Beijing
24 Aug 2002

(Clearwisdom.net) Hundreds of thousands of workers continue to shore up dikes as water levels in China's second largest lake near their peak. The homes of 10 million people are in danger of being swamped by the waters of Dongting Lake.

More than one million peasants and soldiers are working frantically to contain the swollen Dongting Lake. The lake covers 4,000 square kilometers, the size of Luxembourg, in China's central Hunan Province.

The work squads are piling sandbags, rocks and soil into leaks along a vast network of dikes around the lake and the four rivers that feed it.

Some top officials are hopeful that the dikes will hold. They were reinforced after the worst floods in decades killed 4,000 people in 1998.

The flood crest driving down the Yangtze River is expected to surge into Dongting Lake on Sunday. Officials warn residents in the most threatened areas to be ready to evacuate at short notice. The officials say the water level should peak at around 35 meters, just below the record level seen in 1998.

So far this year, China's summer floods have killed more than 900 people. Even if the dikes of Dongting Lake hold, communities farther downriver remain endangered, including the city of Wuhan, with a population of seven million.

However, the mood in the area is reportedly calm even though at least one small village has been submerged after a minor breach of a dike. An estimated 27,000 homes in the area have been flooded.

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(Editor's Note: We are greatly saddened and troubled by the large-scale loss of life and property in China due to the raging floods. Even though China's state controlled television programs are repetitiously chanting empty political slogans while various levels of government officials put on a show of "disaster relief," we see clearly that Jiang and his corrupt officials at each level of government are concentrating their efforts on embezzlement, fraud, bitter power struggles, and persecuting innocent people. Each year there are disastrous floods, followed by "disaster relief efforts" that are too little, too late. Yet these tragedies have been turned into opportunities by Jiang and his cronies to glorify and promote themselves. If they had a shred of a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the common folk and the future of the Chinese people, then the tragedies occurring as a result of the floods in Hunan could have been avoided to a large degree.

The ancients in China emphasized the relationship between man and the heavens, and often drew a direct correlation between a despotic regime and natural disasters. Whenever large-scale disasters occurred, it was commonly believed to be caused by the ruler's greed and atrocities, and the rulers themselves were often forced to admit their culpability, at least in name, to the heavens and to the people. Over the past three years, the disastrous floods in Mainland China have become more and more severe. Meanwhile, over the same period of time the Jiang regime's persecution of the kind people who cultivate "Truthfulness-Compassion-Tolerance" has become more and more vicious -- Jiang's political group has exhausted great amounts of the country's and the people's resources in order to persecute Falun Gong practitioners, creating countless bloody tragedies. Can this be a coincidence? The widespread suffering caused by the floods in China can certainly be attributed to the corruption and incompetence of Jiang's regime, but the deeper reason may well the persecution being carried out by this evil gang against innocent Falun Gong practitioners. While the dictator is desecrating the laws of heaven, it is the people under him that suffer as a direct consequence.

No matter from what angle, it is clear that under Jiang's despotic rule, the victims are not just limited to Falun Gong practitioners but all innocent people, inside China or abroad, that are within his reach. For the sake of our collective future, let us stop the violence being perpetrated by Jiang's regime together.)