Wang Nianyin was still asleep on the second floor of his Lulu Cat Café on Wednesday morning when water seeped onto the picturesque stone streets outside. The waters around Chongqing city — where the Jialing River meets the arcing Yangtze — always rise with the summer rains. But never like this. By midday, Wang and scores of businesses had evacuated. By afternoon, parts of their district, the ancient porcelain-crafting village of Ciqikou, was 5 feet underwater. Riverside highways vanished. Cresting waves threatened to reach elevated rail tracks.

As China enters a third month of devastating flooding, it is grappling with catastrophic damage that has spread from the central provinces to the upper Yangtze — a region that includes Chongqing, a city of 30 million — and Sichuan province, in the high-altitude southwest. So far, 63 million people have been affected and 15 million acres of farmland destroyed — an area the size of West Virginia. In official statements, the government has placed the floods on the same level as the coronavirus pandemic when describing shocks to China this year.

Although the People’s Liberation Army regularly provides disaster relief for floods and earthquakes, the remarks by Xi, who has called the situation grim, and the sheer scale of the mobilization underscored the gravity of the crisis and the urgency of the all-hands response.

The Chinese military has mobilized 1.2 million troops across 17 provinces to evacuate about 170,000 residents and reinforce embankments and roads, according to state media. On Thursday, Yangtze water levels in Chongqing hit a record, as did the flood peak at the Three Gorges Dam, where dam operators pledged to stand on “wartime footing.”