Flood Defense and Water/Sediment Management—With Particular Reference to The Yellow River - River Dynamics and Integrated River Management - page 338

After Pan Jixun the sediment deposition in the lower Yellow River channel sped up to 5-10 cm per year.
The river migrated from south to north and captured the Daqing River in 1855 due to the levee breach at
Tongwaxiang. In the first 10 years after the major shift of the river course, the river flowed wildly and
flooded frequently because there were no strong levee to accommodate the river water and the
government hesitated to move the river back to the south or build a new levee system to stabilize the
north channel. From 1864 to 1888 the new dyke system was constructed and since then the river has
flowed into the Bohai Sea via Lijin.
Since the river was artificially shifted to the south in 1938 during the second World War, the river
flowed over the plain without any levee between the Yellow River and the Huaihe River. It was
disastrous and the local people appealed to the government to bring the river back to its north channel or
to fix a channel between the Yellow and Huaihe Rivers. In 1945, the government and hydraulic engineers
made an effort to close the breach and bring the river back to its north channel but failed. In 1946,
hydraulic engineers finally closed the breach and made the river flow in the north channel across
Shandong Province again. Figure 6.7 shows a photo of the closing of the breached south levee, which
ended the 8 years flooding of the Yellow River water over the central China plain.
Fig. 6.7 The breached south levee of the Yellow River was finally closed in 1946, which ended the 8 years of flooding
of Yellow River water over the central China plain. (after YRCC, 2001)
Since the 1950s the Yellow River Water Conservancy Commission (YRCC) has been the leading institute
for river training. Wang Huayun, the chief of YRCC, proposed and implemented his training strategies in
the period (Wang, 1989). The nation has spent $1 billion for flood control and saved $500 billion in flood
losses (Chen 1999). The riverbed profile has remained stable for half a century, with only parallel rising
following the extension of the river mouth into the sea (Zhang and Xie, 1985). The main strategies are
to reduce flood discharge with reservoirs, enhance the capacity of the river channel by enhancing and
reinforcing the levees, and retending floodwater with detention basins. These strategies are referred to in
short as: upper reaches storing, lower reaches discharging and two sides retaining.
Three foreign names should be mentioned who worked on the training of the river: Engels, Freeman
and Franzius (Yen, 1999). Freeman visited China in 1917 and proposed to build cross dikes extending