The 1931 China floods affected the Yangtze, Huai, and Yellow River regions after extreme weather, snowmelt, and heavy rainfall. The disaster killed vast numbers of people and displaced many more. It revealed the vulnerability of densely populated river societies under political and economic strain.

Modern Chinese writers and poets inherited river imagery shaped by both nourishment and catastrophe. Flood, silt, hunger, boat, and broken dike became powerful symbols in twentieth-century writing about peasant suffering, state weakness, and the unstable relation between civilisation and water.