On the Eve of Harvest, Western Guangdong Farmers Hit by the “King of Global Winds”
I. The Typhoon Shifts South, Force 12 Wind Radius Besieges Farmers
Hao Nan explained that Hua Jia Sha’s track shifted slightly to the south, reducing the area covered by the Force 12 wind radius by nearly 90%, and that the damage a typhoon causes is directly tied to wind force.
Moreover, even within the Force 12 wind radius, the destruction in built-up urban areas and in rural areas differs vastly.
Hao Nan explained that in China, urban municipal infrastructure is generally designed to withstand Force 12 winds. Below Force 12, cities can recover relatively quickly, but once winds exceed the design resistance level, losses multiply many times over. In rural areas, however, a Force 10 wind radius is already enough to inflict devastating damage on agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fisheries and their basic infrastructure. Such losses are difficult to prevent entirely—only to mitigate—which is precisely why vulnerable rural areas need greater investment in climate resilience.
From 08:00 on 24 September to 08:00 on 25 September, winds in Yangjiang’s urban area reached Force 13 or above, causing severe damage. In Hailing Island and Shangchuan and Xiachuan Island—areas dominated by townships and rural communities—winds hit Force 14 to 17. As two townships in their own right, Shangchuan and Xiachuan Islands were briefly cut off from all communications.
II. Yangjiang: Fish Cages Shattered, Fish Farmers Cry Without Tears
“Restarting production is out of the question. You wipe your tears, crouch on the raft and shout to the sky—’Give us justice!'” Zeng Xianguang, secretary-general of the Zhapo Fish Cage Farming Association, told Foodthink in a hoarse voice. Many wooden rafts on Hailing Island had been torn apart or crippled, he said. “The nets are shredded, the fish have scattered and gone.”
Zeng Xianguang still vividly remembers the date 24 September 2008—seventeen years ago—the day Typhoon Hagupit struck Yangjiang. It brought Force 16 winds, the most devastating typhoon in Hailing Island’s forty-year memory of aquaculture. But Hua Jia Sha was worse still.
In an interview with Red Star News, Zeng Xianguang explained that among local farming sectors, fish cage operations suffered the most because there is no effective way to guard against extreme winds. The timber used in wooden rafts is of good quality and can withstand winds up to Force 11, but at Force 12 or above there is simply nothing you can do. Before the typhoon hit, farmers could only reinforce their rafts with long cables and sell off some pompano at low prices.
But even selling was too slow. “Everyone’s trying to sell at once—just wanting to sell doesn’t mean you can.” He told Foodthink that under normal conditions, the purchase price for golden pompano sits between ¥22 and ¥25 per jin (500 g). But before the typhoon arrived, the buying price had already dropped ¥3.5 to ¥4 per jin below the usual level.
As for overall losses across the farming industry, each household had suffered losses in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of yuan, but the precise figure was impossible to calculate, he said: “So far no one has filed a loss report. Every department in Yangjiang is supposed to compile the statistics, but none can report a number yet.”
He gave Foodthink an example: one large deep-sea aquaculture operator might have more than 150 fish cages, each roughly 100 metres long and 100 metres wide, holding 120,000 to 130,000 fish, each weighing close to 500 g—equivalent to a loss of 18 million jin.
Local fisheries insiders also noted that for twenty years they had been lobbying for aquaculture insurance, but “every year we petition, and not once have we succeeded.” The disaster risk was simply too great; insurance companies feared losses of their own.
Risk remained high while returns were shrinking. “Year by year it gets worse—losses,” Zeng Xianguang said. Under the combined pressure of multiple factors, traditional inshore wooden raft aquaculture had not been profitable for years. Inshore farming pollutes the ecosystem and water quality is poor; it is being phased out as a trend, and production costs have risen. Feed prices have climbed by more than 20%, and suppliers now demand cash payment. More devastating still, the purchase price for pompano continues to be squeezed downward.
He said that now only fishermen who own large vessels for deep-sea aquaculture and can also handle transport and trade are turning a profit. Yet Hailing Island still has 462 households practising inshore wooden raft aquaculture, compared with fewer than 100 in deep-sea farming.
Under these circumstances, anyone farming on wooden rafts must take out loans. Zeng Xianguang said many farmers on Hailing Island have put their property up as collateral, but a house worth ¥1 million can secure a loan of at most a quarter of that. Some farming households have already sunk their savings—even the money set aside for worshipping the gods—into aquaculture, yet the loans are still unpaid.
“A lot of people who took out loans to farm fish are so badly off they cannot even speak. My father just came back from the orchard and said that the fish farmers near it are sitting slumped by their ponds.” Huang Ting, a resident of another town in Yangjiang, has also observed the farmers’ plight.
Huang Ting’s father has tended fruit trees locally for more than a decade, but all that experience and effort could not shield them from a natural disaster. His orchard suffered heavy losses. Local crop insurance costs over ¥400 per mu in premium per year, yet she asked around and none of the affected farmers nearby had bought any. Now, the town’s agricultural affairs office has opened a channel for farmers to report losses, but it cannot guarantee any subsidy.
Documentary filmmaker and Bilibili creator “Yuzhen Jishi” visited Zhanjiang, Maoming and Yangjiang before and after the typhoon, interviewing many farmers and aquaculture operators. He found that losses in Yangjiang’s townships were far greater than in Zhanjiang, Maoming and other areas, and not limited to aquaculture alone. In Yangjiang, a banana grove cultivated by a couple from Xinyang, Henan, and 50,000 sugarcane plants grown by a couple from Taizhou, Zhejiang, were all wiped out. Their prefabricated shack beside the fields was also blown apart—walls collapsed, roofs flew off. The bananas were barely ten-odd days from harvest. The growers had all been counting on fetching good prices during the Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays.
