‘Villagers are trapped’ as heavy rains in Beijing leave at least 40 dead

By Vivian Wang, Lily Kuo and Berry Wang

Torrential rains in Beijing and surrounding areas led to the deaths of at least 40 people as severe downpours set off flooding and landslides that trapped residents in their villages and prompted China’s leader to order “all-out” rescue efforts.

The Chinese state broadcaster, CCTV, said Tuesday that 28 people had died in Miyun, a mountainous district of northeastern Beijing, the Chinese capital, where more than 21 inches of rain had fallen as of midnight. Two other people died in Yanqing, a district in the capital’s northwest, and four people in neighboring Hebei province were killed by a landslide caused by the heavy rain.

The broadcaster noted that rain had pounded the area as early as Saturday but did not specify exactly when the deaths had been reported.

Wang Haha, a 25-year-old from Yangjiatai, a village in Hebei, said her family was stuck in their village because roads leading to it had been blocked by landslides. She said that rescue workers had not yet arrived and she had only recently managed to get in contact with her relatives.

“Mudslides, landslides — villagers are trapped inside and can’t escape,” she said. Wang, who was not in the village when the rains started, said some residents managed to leave by wading through floodwaters and climbing over mountain roads. “Some have managed to get out. But not all of them, just a few.”

More than 80,000 people in the outskirts of the capital have been relocated. Schools, construction sites and tourist attractions were temporarily closed, according to CCTV. Dozens of roads were damaged, and 136 villages in broader Beijing, which is largely rural despite being within the capital’s administrative area, had lost electricity.

Beijing issued its highest-level flood alert Monday night, urging people not to go outside unless necessary.

“Continuous heavy rainfall caused major disasters,” CCTV said in a report Tuesday as the downpour continued.

On Monday evening, before the casualties were announced, state media reported that China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had ordered officials to “firmly” focus on flood prevention and exhaust all efforts to rescue victims. He said that China was “currently in the critical period of flood prevention from July to August,” according to Xinhua, the state news agency.

He also said that rainfall across much of northern and eastern China had led to “major casualties and property losses” in recent days.

Extreme flooding has intensified in China in recent years. Chen Tao, chief forecaster at the China Meteorological Administration, said in an interview with CCTV that this year, the rainy season in northern China had begun “abnormally early” with the average rainfall almost 30% higher than the same period in previous years.

Information about natural disasters is tightly controlled in China, where authorities are wary of public anger. On Tuesday, some searches on the social media platform Weibo appeared to be censored. They included discussions of a reservoir in Beijing being discharged, which would flood surrounding areas, as well as talk about the death toll.

Instead, the social media platform featured state media reports of local villagers using forklifts to ferry residents through flooded streets and highlighted details of government rescue efforts.

Deaths caused by heavy rain have been announced in other parts of northern China in recent days, including Shanxi province, where a bus went missing Sunday. In the city of Jinan, in Shandong province, at least two people died last week after half a typical year’s rainfall fell in five hours, state media reported.

In 2023, Beijing was pounded by the most rain it had experienced in 140 years of record-keeping. But most of the damage was in neighboring Hebei province, where officials said they had opened floodgates to “build a ‘moat’ for the capital.” That led to anger in the affected parts of Hebei, where residents said they had not been given ample warning.

In 2012, severe flooding in Beijing and Hebei killed 145 people.