BEIJING, Aug 3 (Reuters) - More than 7 million Chinese were short of drinking water on Friday as heat prolongs weeks of drought across the northeast and south, while floods remained a threat after killing more than 700 this summer, state media said. As much as a third of all farmland across the southern provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan and Heilongjiang in the northeast had been damaged or damaged, the People's Daily said. The autonomous regions of Guangxi in the south and Inner Mongolia in the north and Jilin in the northeast had also hit hard by drought for weeks, bringing the area of damaged crops nationwide to 11 million hectares (42,500 sq miles). Five million cattle also faced water shortages, it said. In rice-growing Jiangxi, where the temperature in some places reached 40.6 degrees Celsius (105 Fahrenheit) on Thursday, water had been diverted from the Yangtze River and the Poyang Lake to irrigate parched land, Xinhua news agency said. That was possible only because water levels on the Yangtze, China's longest, had become higher than those on its tributaries in Jiangxi after downpours along its upper reaches sent flood peaks downstream, Xinhua said. A new Yangtze flood peak was expected to reach the densely populated city of Wuhan, capital of the central province of Hubei, on Saturday, Xinhua said. Vice Premier Hui Liangyu has warned that the country is still at a crucial stage in battling floods and drought as rainfall distribution is uneven. Heavy rain soaked large parts of south China in June and much of the east, southwest and northwest in July, killing more than 700 people in floods, landslides and house collapses. And the heat is to continue on Friday as temperatures across China's south and east, including Anhui province where millions was reeling from one month of flooding from the Huai River, hovered above 37 degrees Celsius (98.6 F), the National Meteorological Centre said. In the eastern province of Zhejiang, where the temperature could hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 F) on Friday, at least 11 people were missing after a tidal bore near the mouth of the Qiantang River swept more than 30 people out to sea on Thursday afternoon.
