Typhoon Saomai: How Bad Was It?

Typhoon Toll Much Higher Than China’s Leaders Let On
Clearly, this fishing village and others near the mouth of a bay on China’s southeast coast suffered catastrophic damage when Typhoon Saomai blew through on the afternoon of Aug. 10, a Category 4 storm packing sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. Yet the next day, initial reports listed only 17 people dead and 138 missing in all of Fujian Province.

By noon on Aug. 10, according to news reports distributed nationwide, more than 500,000 people had been evacuated, and five million others had been alerted to the impending danger through short messages sent to cellphone users. The emergency response was trumpeted as a triumph...

[A]n internal report by the official New China News Agency, compiled in the days after the storm and intended just for the authorities, bluntly contradicted the official picture. In succeeding days, the Chinese news media also took an increasingly skeptical view of the official accounts.

After consulting with local fishermen, these publications, among them Chinese Newsweek, concluded that about 900 boats from the immediate area had been lost at sea. Because each fishing boat typically carries a crew of two, they estimated that some 2,000 people had died just in this vicinity, where the storm hit hardest.

During events like these it often seems that the Chinese authorities are at war with the news, or even with the truth itself.