Typhoon Bavi tornto China’s eastern coast over the weekend, forcing one of the largest evacuations the region has seen this year. More than 2.8 million people were moved out of harm’s way nationwide, with over 2.2 million of them coming from Zhejiang province alone, an economic and technological hub central to China’s manufacturing and tech industries. The storm, described by meteorologists as roughly the size of France, is the most powerful system to strike mainland China so far this year.
Bavi made its first landfall in the coastal city of Yuhuan, Zhejiang, at around 11:20 p.m. local time on Saturday, before striking again just after midnight in Yueqing, part of the densely populated Wenzhou district. By the time it reached the mainland, Bavi had already weakened from typhoon strength to a tropical storm, but it still carried enough force to uproot trees, flood streets, and disrupt transportation across multiple provinces.
A resident in Yueqing described the chaos to Reuters, saying he could hear roof tiles and tree branches crashing down as a walkway near his home vanished beneath rising floodwater. State broadcaster CCTV reported that more than 1,300 trees were felled in Yueqing alone, with roughly half torn out completely at the root. Despite the widespread damage, Chinese authorities have reported no deaths or injuries directly linked to Bavi’s landfall on the mainland so far.
The storm’s disruption to daily life was immediate and widespread. In Hangzhou, Zhejiang’s provincial capital, two major railway stations suspended all services entirely, while 327 flights were cancelled at the city’s Xiaoshan International Airport. The impact extended well beyond Zhejiang’s borders. In nearby Shanghai, one of the world’s busiest transit hubs, authorities cancelled 684 flights and more than 1,600 train services as a precaution against the storm’s outer bands.
This kind of cascading transportation shutdown has become a familiar pattern during major typhoon events in East Asia, where dense populations and high-speed rail networks mean even a weakening storm can paralyze regional travel for days. For readers tracking the broader pattern of extreme weather disruption in the region this year, Al Jazeera’s climate coverage provides ongoing updates on how Asian countries are adapting infrastructure to increasingly volatile storm seasons.
Bavi is notable not just for its scale but for its timing. It marks the second typhoon to strike China within roughly a week, following Tropical Storm Maysak, which made landfall in the country’s south on July 3 and triggered deadly flooding. A dam breach linked to Maysak’s rainfall killed at least 39 people in the city of Nanning, according to earlier reporting, underscoring how back-to-back storm systems have strained emergency response capacity across multiple provinces simultaneously.
Before reaching China, Bavi had already left a trail of damage across the region. The storm passed north of Taiwan, dumping close to 80 centimeters of rain in parts of Miaoli county and injuring more than 130 people, mostly from motorbike accidents and falls on slick roads. Japan’s southern Okinawa prefecture also felt Bavi’s outer bands, with more than 200 flights cancelled as authorities warned of high waves and storm surges. In the Philippines, monsoon rains intensified by the storm triggered landslides that killed at least 15 people across two southern provinces, according to the Office of Civil Defense.
Chinese authorities moved quickly to allocate resources ahead of Bavi’s landfall, setting aside 40 million yuan, roughly $5.9 million, in central disaster relief funds to support Zhejiang and neighboring Fujian province with typhoon prevention and rescue operations. Emergency shelters were opened across the affected coastline, and local governments issued high alerts well before the storm made contact with the mainland, a response that experts credit with helping avoid confirmed fatalities during landfall itself.
Even as Bavi weakens further inland, forecasters caution that its threat is far from over. By Sunday afternoon the system had pushed into Anhui province, northwest of Zhejiang, and was expected to track toward the Yellow Sea by Tuesday. Its wide circulation means heavy rain could continue to affect eastern and northern China for several more days, raising the risk of secondary flooding well after the initial landfall. Benjamin Horton, dean of the School of Energy and Environment at the City University of Hong Kong, noted that storms of this scale can generate destructive weather hundreds of kilometers from where they first make contact with land.
Scientists have also pointed to a broader trend behind this year’s active storm season. The expected emergence of an El Niño weather pattern is believed to be shifting typhoon tracks westward toward China’s coastline while intensifying rainfall totals, a shift that has left less time for at-risk communities to prepare. For a deeper look at how El Niño is influencing this year’s Pacific typhoon activity, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintains updated seasonal forecasts and climate pattern analysis.
As cleanup efforts continue across Zhejiang and neighboring provinces, the scale of Bavi’s evacuation, one of the largest coordinated movements of people in China this year, is likely to be studied as a benchmark for how densely populated coastal regions respond to increasingly powerful and unpredictable storm systems.
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