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The late 19th century is widely known as the period of modernization in China. But it was also the time that witnessed the highest frequency of flooding of the Yellow River in history. Yellow River flood management, a top priority in internal affairs for the Chinese empire since antiquity, became an urgent and immediate task as well as a pivotal part of the modernization project for the Qing government in the late 19th century. As a technician deeply engaged in regulation of the Yellow River in the 1890s, the late Qing novelist Liu E 劉鶉(1857-1909) begins his celebrated The Travels of Lao Can 老殘遊記 with the theme of Yellow River floods. The flooding caused by the Yellow River breach was an unbearable trauma for Liu E, who himself was unable to effectively control the Yellow River and personally witnessed the ensuing tragedy. Prior to The Travels of Lao Can, there had never been a Chinese literary work that dealt directly with the traumatic experience of mass death. How did The Travels of Lao Can describe and deal with such trauma that had never been written about? Did the trauma caused by the flooding of the Yellow River involve a more complicated technical orientation for Liu E, who，compared with the simple bystanders of the disaster, was directly involved in river management? In the novel, what is the relationship between the recovery from this trauma and river technology? This paper sheds light on the relationship between environmental crises and the inception of national identity in late 19th and early 20th century China by examining how The Travels of Lao Can was shaped by and responded to the trauma caused by the Yellow River floods in Shandong in the year 1889. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From AD 1048 to 1128, Yellow River flooding killed over a million people, left many more homeless and destitute, and turned parts of the once fertile North China Plain into a silted-up agricultural wasteland. Brought on in part by climate change and the Northern Song dynasty’s (AD 960–1127) mismanagement of the environment, the Yellow River floods likely hastened the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty. Despite the magnitude of this flood event, no sedimentary deposits have yet been linked to these historically recorded floods. In this research paper, we provide archaeological, sedimentary, and radiocarbon evidence of the AD 1048–1128 Yellow River floods at the Dazhanglongcun, Xidacheng, and Daguxiancun sites in Neihuang County, Henan Province. Based on our data, we argue that the AD 1048–1128 Yellow River floods deposited over 5 m of alluvium on villages in the North China Plain, radically changing both the physical and political landscape of Northern Song dynasty China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the catastrophic Yellow River flood of 1938-1947 impacted rural communities and state-society relations in the inundated area. The flood, which occurred when China's Nationalist government deliberately breached a major Yellow River dike in a desperate attempt to use flooding to slow the advance of the Japanese Imperial Army, turned millions of Chinese farmers into refugees and killed over eight hundred thousand people. This essay explores the human and social sides of the flood through the eyes of local observers, missionaries, and the wartime Chinese media. It compares rural and urban experiences of the disaster and examines local perspectives on the efficacy of the flood relief projects organized by the Chinese government. This paper finds that while the wartime Nationalist state did not abandon the inundated area, its state-building efforts there exhausted and disillusioned flood refugees rather than integrating them more fully into the modern nation state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major obstacles to simulating flood flow in the Yellow River are its high sediment concentration, complex compound cross section, and rapid change in channel planform. This paper presents an improved one-dimensional numerical model that takes into account the effect of sediment concentration and bed change on mass and momentum conservation of flood flow in the Yellow River. The model is calibrated and then validated by simulating three individual flood events. Results show that an increase in sediment concentration leads to a reduction in flood wave celerity and peak discharge. The generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) method is used to evaluate the uncertainty of modeling results. A sensitivity index, analogous to the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency factor, is adopted to quantify the sensitivity of calibration parameters. The modeling results are sensitive to the choice of Manning's roughness coefficient and the empirical recovery coefficient for suspended sediment transport at reaches of transitional channel planform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An economic valuation of flood reductions arising from land use changes induced by the Conversion of Cropland to Forest and Grassland Program (CCFGP) in China is detailed in this paper. A distributed hydrologic model is used to analyze and predict changes in the probability of flood occurrences in the Yellow River Basin (YRB) due to revegetation activities under the CCFGP. The expected value of flood reductions due to the avoided flood damage potential is then estimated. Losses brought about by each type of flood in the YRB over time and the probability change in flood occurrences are used in the calculation. Results show that the economic benefits from flood reductions will total China Yuan 362 million during 2010–2020. The inclusion of this economic benefit into a benefit-cost analysis of the CCFGP provides a more comprehensive assessment of the program. Implications for prioritizing management options to mitigate flood disasters in the YRB are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main-channel of the lower Yellow River is the main path of water and sediment transportation. In this paper, we put forth a suggestion that the bank-full discharge of the main-channel in the lower Yellow River should be no less than 4000 m³/s, which is based on the demand from effective sediment transportation (or riverbed scouring), the demand of flood control on morphology of the cross section of the main-channel, and the possible riverbed-forming force of future flood. The forming of the main-channel is the process for the flood force to overcome the resistance from the riverbed. The forming of the main-channel configuration comes from the competition between riverbed-forming force of flood and resistance from the riverbed. Regarding the flood with medium or less sediment content and without floodplain inundated, the main-channel forming mechanism can be simplified as the relationship between the change of cross section area and WαQβ. For forming same main-channel, the needed flood force W0.32Q0.37 is definite, i.e., when the discharge is large, the flood volume can be smaller; if some flood is able to scour the main-channel, its force W0.32Q0.37 should be larger than 41. Not all floods that inundate floodplain have the function of silting in floodplain and scouring main-channel. Regarding flood with medium or less sediment content, only when the flood discharge is over 1.5 times of the relevant bankfull discharge, obvious scouring effect can occur in the main-channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]