Sarah Burke
Soon after record-breaking rain hammered northeast China at the end of July 2025, tens of thousands of people were evacuated from areas just outside the nation’s capital city, Beijing. This news broke from state-affiliated sources, across a number of native Chinese social media channels.
“Flooding is especially hard to cover, it is often difficult to know when and where it’s going to hit and how much impact it will have,” said Vivian Wang, head of APAC at Factal, a risk intelligence platform that provides real-time news discovery, verification, and collaboration tools for the world’s biggest companies and NGOs.
Factal’s AI-driven tool publishes verified updates on stories with immediate, real-world impact, to help protect people, ensure business continuity and expedite disaster relief. The risk of flooding near a major city can very quickly — and unpredictably — become flooding impacts inside a major city, which in turn can disrupt mass transit networks, commercial activities, and threaten the physical safety of people in the region.
Within days of the large evacuations in Hebei province, Beijing was placed under the highest flood emergency warning, impacting residents across the city.
Over the next few days, floodwaters would run through the streets of Miyun and Yanging districts of Beijing, killing dozens of people and leaving nearly 100,000 displaced. Photos of the aftermath showed inundated streets, bridges and homes. In total, more than 350,000 people were impacted by the floods in Beijing and its surrounding provinces.
When news breaks in China, it moves quickly through a series of native social channels which require their own expertise to navigate. Almost all media in China is government-owned or affiliated, and official organs of the state are well represented on WeChat or Weibo, the country’s most influential social media platforms. For journalists or eyewitness media, private WeChat groups or Douyin — the original TikTok — are particularly useful.
“Most China incidents will break on WeChat and Weibo and then they start to turn up on Baidu, China’s main search engine,” Wang explained. “Some of these platforms are sorted by algorithm and not chronologically, but they can be very useful for breaking stories from both eyewitness and official accounts.”
When it comes to natural disasters — flooding, earthquakes, typhoons — the Chinese government is incentivized to encourage a free-flow of information. But coverage can follow a very different cadence when the story is more sensitive. Criticism of the government is routinely suppressed. When an incident is controversial, or reflects poorly on those in power, information moves differently.
“China is a big place with a lot of cameras. It’s not complete censorship. The government can’t suppress everything. Usually, sensitive stories will still break eventually — just more slowly and on their time,” Wang said.
China “Watcher” Accounts
Working around the state’s grip on information can be a challenge, but one way Factal editors do this is through China “watcher” accounts, which are unofficial and usually run by dissidents who are outside of China. They often publish news stories to Telegram as a way of getting stories out of China and into the wider world.
“These are sort of like unofficial aggregators of eyewitness media in China. They have strong networks and good access to the Chinese platforms, and they themselves take submissions from users. So sometimes they have stories that you might not see on Chinese channels straight away. They come with their own perspective and agenda and still need to be verified.”
Wang said the most important consideration when covering China is to understand what the Chinese government’s priorities are, and how those affect the way reporting happens.
“Sometimes you have to read between the lines,” she says.
Wang, who has spent her career reporting on APAC and speaks several regional languages herself, leads a team of multi-lingual editors with backgrounds in analysis, social verification, and old-school journalism. Each editor brings their own deeply informed experience about how information breaks and behaves online in their region.
Beyond China
The APAC region has a wide range of social and traditional media landscapes, including some very complex and competitive markets like India, Pakistan, Taiwan and Philippines. But the region is also home to some of the world’s blind spots like Myanmar and North Korea.
In Myanmar, Factal — like the rest of the world — relies heavily on the few journalists that remain either inside the country or operating in exile.
“We really depend on the people dedicated to independent journalism in places like Myanmar. There is no way to verify what is going on there other than through the people that are still doing real reporting, despite everything.”
Factal gives companies the facts they need in real time to protect people, avoid disruptions and drive automation when the unexpected happens.
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