Rain, Ruin, Repeat: The Chinese Villages Caught in Climate Chaos
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on the devastation caused by extreme weather in central China’s Hunan province and the government’s efforts to relocate entire villages from disaster-prone areas.
HUNAN, Central China — Wherever Zhong Bailan went, rain, mud, and ruin always followed.
In 2000, a flood swept away her first farm. Six years later, a storm crushed the timber business she had built to start over. And last July, disaster struck again when she was caught in the worst rainstorm to hit central China’s Hunan province in decades.
This time, there was no escape.
In Zhong’s Qingyao Village, a remote mountain settlement built on landslide-prone slopes in southeast Hunan, the earth couldn’t hold under the strain. A wall of mud, water, and debris, driven by the fury of the rain, tore through her home, burying the 67-year-old under bricks and branches.
“The house suddenly collapsed on me,” Zhong recalls.
She lay there for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness, until her husband clawed his way through the wreckage with his bare hands. Her injuries were so severe that she had to be airlifted to a larger hospital for emergency brain surgery — her first ever flight.
Zhong survived. But at least 50 people across 26 villages in the region did not.
It began with Typhoon Gaemi, among the most powerful typhoons to hit China’s eastern seaboard in 2024. Just over one day after making landfall in Fujian province, it dumped nearly 500 millimeters of rain on Hunan, overwhelming the mountain slopes and triggering massive landslides.
The province’s Zixing region, where Zhong’s village is located, has long been susceptible to severe weather. Over the past 15 years, the area has experienced 21 major rainstorms, its mountainous terrain and loose, landslide-prone soil making it particularly dangerous. Gaemi’s torrential downpour, compounded by previous storms, turned the region into a deadly trap.
Over 128,500 people were affected or displaced by the disaster, accounting for roughly one-third of Zixing City’s population, according to a government report.
While the central, provincial, and local governments moved swiftly with rescue operations and evacuations, many areas, including Zhong’s village, remained inaccessible for days due to damaged roads, rising waters, and threat of more mudslides.
The disaster marked another chapter in a troubling trend of increasing extreme weather events across the country. In 2024, China endured its third consecutive summer of extreme heat, followed by at least 20 floods and six record-breaking typhoons.
Meteorologists and geologists warn that this escalating pattern of extreme weather is leaving regions like Zixing increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic flooding and landslides, compounded by inadequate infrastructure.
A government review found major gaps in disaster preparedness, from weak infrastructure and limited evacuation capacity to inadequate early warnings. While stronger forecasting, better public education, and improved emergency response were deemed crucial — progress remains slow.
The rise in extreme weather events has left few options. Government efforts to rebuild or fortify homes have proven inadequate in the face of relentless floods and landslides.
As the unpredictability of these disasters grows, relocation has for now emerged as the only viable solution — a painful yet often necessary response to the environmental instability threatening livelihoods.
But for many residents like Zhong, every relocation feels like another break in a life already shattered. With each move, they lose more: their land, their history, their sense of home.
Life and death
After weeks of relentless heat, last July’s rain arrived in the Zixing region as a welcome relief. Streams had run dry, and crops like ginger and bamboo, essential to the region, had wilted under the scorching sun. At last, the moisture seeped into the earth, coaxing life back into the villages and fields around Zixing.
But within hours, it would escalate into record-breaking rainfall, far surpassing predictions.
By 8 p.m. on July 25, Typhoon Gaemi made landfall along the coast about 800 kilometers southeast of Zixing. Initial forecasts predicted up to 100 millimeters of rain, but over 13 hours, Zixing received nearly 500 millimeters — nearly five times the predicted amount.
“By dinner time (on July 26), I realized the rain felt different,” says Li Lankun, a 55-year-old from a village close to Zhong’s. “I was sitting by the door, and the road across from me was blurred. I could hardly see it through the downpour.”
But Li went to bed as usual, unaware of what lay ahead.
At 1 a.m. on July 27, villages across the region awoke to a relentless barrage of phone alerts, broadcast warnings, and the deafening clang of gongs — a rural alarm meant to signal immediate danger.
When the village head called Li, she shouted, “Are you crazy? It’s so late!”
But then she looked down and saw the water rising fast — nearly up to her bed. The power had gone out. The constant roar of the rain drowned out all other sound.
