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Beijing: Fifty-six Chinese fishermen were reported missing on Friday as a typhoon bore down on the southern resort island of Hainan.
The fishermen were last said to have sheltered near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea but had not been heard from since Thursday evening, the Xinhua news agency said.
Hainan and the neighbouring province of Guangdong are braced for Typhoon Neoguri, the first of the year, with almost 22,000 fishing boats having been called back to harbour as the storm skirted Vietnam.
Earliest storm
"Neoguri will be the earliest typhoon of the season to affect the south China region since the founding of new China in 1949," Chen Lei, deputy commander of the State Headquarters of Flood Control and Drought Relief, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
The storm was expected to be "one of the strongest in history" to hit the region, Xinhua said.
Typhoon tracker Tropical Storm Risk labelled the storm as category two in a scale up to five, with maximum sustained winds of 154-177 kilometres per hour.
The typhoon is expected to drop anything between 40mm and 90mm of rain on Hainan and Guangdong. "The heaviest downfall is expected to be 180mm in southern Hainan," Xinhua said. The typhoon season usually starts in May but China's far-western region of Xinjiang experienced blizzards, Xinhua added.
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