Flooding across the country has now killed 273 people and left more than 20,000 others sick or injured, the Civil Affairs Ministry said yesterday.
At least 10 provinces and regions, including cities, had been hit by flooding and storms, among them usually arid areas in the north and northwest, a ministry official said.
"Flood disasters have hit Jiangxi, Fujian, Hubei, Hunan, Sichuan and Guangdong, and storms have hit Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai and Xinjiang," he said.
The floods had destroyed or damaged 1.01 million houses and hit more than two million hectares of farmland, including more than 200,000 hectares where the harvest was wrecked, Xinhua said.
Direct economic losses were estimated at 7.4 billion yuan (HK$6.9 billion), the official said.
The mainly desert region of Ningxia, in the north, has had its worst floods this century. Farmland was drenched and irrigation works and houses destroyed, the Workers' Daily reported.
The rains, which began on May 20, caused flooding east of the Helan mountain in the northern part of the region, the paper said, inundating 4,200 hectares of farmland.
Hunan has been worst hit. Heavy rains started in the province on May 21. In some areas, 240 mm of rain fell in three hours. So far, 30 people have died in the province and 57,500 hectares of farmland have been affected.
Areas along the Yangtze River in eastern Jiangsu province have been on alert against flooding and landslides.
Jiangsu officials said its spring rainfall had been 2.5 times the normal amount. They have set aside 88 million yuan for flood prevention operations to be carried out by a 900,000-strong team equipped with 830,000 tonnes of stone and 12 million straw bags.
The provincial Government has placed an indefinite ban on sand-gathering in the Yangtze to keep embankments secure. A landslide and mud-rock flow warning system was recently completed.
Meteorologists have blamed the influence of the El Nino weather phenomenon for the floods.