III. Taishan: Power and Networks Down, Fish Ponds Overflowing
Taishan is famous for its oysters. Zhang Qing’s family told her that every oyster raft along the coast, from Haiyan Town to Guanghai Town in Taishan, had suffered devastating losses.
Everyone is still steeling themselves to welcome the crowds and trade of the National Day Golden Week.
Coastal aquaculture operators raise fish on rafts, while on inland waterways not directly adjacent to the sea, saltwater pond farming is practised. But after the typhoon passed, the ponds were overtopped, and thousands upon tens of thousands of mu across dozens of operators merged into one vast expanse of water. Fish, shrimp and crabs all escaped.
A mud crab farmer in Xincun Village, Douhu Town, Taishan, lost every crab in his 50-mu pond this way. He told Foodthink that the mud crabs had already matured, but farmers had been holding out in the hope of fetching a better price during the National Day holiday; now the loss per mu is at least ¥20,000.
Official figures show that the total saltwater aquaculture area in Xincun Village, Douhu Town, exceeds 6,000 mu.
For these farmers, there is no protective measure to take, because fish ponds cannot be reinforced in advance—”there is nowhere to put all that mud.” On the 24th, the night the typhoon hit, they were ordered to evacuate the ponds. He paid for a hotel in town out of his own pocket, and when he returned on the 25th, “there was nothing left—just water and grass.” His house, his boats, and his ponds had all been destroyed.
Over a decade ago he came here from Guangxi to take up aquaculture, signing a pond-lease contract with a villager at ¥2,000 per mu. Most local ponds are contracted by outsiders. “They see typhoons all the time—no wonder the locals don’t want to farm anymore,” he said with a rueful smile.
Taishan has been hit before. Records show that Typhoon Tapah made direct landfall in Taishan at 8:50 am on 8 September with centre winds of Force 11, compounded by a spring tide, triggering severe seawater inundation that dealt a heavy blow to aquaculture in Douhu, Haiyan and Lianzhou in Zhuhai.
“There was flooding before, but nothing this severe,” the farmer said.
The water has still not receded. On the 25th he hired an excavator at his own expense to rebuild the earthen bunds around the pond.
A mud crab farmer in Chixi Town, Taishan, also sent a video of his damage. “It’s over—lost everything.” In the footage, a pond had completely collapsed; an empty, torn mesh basket held not a single crab, and some farmers stood despondently beside an upturned coloured-steel shed. This farmer, born in the 1980s, had once enthusiastically shared his crab-farming tips on his video account.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” That was the last reply he sent.
The people of Taishan have decades of experience weathering typhoons. In Zhang Qing’s memory, in the early 2000s, two large fishing vessels from their home harbour went down in the Spratly Islands during a typhoon, killing over 200 people—the father of her kindergarten classmate was among those lost. Now that information flows freely, fishermen no longer stay aboard their boats to go down with them during a typhoon.
But with extreme weather growing ever more violent, how much longer can farmers and fishermen endure?
IV. Seawater Inundation: A Long Road to Recovery, a Glimmer of Hope
Based on satellite imagery and terrain analysis, Hao Nan determined that parts of Jinwan District in Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Zhongshan and Yangjiang near the Pearl River Estuary had all been hit by storm surge. Among them, Jinwan District along the Pearl River features a small trumpet-shaped mouth where the terrain narrows sharply, making the storm-surge rise the most violent there. Even before the typhoon’s core made landfall, as it approached the outer edge of the Pearl River Estuary, it had already pushed seawater inland.
Compared with visible, acute losses such as destroyed fish rafts and snapped fruit trees, the problems brought by seawater inundation—groundwater contamination, soil salinisation and wetland degradation—affect larger areas, are more insidious, and take far longer to repair. In short, seawater inundation not only causes soil salinisation but also disrupts or suppresses the activity of soil microorganisms, thereby affecting microbe-mediated cycles of carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, iron and other elements. Of course, even without knowing scientists’ findings at the microscopic level, farmers looking at land soaked through by seawater know exactly what destruction that means.
Seawater inundation also alters the distribution of Heavy metals in the soil. Researchers at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, found through experiments that rising salinity affects cadmium mobility in soil, which may lead to cadmium accumulation in rice. In other words, it is not only farmers who suffer—consumers who rely on rice as a staple food may be affected too.
Yet as climate change advances, such record-breaking storm surges will become ever more common. At the same time, rising temperatures are causing sea levels to rise—one sudden, the other gradual. Under the compounded effect of both, seawater inundation will worsen further in the future.
What now? “Carry on (grinning emoji).” One farmer from Dong’an, Hunan, who grows sugarcane in Jiangmen, replied this way on his video account.
In the video he posted on 25 September, several dozen mu of sugarcane stood in water just a few centimetres deep. Fortunately, “a narrow escape from disaster”—few sugarcane stalks had been blown flat. Before the typhoon struck, he had braced the entire plot with thick branches and net twine. “I’ve done all I possibly can! I hope you (Typhoon) will show mercy!”
This year, he plans to go back to his hometown for the Spring Festival. Next year, the sugarcane fields will be planted again.
Huang Ting and Zhang Qing are pseudonyms.
Editors: Lingyu, Tianle