China Evacuates One Million as Typhoon Dolphin Hits
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- Chinese authorities evacuated more than one million people in eastern China including Shanghai, cancelling nearly 1,000 flights Monday after issuing the highest-level red alert for Typhoon Dolphin.
- Typhoon Dolphin made landfall in Yuhuan, Zhejiang at 17:30 Sunday with maximum winds of 150 km/h before a second landfall in Wenzhou about an hour later, then was downgraded to a tropical storm.
- Wenzhou authorities relocated roughly 900,000 residents and opened more than 1,000 emergency shelters, while Taizhou evacuated about 390,000 people, with parts of Zhejiang forecast to receive 250–500 mm of rain.
- CCTV reported the storm traveled 6,000 km before landfall — a lifespan more than three times that of an average typhoon — with state media showing flooded ground-floor businesses in Shanghai's former French Concession.
- State media said a nine-year-old boy from Wenling, Zhejiang is missing after being swept into the sea, with no official casualties reported; two people were detained for spreading an AI-generated fake video and misleading re-edited storm footage online.
- Dolphin killed eight people in the Philippines and injured five elderly in Okinawa before reaching China, while Hong Kong recorded a record high temperature of 36.9°C as the typhoon pushed warm air over the city.
Why it matters: Over one million people displaced in a single storm event, with Wenzhou alone accounting for 900,000 evacuations, signals the scale of pre-emptive mobilization Chinese authorities are now willing to mount — and the storm's 6,000 km path, three times the average lifespan, underscores why forecasters flagged this as the strongest typhoon to hit China this year.
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