Storms are expected to batter large swathes of China again on Monday after floods, landslides and lightning killed more than 150 people last week alone, state media said.
Storms are likely to hit the already swollen Yangtze and Huai river valleys, bringing strong wind or hail.
“Meteorologists warned people in southwestern Chongqing, central Hubei and Henan and eastern Shandong to be on the alert for floods and landslides in the coming three days,” the China Daily said.
The provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanxi and the Guangxi autonomous region would suffer heavy rainfall, meteorologists said.
In normally dry Shanxi in the country’s north, 11 coal miners were trapped underground after mountain torrents flooded their pit on Sunday, Xinhua news agency said.
By July 16, China’s death toll from natural disasters so far this year was 715 with 129 missing, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Since the start of the annual rainy season in May, floods have hit nearly half of China and killed at least 400 people, Xinhua news agency said.
President tours flooded city
State television on Sunday showed President Hu Jintao slogging through Chongqing’s flooded streets in black galoshes and visiting residents whose homes had been inundated.
Hu was shown chatting with an elderly man living in a washed out apartment, asking, "How high was the water? Are you having any problems getting enough food? Do you have all the things you need to cook your rice?"
During a speech in the city’s flooded Shapingba district, Hu told residents that the Communist Party and government would do everything possible to help.
"You all have suffered," Hu told a small crowd gathered on the street. "This once-in-a-century rain disaster has destroyed your homes and washed away your belongings, causing significant losses. I am sad as you are sad. We must have the determination and courage to overcome this."
Power had been restored to most of Chongqing after days without electricity. The worst rainstorm in more than a century in the municipality, home to 30 million people, killed at least 42, state media said.
Hundreds of thousands flee
Even harder hit this week was southern China's Yunnan province, where rain triggered floods and landslides from Wednesday to Saturday. More than 4,000 houses were destroyed and 386,000 people evacuated, Xinhua said. It cited the Ministry of Civil Affairs as saying that 59 people were killed in Yunnan, most of them caught in violent mud flows on Thursday.
Summer is peak rainy season in China, where millions of people in the central and southern part of the country live on farmland in the flood plains of rivers.
Flooding and typhoons killed 2,704 people last year, according to the China Meteorological Administration. That was the second-deadliest year on record after 1998, when summer floods killed 4,150.
