Editing Yellow River (section)

===Recent times===
[[File:1938 June Yellow River.gif|right|thumb|[[Chinese Nationalist Army]] soldiers during the 1938 Yellow River flood.]]
[[1851 Yellow River flood|Between 1851 and 1855]],<ref name="Treg"/><ref name="R. Grousset"/><ref name="eunuch"/> the Yellow River returned to the north amid the floods that provoked the [[Nien Rebellion|Nien]] and [[Taiping Rebellion]]s. The [[1887 Yellow River flood|1887 flood]] has been estimated to have killed between 900,000 and 2 million people,<ref name="internationalrivers.org">International Rivers Report. "[http://internationalrivers.org/files/Deluge2007_full.pdf Before the Deluge] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080704083330/http://internationalrivers.org/files/Deluge2007_full.pdf |date=4 July 2008 }}". 2007.</ref> and is the [[List of natural disasters by death toll#Ten deadliest natural disasters by highest estimated death toll excluding epidemics and famines|second-worst natural disaster in history]] (excluding famines and epidemics). The Yellow River more or less adopted its present course during the [[1897 Yellow River Flood|1897 flood]].<ref name="R. Grousset"/><ref>Needham, Joseph. ''Science and Civilization in China''. Vol. 1. ''Introductory Orientations'', p. 68. Caves Books Ltd. (Taipei), 1986 {{ISBN|052105799X}}.</ref>

The [[1931 Yellow River flood|1931 flood]] killed an estimated 1,000,000 to 4,000,000,<ref name="internationalrivers.org"/> and is the worst natural disaster recorded (excluding famines and epidemics).

On 9 June 1938, during the [[Second Sino-Japanese War]], [[Kuomintang|Nationalist]] troops under [[Chiang Kai-shek]] [[1938 Yellow River flood|broke the levees]] holding back the river near the village of [[Huayuankou, Henan|Huayuankou]] in Henan, causing what has been called by Canadian historian, Diana Lary, a "war-induced natural disaster". The goal of the operation was to stop the advancing Japanese troops by following a strategy of "using water as a substitute for soldiers". The [[1938 Yellow River flood|1938 flood]] of an area covering {{convert|54000|km2|sigfig=3|sp=us|abbr=on}} took some 500,000 to 900,000 Chinese lives, along with an unknown number of Japanese soldiers. The flood prevented the Japanese Army from taking [[Zhengzhou]], on the southern bank of the Yellow River, but did not stop them from reaching their goal of capturing [[Wuhan]], which was the temporary seat of the Chinese government and straddles the [[Yangtze River]].<ref>Lary, Diana. "The Waters Covered the Earth: China's War-Induced Natural Disaster". Op. cit. in Selden, Mark & So, Alvin Y., eds. ''War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century'', pp. 143–170. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004 {{ISBN|0742523918}}.</ref>

In 1954, the People's Republic of China announced its General Plan to Fundamentally Control Yellow River Flood Disasters and Develop Yellow River Waterworks.<ref name=":12">{{Cite book |last=Harrell |first=Stevan |title=An Ecological History of Modern China |publisher=[[University of Washington Press]] |year=2023 |isbn=9780295751719 |location=Seattle}}</ref>{{Rp|pages=111–113}} It sought to address both flooding risks and to convert rainfall-fed fields of the North China Plain to irrigated agriculture.<ref name=":12" />{{Rp|page=114}} Construction began in earnest in 1957.<ref name=":12" />{{Rp|page=114}}

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the dry-up trends accelerated, with the Yellow River failing to reach its mouth for an average of approximately 180 days per year in the 1990s.<ref name=":12" />{{Rp|page=168}} In 1997, the Yellow River did not reach the sea for 226 consecutive days.<ref name=":12" />{{Rp|page=168}}

On 12 August 2024, according to the Yellow River Water Conservancy Committee of the Ministry of Water Resources, since the implementation of unified water flow regulation for the entire river in 1999, the Yellow River has achieved continuous flow for 25 consecutive years as of August 12. Over the past 25 years, the main stream of the Yellow River has supplied a total of more than 543.6 billion cubic meters of water, with a total of 1.464 billion cubic meters of ecological water replenishment. The number of bird species in the estuarine wetlands and protected areas has increased to 373, and the wetland ecosystem has undergone a positive restoration.<ref>{{Cite web |title=黄河实现连续25年不断流_新闻频道_中国青年网 |url=https://news.youth.cn/gn/202408/t20240812_15443210.htm |access-date=2025-04-08 |website=news.youth.cn}}</ref>