BEIJING, April 18 (Reuters) - A typhoon bearing down on the southern Chinese resort island of Hainan on Friday is the earliest to threaten the region in decades and may well be the strongest, state media said.

Hainan and the neighbouring province of Guangdong were braced for Typhoon Neoguri, the first of the year, with almost 22,000 fishing boats called back to harbour as the storm skirted Vietnam.

"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 news agency 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 going up to five, with maximum sustained winds of 96-110 miles per hour (154-177 kph).

The typhoon is expected to drop 40 mm (one and a half inches) to 90 mm of rain on Hainan and Guangdong. "The heaviest downfall is expected to be 180 mm in southern Hainan," Xinhua said.

Chinese scientists have blamed global warming for increasing weather extremes, including devastating typhoons, snow storms, floods and drought, which they say are likely to get worse.

Typhoons, known in the West as hurricanes, are cyclonic storms which draw strength from the warm waters of the South China Sea and regularly target the Philippines, Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong over the summer, sometimes with catastrophic effect.

The typhoon season usually starts in May.

(Reporting by Nick Macfie; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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