More than 650 people have died and millions have been left homeless during weeks of disastrous flooding, landslides and mudflows caused by rainstorms in China, the country's state news agency disclosed today.

Xinhua said that the flooding, the worst in 10 years, was known to have killed 652 people and cost the Chinese economy 52.5billion yuan (£3bn) since the start of the year.

It added that 452,000 homes had been destroyed across the vast country, and another five million people had recently been evacuated from their properties along China's main rivers in anticipation of more flooding.

To worsen the situation, heavy rains were forecast to hit the country’s southwest, northwest and northeast regions in the coming days.

As a flashpoint in the current weather crisis, it emerged today that 69 Chinese miners were trapped for a second day in a flooded coal pit 125 miles west of Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan.

Rescuers were spending the day trying to deliver food and water to the miners through 2,600ft ventilation pipes they had installed while working to remove mud and sediment from a passage which would allow them to pump more water out of the mine.

“All 69 miners are safe, and their mood is stable,” the Government’s work safety administration was quoted as saying.

Revelations of China's growing weather crisis today prompted the International Red Cross to launch an emergency appeal claiming that China's rural population, much of which still live in a state of poverty while its cities boom, is the worst affected.

“There’s an urgent need for rice, clean drinking water, shelter, clothing, medical services and disinfectant,” said Gu Qinghui, the Red Cross's regional disaster management delegate for East Asia. "It’s the rural poor who are suffering the most, including many farmers."

The Red Cross is bidding to raise 9.5 million Swiss Francs (£3.9m) to help compensate residents for millions of hectares of farmland which had been submerged, along with hundreds of thousands of homes damaged or destroyed.

“When you look at the economic growth of the country, it’s easy to forget that outside of the major cities the rural areas are home to many families living in utter poverty,” Ewa Eriksson, the federation’s acting regional head of delegation in Beijing, said.

“We don’t want this disaster to become forgotten or neglected because the world’s attention is elsewhere."

While chronic flooding has affected much of the country, the Red Cross disclosed that eastern China's Jiangxi province has actually been suffering from a month-long drought.

A million people have suffered drinking water shortages while at least 31,300 hectares (77,342 acres) of farmland had been ruined, it added.

Weather conditions have already had disastrous consequences over much of Asia this summer, large parts of which are known to suffer potentially lethal summer monsoons.

Earlier this month, it emerged that almost 700 people had died in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh because of storms and heavy rains.

In particular, rains caused chaos in Calcutta, one of India's biggest cities, where many hospitals in the eastern city of eight million people were flooded, and hundreds of people used lifeboats to move out of lowlying areas.

And in southeastern Bangladesh, intense flooding and mudslides were revealed to have completely washed away a shantytown crowded with migrant workers, killing 105 people and leaving scores unaccounted for.

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