In 1931, China suffered a catastrophic flood that claimed millions of lives. This was neither a natural nor human-made disaster. Rather, it was created by an interaction between the environment and society. Regular inundation had long been an integral feature of the ecology and culture of the middle Yangzi, yet by the modern era floods had become humanitarian catastrophes. Courtney describes how the ecological and economic effects of the 1931 flood pulse caused widespread famine and epidemics. He takes readers into the inundated streets of Wuhan, describing the terrifying and disorientating sensory environment. He explains why locals believed that an angry Dragon King was causing the flood, and explores how Japanese invasion and war with the Communists inhibited both official relief efforts and refugee coping strategies. This innovative study offers the first in-depth analysis of the 1931 flood, and charts the evolution of one of China's most persistent environmental problems.

Unearths the forgotten history of a catastrophic flood, examining its profound impact upon the environment and society of modern China.

Systematically expresses the temporal and spatial patterns of natural disasters, the hazard-formative environment, hazard-affected bodies and hazard-formative factors.

This is the first English language book that systematically introduces the spatial and temporal patterns of major natural disasters in China from 1949 to 2014. It also reveals natural disaster formation mechanisms and processes, quantifies vulnerability to these disasters, evaluates disaster risks, summarizes the key strategies of integrated disaster risk governance, and analyzes large-scale disaster response cases in recent years in China. The book can be a good reference for researchers, students, and practitioners in the field of natural disaster risk management and risk governance for improving the understanding of natural disasters in China.

This book uses cutting-edge methods, such as big data mining methods on social media, generalized difference in difference, inoperational input–output models, improved data envelopment analysis, improved computable general equilibrium and others to calculate the economic impacts of climate and environmental disasters on China. This book provides the ideas, methods and cases of the redistribution of air pollution emissions in China through evaluating the benefits of meteorological disaster services and meteorological financial insurance. Using big data resources and data mining methods, as well as econometric models, etc., this book provides a comprehensive assessment of the economic impact of disasters in China and studies China's counterpart aid policy and international aid policy for disasters. This book is an academic monograph devoted to the China’s case study. The intended readership includes academics, government officials, graduate students and people concerned about China.

In China’s 4,000-year-long history and modern development, natural disaster management has been about not only human combat against devastating natural forces, but also institutional building, political struggle, and economic interest redistribution among different institutional players. A significant payoff for social scientists studying disasters is that they can reveal much of the hidden nature of political and economic processes and structures, particularly those in non-democracies, which are normally covered up with great care. This book reviews the problems and progress in the politics of China’s disaster management. It analyses the factors in China’s governance and political process that restrains its capacity to manage disasters. The book helps the audience better understand the dynamic relationship among various interest groups and civic forces in modern China’s disaster politics, with special emphasis on the process of pluralization, decentralization and fragmentation.

This book shows how Chinese officials have responded to popular and international pressure, while at the same time seeking to preserve their own careers, in the context of disaster management. Using the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake as a case study, it illustrates how authoritarian regimes are creating new governance mechanisms in response to the changing global environment and what challenges they are confronted with in the process. The book examines both the immediate and long-term effects of a major disaster on China’s policy, institutions, and governing practices, and seeks to explain which factors lead to hasty and poorly conceived reconstruction efforts, which in turn reproduce the very same conditions of vulnerability or expose communities to new risks. In short, it tells a “political” story of how intra-governmental interactions, state-society relations, and international engagement can shape the processes and outcomes of recovery and reconstruction.