Word: floodings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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CHESF began as a gleam in the eye of Pernambuco's Senator Apolonio Sales, Minister of Agriculture under the Vargas dictatorship. Sales saw Paulo Afonso as part of a larger, TVA-style plan for development of the whole valley, with irrigation, flood-control and sanitation schemes. He was swept out of office in the avalanche that toppled Vargas, but not before both CHESF and the Sao Francisco Valley Authority (for which plans are still incomplete) had been...
Three months after the Communist takeover, the once booming, bustling, bawdy metropolis is dying. Shanghai has been withered by Nationalist blockade, damaged by flood and typhoon, weakened by arrogant Red treatment of its foreign businessmen and consulates. Brisk, bald General Chen Yi, Shanghai's new Red mayor, standing on a platform in front of a huge oil portrait of Communist Leader Mao Tse-tung, told a handpicked group of "Shanghai representatives" what the Communists propose...
...plight of Farmer Ah Teng, a refugee from a village near Canton, was typical of China's immemorial calamity. Even war had not been so dread a scourge as the flood. "When the Japs were here," said Ah Teng, "the battle raged four times across our village. But through it all we lived in the same hut. Now the hut has been swept away. My only buffalo, the pigs and chickens-all we have is gone...
Within Communist territory there were other millions like Ah Teng. Red leaders in Hankow proclaimed flood relief along the Yangtze as the party's most urgent task. Red armies sloshed southward across swamped fields, heavy guns sinking into the mud. There were mass levies of peasants to shore up dikes and save the riceland. Seven women who each toted more than 70 crates of mud in a nightlong fight against the waters were acclaimed as "flood labor heroes...
...fight against the flood was also a fight against starvation riding its crest. The Yangtze basin had lost 40% of its rice crop. In the south the deficit was 50%. Surveying the figures, foreign experts foresaw another tragedy: the great flood might well plunge China into the century's most terrible famine...