Why is China facing record floods?
Record rains have inundated central China with floods striking an underground subway system, damaging dams and riverbanks, and causing landslides and building collapses.
Beijing has touted its massive dam network as a remedy for its devastating annual floods, but deluges in recent years have killed hundreds of people and submerged thousands of homes.
Here are five questions about why China still endures severe flooding every year.
China has historically relied on dams, levees and reservoirs to control the flow of water.
Around 30 billion cubic metres of floodwater were intercepted last year by dams and reservoirs in Asia's longest river, the Yangtze, mitigating flooding downstream in areas including Shanghai, China's emergency management ministry said.
But the country's vast water management schemes are unable to contain all the flooding while there are questions about the endurance of dams built decades ago.
On Tuesday night, the army warned a damaged dam in Henan province "could collapse at any time" after a record downpour. Troops blasted an opening in the dam to release water and raced to reinforce other embankments with sandbags across the province.
Last year, authorities in eastern Anhui province were forced to blow up two dams to release water from the rising Chuhe river over cropland.
And fears re-emerge periodically over the structural integrity of the Three Gorges Dam on the upper Yangtze, the world's largest hydroelectric dam, built in an area criss-crossed by geological faultlines.
The burden on China's dams is likely to grow as climate change makes extreme weather events more common.
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