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China is no longer dealing with isolated weather emergencies. It is contending with a compounding crisis, one typhoon following another across its eastern and southern coastlines, each one adding to a toll of evacuations, deaths, and disrupted lives that has defined the country’s summer of 2024. Typhoon Saudel is only the latest chapter.
On Thursday morning, Saudel made its third landfall on the coast of Fujian province in eastern China, having already struck neighbouring Zhejiang province twice before moving south. Local authorities responded swiftly: schools in the cities of Fuzhou and Quanzhou suspended in-person activities, tourist attractions including theme parks in Fuzhou were temporarily shut, and state broadcaster CCTV reported that 24 passenger ferry routes along Fujian’s coast were taken offline.
A Province Already on Edge
Fujian’s emergency management authority issued warnings of rainstorms and secondary disasters, specifically flash floods and landslides, which tend to follow prolonged heavy rainfall in the province’s hilly interior. In a WeChat statement, the authority noted that Fujian was “currently experiencing a period of persistent, heavy rainfall,” signalling that Saudel was not arriving into a dry landscape but onto already saturated ground.
The human cost of preparation is already visible. Around 247,700 people in high-risk areas in Fujian had been evacuated the previous week, ahead of the storm’s arrival, according to Xinhua news agency. That figure reflects how seriously Chinese authorities are now treating typhoon warnings after a brutal season that has left little room for complacency.
The Broader Toll of a Punishing Season
Saudel arrives in the context of a summer that has tested China’s disaster response infrastructure repeatedly. In July, Typhoon Maysak triggered devastating floods in the southern region of Guangxi, killing at least 159 people. The pattern, multiple powerful storms making landfall within weeks of one another and pushing into densely populated inland areas, has forced hundreds of thousands of evacuations across different provinces.
Beyond China’s own borders, a catastrophic flood tore through the area straddling Nepal and China’s Tibet region last week, killing more than 1,200 people and leaving more than 4,750 missing as of Thursday. That disaster has sharpened global concern about the accelerating risks of climate change, particularly in high-altitude and coastal regions that are especially vulnerable to extreme precipitation events.
Climate Change and the Uncomfortable Contradiction at China’s Core
Scientists have long warned that the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events will rise as global temperatures climb, driven by fossil fuel emissions. China sits at the centre of that tension in a way no other country does. It is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and yet it is simultaneously a dominant force in global renewable energy deployment, with a stated national goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
That contradiction does not resolve easily. China’s industrial base and its coal-heavy energy mix continue to push emissions upward even as its solar and wind capacity grows at a pace that outstrips most of the world. The typhoons battering Fujian and the floods reshaping Guangxi are, in the scientific consensus, partly a consequence of the warming that China’s own emissions have helped accelerate. The country is, in a real sense, experiencing the downstream effects of its upstream choices.
For the region, the significance of China’s extreme weather season extends beyond its borders. Supply chain disruptions in Fujian, a major manufacturing and export hub, can ripple quickly into Southeast Asian economies including Malaysia and Singapore that depend on Chinese industrial output. Port suspensions and logistics delays caused by typhoon activity in Chinese coastal provinces have a habit of appearing, weeks later, as delivery backlogs and price pressures in regional markets. As storms grow more frequent and more intense, that exposure is worth watching closely.
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