“When I looked outside, all I saw was a vast, endless sea. He (the village official) saved my life,” Li says, recalling how she fled to the attic in her pajamas after his warning. She survived, but just barely.
In Qingyao Village, Zhong received an urgent call from her son, who lives close by, urging her to move to higher ground. But before she could leave, she realized she hadn’t grabbed her wallet.
As she turned back to fetch it, the mountain was beginning to wash away. When she returned inside, the earth came crashing down — trees, soil, and water buried her beneath debris.
Zhong’s 71-year-old husband, Long Xiaozhong, was standing outside the house at the time. He spent an hour lifting the rubble to free her, cutting away branches to create a gap.
Long looks back on that moment with remarkable calm. Asked about rescuing her, he only smiles and shrugs. “What’s there to be anxious about? It is what it is, isn’t it?”
Stranded due to the blocked roads, Zhong spent two days in a makeshift hospital before being airlifted to a larger facility for emergency brain surgery. After a month of recovery, she had lost 15 kilograms.
Today, a C-shaped pink scar marks the center of her thinning hair, a permanent reminder of her narrow escape from death. She wears a knitted hat with purple and white stripes, a gift from her daughter-in-law, to cover the wound.
That scar may eventually heal, but across Zixing, the damage ran much deeper.
Satellite images later revealed 19,513 landslides across 136 villages in the area. Roads were blocked, power was lost, and 94 villages were cut off completely. Communication had broken down, making rescue efforts nearly impossible.
“Each disaster-hit area became an ‘isolated island.’ In some places, rescuers had to dig through half a mountain to clear a path,” stated an internal local government report seen by Sixth Tone. It added that the rescue team heading to Zhong’s village “had no road access and could only crawl and dig through waist-deep mud. What would normally take a 10-minute drive took six hours.”
For many, even the warnings came too late.
“There were no broadcasts, no text messages, no phone calls,” says Ou Shezhang, 69, from Yanwo Village, one of the hardest-hit areas, located 40 minutes by car from Zhong’s village.
But Ou wasn’t being critical. Local officials had done their best under impossible conditions. The heavy rain disrupted mobile signals, and drowned out the sound of broadcasts. With houses scattered across the mountains, it was nearly impossible for village officials to knock on every door and wake people up.
“People are scattered in remote valleys, and emergency shelters are limited,” the Zixing City government report stated. “Evacuations were slow, and the lack of communication made everything worse.”
Another Yanwo official, Lan Fenghuang, was caught in a mudslide while rushing to warn villagers. Miraculously, a second flood current pulled her to shore. With two broken legs, she crawled for an hour before being rescued by villagers.
“I was conscious the whole time, but I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I had given up hope,” she recalled through tears speaking with Sixth Tone.
Into the wreckage
In Yanwo, local official Ou Xiaolong made a final phone call before the signal cut out. It would be the last time he spoke to his closest friend.
Around midnight on July 28, Ou had called several residents, urging them to move to higher ground. But at the foot of one mountain, six people, including his friend, were caught in the mudslide. Only one survived.
By morning, villagers found another survivor — not Ou’s friend — but with the road blocked and no way out, he died before help could reach him. “He must have died from the pain,” people murmured.
The only comfort Ou found was in the life he managed to save. As he tried to secure a door with wooden planks, something rolling through the water caught his eye. At first, Ou thought it was a stone. Then he realized it was a person.
“I reached out and grabbed her arm,” he recalls. The girl was nearly unrecognizable, caked in mud. It took Ou a moment to identify her: a 15-year-old who lived uphill. She survived, but her grandmother and younger brother didn’t.
Ou Shezhang lived near the girl’s house and watched it disappear under the floodwaters. “They were honest, hardworking people. We used to sit together, drinking tea and chatting often. Thinking of them now still makes me feel pained,” he rues.
On that very day, Shezhang had gathered 13 family members to celebrate his brother, Ou Mojiang’s 71st birthday — a milestone in the Chinese tradition. The youngest among them was just 7.
“We looked outside and saw water coming from all directions,” says Mojiang, gesturing with his arms to show how frightened the family had been. “When the landslide hit this side of the house, we ran to the other corner. Then another landslide came, and we had to run back.”
