pickers from Guizhou, Yunnan, and other regions come to Hengzhou, renting rooms in various villages, and working alongside local labourers to complete the high-intensity harvest of fresh flowers.

“Too many people are growing jasmine now — it has gone beyond market demand. These past two years, even the tea company owners cannot sell their tea,” Liang Dong said. Starting in 2025, jasmine prices began to fall. Over the past two years, the average price had held at a little over 20 yuan per jin, but by the start of this year it had dropped to an average of just over 10 yuan, falling to 5 or 6 yuan per jin on rainy days.

In the first half of 2026, flower prices have not returned to their 2024 highs, and the flood has disrupted what is the jasmine farmers’ single most important revenue cycle of the year.

Beyond Jasmine, More Crops Destroyed

The agricultural damage within the flood’s reach is not limited to jasmine cultivation.

The local staple crops — rice and maize — were flooded over wide areas, and already-transplanted late-season rice seedlings were washed away by the flood. Sugarcane, a core sugar crop in Guangxi, suffered widespread lodging, with roots waterlogged and rotting. Bananas in Guangxi, currently at peak blossom emergence, also lodged and were inundated. Aibao Talks Agriculture, a Video Account blogger, estimates that over 10,000 mu of banana trees have been damaged within Guangxi.

◉ Bananas lodging in contiguous stands. Image source: Aibao Talks Agriculture

Snake farming is also a local specialty in Hengzhou’s aquaculture and husbandry sectors, with peak annual output worth hundreds of millions of yuan. During this flood, approximately 800 to 900 snakes escaped from a snake farm in Dengxu Village, Yunbiao Town, Hengzhou City. Snake farms across the region suffered extensive waterlogging, and most of the farmed snakes drowned in their housing sheds. Several pig farms were struck by the flood; at one in Yunbiao Town, all 16,000 head of pigs were washed away. At a cattle shed in Hengzhou, 19 cattle were killed by the flood, costing an individual farmer around 200,000 yuan.

Aquaculture also suffered losses.

The village road in Liangshan Village, Wutan Town, Nanning, was not passable until the afternoon of 6 July. When villager Qing Shoubo finally made it into the village, he found it in utter disarray. Mud covered the ground everywhere, making it hard to move forward. He has a 15- or 16-mu eco-pond, and the day before it had merged with the neighbouring fish pond into one vast expanse of water. “I used to see floods somewhere on the news or on TV and feel sorry for them, but honestly, once it hits home, it feels completely different. That sense of helplessness is very hard to put into words.” He realised there was nothing he could do in the moment and could only manage a bitter smile.

The pond originally stocked bighead carp, silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella), and other species. He had been raising them for about three years, but now the fish had been scattered by the flood into nearby rivers, and he did not know how many remained. On the way, he met the farmer from the neighbouring fish pond, who looked even more exhausted and weathered than he did. That farmer’s pond was several times the size of Qing Shoubo’s, and the money invested in it had reached well over 500,000 yuan.

◉ At 02:00 on 8 July, power was finally restored to Qing Shoubo’s farm. Image source: interviewee

Qing Shoubo has been in freshwater aquaculture since 2011. He does not consider himself inexperienced in handling extreme weather, and the moment a typhoon warning was issued, he had been tracking its movements. In past years during the heavy-rain season, clearing the drainage outlets in time was enough to deal with the waterlogging. “This time it is definitely not going to work — there is no catching up.” “Your experience is simply useless against a 100-year return period event like this,” he said.

To run eco-aquaculture and keep up with the pond rent, he has been scraping by these past years by borrowing money from friends and relatives. He held on until the last two years, when he finally saw a glimmer of hope, but this flood has crushed him a little further.

Just before ending the call, he told Foodthink that he would go out to the fields again that night. The water was gradually receding, but people would take advantage of the standing water to quietly electrofish, and he needed to go stop them.