Typhoon Bavi forces 2M evacuations across China, Taiwan, Japan

Nearly two million people woke up Saturday morning knowing they had to leave. Across China, Taiwan, and Japan, the approach of Typhoon Bavi had set in motion one of the largest evacuations in recent memory—a coordinated scramble to move families, supplies, and essential services out of the storm's path before it made landfall.

The scale was staggering. In China's eastern Zhejiang province alone, authorities had already relocated more than 1.7 million residents from their homes ahead of the typhoon's expected arrival early Sunday. The government in Wenzhou, a city of nearly ten million people, issued a statement acknowledging the extraordinary effort: a mobilization that spared neither resources nor cost, undertaken entirely to prevent catastrophe. Classes were cancelled. Workplaces shut down. More than four hundred flights were scrubbed from the schedule, and dozens of train services halted. The infrastructure of daily life simply stopped.

But Bavi was not arriving to a region unprepared by recent disaster. Earlier in the week, storms had already ravaged southern and central China, killing at least thirty-nine people and triggering a cascade of secondary disasters—rivers overflowing their banks, a reservoir dam bursting. In Beijing, more than one hundred thousand people were evacuated as authorities increased water discharge from the Miyun Reservoir to manage potential flooding. Fujian province saw more than one hundred thirty thousand flee their homes. Shanghai's coastal areas and high-risk zones accounted for another thirty-four thousand evacuees. The typhoon was arriving not as an isolated event but as the latest blow in a week of relentless weather.

Northern Taiwan experienced the storm's outer bands first. Streets that should have been alive with Saturday commerce sat nearly empty. Businesses remained shuttered for a second consecutive day. More than fourteen thousand people had been evacuated from their homes. Hundreds of flights were cancelled. One hundred seventy thousand households lost power. Yet even as the island braced for impact, some people had no choice but to move through the chaos. A fifty-year-old breakfast shop owner named Tsai, interviewed in the port city of Keelung, explained her decision to open despite the warnings: people on duty needed to eat. Someone had to deliver food to them. The storm did not pause for those obligations.

Japan's southwestern islands bore the brunt of Bavi's passage. More than eighteen thousand households and facilities across Okinawa lost power, with the Miyako region suffering the worst damage. Japanese airlines cancelled dozens of flights, stranding more than twenty-six thousand passengers. In the Philippines, the death toll from landslides and other storm-related incidents had climbed to eighteen, most of them on the southern island of Mindanao. Nearly eleven thousand people across the archipelago had fled their homes, and three hundred thirteen vessels sought shelter in closed ports.

The typhoon itself had weakened somewhat by the time it reached Taiwan. Bavi had arrived in the Pacific as a super typhoon, devastating Guam and the Northern Marianas on Monday with catastrophic force. By Saturday, as it skirted Taiwan's northern coast, its maximum sustained winds had slowed to one hundred thirty-seven kilometers per hour, though gusts still reached one hundred seventy-three kilometers per hour. The Taiwan Central Weather Administration warned of extremely torrential rain and dangerous waves reaching up to ten meters along the coast. Yet some residents expressed skepticism about the severity of the warnings. A breakfast shop owner named Li, frustrated by the loss of business from Friday's precautionary closures, questioned whether the government's alerts had been overblown. "It's just like a rainy day," said a nineteen-year-old convenience store worker named Kang Yu-chen. A seventeen-year-old named Dottie Xu, who had taken a public bus to her grocery store job, noted that her boss had simply instructed her to pull down the metal shutter if winds intensified.

But the broader context suggested the skepticism might be premature. Oceans had recorded their hottest June on record, according to the European Union's Copernicus Marine Service. Warmer water intensifies tropical storms and adds moisture that falls as heavy rain. This year, El Niño—a natural climate phenomenon that warms Pacific surface temperatures and typically occurs every two to seven years—was returning. The conditions that had created Bavi were not anomalies but part of a pattern that climate scientists expected to intensify. The evacuations, the cancellations, the precautions—they were not overreactions to a single storm but preparations for a new normal of extreme weather that was becoming harder to predict and easier to underestimate.