As dawn broke, Mojiang saw that trees had blocked the gap between his house and the neighbor’s, trapping them. Water from the mountaintop had formed a dam.
Seizing the chance, the family climbed out of a second-floor window, stepping onto mud that reached higher than the first floor. They made a run for it, heading toward their neighbor Li Rennan’s house at the village’s highest point.
“The rain was so loud that they couldn’t hear me shouting,” Li recalls. “I could only wave my hands, signaling them to hurry over.” Just as the family reached Li’s house, Ou Mojiang glanced back and saw the “dam” break, floodwaters swallowing the path they’d just taken.
“Our escape was the blessing of our ancestors,” says Ou Shezhang.
Li, 41, hosted nearly 30 villagers for three days until the roads were unblocked. During the day, young men went around the village helping with rescue operations and salvaging belongings, while at night, people lit candles stuck in beer bottles for light and slept on the floor in empty rooms.
In his half-destroyed kitchen, villagers cooked porridge on a gas stove using rainwater they collected. Li even slaughtered a chicken that had survived the mudslide.
To mark Mojiang’s birthday, Li made a bowl of changshou mian, or “longevity noodles,” and added two eggs. It was the closest thing to a celebration they could muster in the face of so much uncertainty.
Cycle of pain
For decades, Zixing has been caught in a cycle of storms and recovery. Since 1989, it has weathered more than 30 heavy rainstorms — eight of them turning into major floods. Time and again, the worst-hit areas have remained the same.
Government records seen by Sixth Tone indicate floods strike every one to two years, with severe disasters hitting every three to five. Flash floods carve through villages, rivers overflow their banks, and landslides bury homes and roads.
Some communities barely have time to rebuild before the next storm arrives — just ask Zhong.
Each time the waters receded, she started over: New land, new business, new home. Each time, disaster found her again.
“I’ve suffered from disasters three times. Life is so bitter,” she sighs.
She’s among the thousands caught in a cycle of destruction that is neither new nor surprising. Scientists say the forces driving these disasters are both natural and man-made.
In response, the local government has taken steps to improve disaster management. After the flood in 2000, Hunan formed a disaster survey team tasked with identifying high-risk zones, eventually mapping 850 sites across the province. Residents were encouraged to relocate.
“In 2000, we simply called them ‘floods,’ but by 2006, they were recognized as ‘geological and hydrological disasters,’” explains Ye Jun, a geologist who led Zixing’s disaster survey team from 2000 to 2017. It signaled an understanding that the problem wasn’t just flooding, but collapsing land, an issue no amount of engineering could easily solve.
Despite growing efforts, disaster forecasting still lags behind the pace of extreme weather. Government reports note that typhoon paths have become increasingly difficult to predict, leading to inaccurate early rainfall estimates.
The 2006 disaster was labeled a “once-in-500-years” event. That record didn’t last long. The latest government report now classifies the 2024 floods as a “once-in-300-years” catastrophe, marking yet another broken threshold.
“As global warming and climate change continue to evolve, the risk of extreme weather events may become increasingly severe,” says Tang Jie, deputy director of the Emergency and Disaster Mitigation Department at the Hunan Meteorological Bureau.
In the government’s view, there’s only one real solution left: leave.
After decades of reinforcing riverbanks, expanding drainage networks, and mapping disaster-prone zones, officials are facing a reality they can no longer ignore. The land itself is becoming unlivable.
In response, authorities have launched one of the largest relocation efforts to address the threat of disasters in Hunan’s history, aiming to move entire villages away from the mountains and floodplains.
On paper, the plan is straightforward: flood-affected families meeting the criteria receive subsidies to relocate to safer ground, either in town or the city. The government has fast-tracked the construction of resettlement apartments, with officials calling this year’s support package the most generous ever offered in Zixing.
But it’s an impossible choice. Stay and rebuild in the shadow of disaster, or leave, giving up the land their families have farmed for generations, and trade self-sufficiency for an uncertain future.
Either way, many in Zixing may have to move. Whether by choice, or by the next flood.
Additional reporting: Diao Fanchao and Chen Sizhong; editor: Apurva.
(Header image: Two villagers stand amid the rubble of a home in Yanwo Village. Wu Huiyuan/Sixth Tone)
