EARLY this week Typhoon Sally oared into southern China, killing 200 people, and bringing torrential downpours to an area already devastated by flooding this summer.
Outside China, almost no one noticed. Floods in southern China are like brush fires in California regular occurrences in the annual news cycle. China is anyway so vast flooding or drought records are always being broken somewhere.
But this year the story of flooding in China has been different. During the summer the Yangtse valley, China's agricultural and industrial heartland with a population of 180 million and including the city of Shanghai, came within a hair's breadth, or a few layers of sandbags, of a catastrophe of huge proportions.
Five million soldiers and peasants battled throughout July and August to prevent the mighty river, the third longest in the world, bursting its banks as tributary rivers backed up.
The crisis passed, but not before more than 1,000 people were drowned and two million made homeless as tropical rain came down in sheets of water, day after day, during the summer months.
Floodwaters swamped cities and villages, and the Dongting, China's largest lake, overflowed into the surrounding countryside. This is where most lives were lost. Financial losses are estimated in billions of dollars. For only the second time since 1949, China appealed for international aid to help the victims.
The Chinese authorities are now left facing the conclusion that recent environmental changes might have been to blame for the worst flooding in decades and that the worst is yet to come.
Yangtse flooding has, of course, plagued China through every dynasty, and attempts by earlier generations of Chinese peasants and rulers to control the mighty river, which flows 6,300 kilometres to the sea from its sources 5,000 metres high in the Qinghia-Tibetan plateau, have sometimes been the cause.
Over 200 years ago, during the reign of Qianlong, farmers built dikes in the area of Dongting Lake to protect their plots. This, combined with massive land reclamation, deprived the Yangtse of its natural run off areas and led to terrible flooding. Devastating floods in the Yangtse valley in 1931 inundated an area the size of Ireland and created 14 million refugees.
There were further disasters in 1935, 1949 and 1954 after exceptionally heavy summer monsoon rains. The floods in Wuhan in 1954 took tens of thousands of lives, and dikes had to be opened to save part of the city.
Today's disasters are partly blamed by some experts on major environmental changes which occurred during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" 40 years ago, when communes were ordered to abandon riverside fishing and reed growing in favour of grain.
In the 1970s more lakes and marshes were drained to create farmland. "A big reason for the disasters is that under Mao peasants drained the reservoir lakes along the Yangtse to grow grain" said Li Rui, the communist leader's former personal secretary who lost his job when he protested.
Silt and sand is causing the river bed to rise, some three metres in the past 50 years, according to Prof Huang Wanli, a hydraulic engineer who studied in the US. Sediment has also built up in the river bed because of widespread soil erosion in Sichuan province upriver, where numerous tributaries drain into the Yangtse.
To ease the pressure on river banks, the authorities today now have to relocate millions of peasants who, desperate for land, cultivated crops in the rich soil on the wrong side of levees all across the Yangtse plain.
Yang Xin, a conservationist who specialises in monitoring the ecology at the Yangtse's source said in a recent interview that deforestation, erosion, desertification, large scale poaching of wildlife such as antelope, and climate changes have contributed to create a potential catastrophe.
Swathes of sand dunes have formed by the river banks as grasslands shrivel up, he said. He believed that the amount of sediment washed into the river could be enough to cause problem when the Three Gorges Dam is completed.
Work on the controversial dam, one of the greatest Chinese projects ever envisaged, got under way in the late 1980s and is due for completion in 11 years. Over a million people will be moved before the dam is completed, creating a reservoir 600 kilometres long. It is designed to control the flood waters by blocking the river at its narrowest point.
Opponents of the project say the barrier is too far upstream to prevent flooding in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtse, and that the Three Gorges Dam would not stop flooding such as occurred this year, and might even make it worse.
They argue that there are better ways to stop future disasters, such as strengthening levees, many of which have fallen into disrepair, and creating smaller storage reservoirs.
The Chinese government has undertaken such works on the Huai river plain after terrible damage and loss of life in 1991, but it has had to move hundreds of thousands of people to higher ground and raise whole villages on stilts.
Supporters of the dam project reply that floods downstream will be prevented in future because they are fed by rainfall in the Sichuan plain above the dam The South China Morning Post pointed out that their theory is supported by history.
The worst floods of the last 1,000 years originated from water carried by tributaries above the Three Gorges. Whatever happens the Chinese government is totally committed to the $25 billion project. In the China Daily on, August 19th, He Gong, vice president of the China Yangtse Three Gorges Project Development Corporation, said: "The project is a touchstone nothing can stop it now."
His remarks came after 60 prominent Chinese scientists sent a petition to President Jiang Zemin in mid summer asking for increased aid to protect relics which will be lost beneath the waters of the dam when flooding takes place in stages.
Mr He said that the archaeological sites which include Han and Tang dynasty tombs, and Ming, Han and Qing dynasty temples, would be excavated, though money to survey the ruins has run out. The Three Gorges Construction Committee is headed by the Prime Minister, Li Peng, who was prominent in rallying the soldiers and rescue workers during the critical days of late July.
It can never be far from the minds of the Chinese leadership that the traditional role of the emperor and his officials in China has always been to regulate the rivers, and that dynasties fell when they failed. Mr Li warned that China could not relax its will and must prepare for a prolonged fight against big floods.