I feel I owe the people of China an apology. About a month ago I accused this winter of being a "pansy" winter. As many people have since reminded me, I was tempting fate. Fate has obliged by throwing China it's worst winter storm in more than two decades at the worst imaginable time of year.

Beijing has escaped with little more than a cold spell. After a relatively balmy December, January brought all the things I associate with a real Beijing winter: subzero temperatures, ripping northern winds, and dessicating dryness that peels the skin from your body and atomizes it into a fine, white dust that coats the inside all your clothes and clogs up your air filters.

I won't get into the details of the storm's effects here. You can find news reports and photographs all over the web. Suffice to say it has been one of those epic, sweeping, photogenic disasters at which China excels. Tens of millions affected; crops wiped out; holidays spoiled. The government has responded with a full-scale disaster relief effort and, as befits its growing sensitivity to public discontent, a full-court PR press. Wen Jiabao, who plays the warm, fuzzy man-of-the-people to Hu Jintao's untouchably lofty Technocrat in Chief, has been seen working the stranded crowds at train stations in Guangzhou and elsewhere. (As a double act it's something of a departure from the vaudevillian stylings of their immediate predecessors.) Hu has also been out and about, but as always he comes across much stiffer than his number two.

From cold but sunny Beijing it was hard for a foreigner to get a real sense of the disaster unless one went to the train station (which no one in their right mind except for journalists did). But flying from Beijing to Shanghai last Thursday, a rare clear day, offered a glimpse of the scale of what had happened. We flew south over Jiangsu, a province I associate with humid, sweaty summers and cold, rainy winters, but not with snow. It was a startling, unbroken carpet of white. You might expect to see this flying up into the far Dongbei or out west, but not over Jiangsu and Shanghai.

Jiangsu's rivers, canals and ponds, normally green-against-green, were a stark black against the snow. It was eerily like looking at a stained slice of flesh through a microscope. The Yangtze was a black artery cleaving off into ever-smaller capillaries snaking between the cell-like grids of fish-farm ponds and geometric Chinese villages. Even Shanghai's Formula One track was white-on-white.

Our company driver in Shanghai said he hadn't seen anything like it since 1980.

On Friday I flew back to Beijing. Thursday's blue skies had given way to the next wave of the storm, and by Friday afternoon snow was again falling heavily in Shanghai. Recent experience had made me pessimistic about my flight getting off at anything close to on-time. After the better part of a year's worth of relative luck, I had been bitten three times in a row on three successive departures from Beijing. Three weeks ago mechanical issues canceled my flight to Shanghai, resulting in a mad scamble for reticketing. Beijing's reticketing process is, to say the least, inelegant. Somehow --this is not an exaggeration-- I was the very last person to be reticketed. It was a four hour delay.

A week ago, flying to Chengdu for our annual staff conference our airplane turned around in mid-air at the halfway point and returned to Beijing. Snow had closed the Chengdu airport. The return flight, which also took off in the snow, had been delayed a mere ninety minutes.

On Thursday our first plane also had mechanical difficulties. This time I was prepared. When they finally let us off, an hour and a half after failing to spin up one of the engines, I sprinted for the counter and got re-ticketed for a flight already boarding.

Despite the snow at Hongqiao, my Friday return flight miraculously departed ten minutes early. This good fortune I owe to the fact that virtually every flight heading south had been canceled due to the storm's resurgence and the airport was at a lull. I had a bad moment when, sitting by my customary window seat, I saw the water on the wings freeze into sheets of ice as we took off. I don't have much experience flying from locations where icing is an issue. But as we climbed it peeled from the wings like, well, like dry skin.

The weather down south is bad again. The storm will pass in a few days, but despite Wen's efforts to mollify the crowds the effects will linger for a while.

Update:

Don't miss David Bandurski's roundup of Chinese media coverage of the situation, plus his comparison with what the Hong Kong media spent its time on last week.