The worst affected is the regional capital Zhengzhou with 12 million inhabitants.
Large parts of the city ended up under water on Tuesday, after what Chinese meteorologists describe as the worst rainfall in a thousand years, according to Reuters.
Dramatic images on social media show major flooding in the streets and on the subway tunnel in the city.
Trapped on a train
Hundreds of passengers were trapped on trains and in tunnels when large bodies of water fell into the ground.
Several videos, posted on Twitter and the Chinese app Weibo, show that passengers were trapped on trains with water up to their shoulders and necks.
Evacuation work is now underway in several places in the city.
16 people have died and at least 200,000 have been evacuated from their homes, according to the news agency AFP.
Several subway cars were flooded after heavy rainfall in Zhengzhou.
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– Very serious
Chinese President Xi Jinping says the floods are very serious.
– Some dams have crossed their banks and caused serious damage, loss of life and damage to property. The flood situation is very serious, Xi said according to state media on Wednesday.
He also said that the situation at the moment is at a critical point.
On Tuesday, the army warned that a dam was in danger of collapsing in the city of Luoyang, which has a population of 7 million and is located further west of Zhengzhou.
A man wades through floodwaters after heavy rainfall in the city of Zhengzhou.
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Rarely large amounts of precipitation
From Saturday night until late on Tuesday, 617.1 millimeters of rain was recorded in Zhengzhou, which is almost equivalent to the city’s annual average.
This amount of precipitation is only seen every thousand years, local meteorologists say according to Reuters quoting local media.
For comparison, it is Norwegian precipitation record, which was set in 1940, at 229.6 millimeters in one day.
According to the BBC it is expected that the heavy rain will subside by Thursday.
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