An 18th century list of historical Chinese epidemics, compiled from various dynastic histories and local gazetteers for an imperial encyclopedia, records a number of devastating epidemics in the later decades of the Yuan which may correspond to the Black Death in the west.

To summarize, the admittedly imperfect summary of Chinese records shows three rounds of epidemics in the last forty years of the Yuan Dynasty. The first round occurred in the years 1331–34, spreading out from one or both of the widely separated provinces of Hebei and Hunan. The second round occurred in 1344–46 in coastal Fujian and Shandong, where a massive flood and displacement of the Yellow River also occurred in the summer of 1344. The third round raged throughout the 1350s and spread over most of northern and central China in the midst of widespread rebellion. In all three rounds mortality was exceptionally high, at least in some localities. We have no information about the signs, symptoms, or course of the disease or diseases responsible for the epidemics.

However, as that last sentence attests, we have no idea whether or nor these outbreaks were actually plague. This period saw China struck with a number of disasters, floods, famines, rebellions and the ultimate collapse of the Yuan Dynasty, conditions which displaced large populations and which could have given rise to outbreaks of other common Chinese illnesses such as malaria, dysentry, typhoid, typhus, smallpox, cholera, etc. Moreover, they seem to have been sporadic and restricted to certain disaster-hit regions rather than spreading rapidly along trade routes as the Black Death did in Europe and the Middle East, which is strange given China's high population density and economic integration. It is also very strange that the highly distinctive symptoms would not be recorded by one of the world's most literate societies, as they would later be in early modern outbreaks. A clear description of bubonic plague doesn't appear in Chinese records until the mid-17th century, only a few decades after the first clear description from Indian records.

Regardless of whether they were outbreaks of plague or not, these epidemics do seem to have played a significant role in the general chaos leading to the fall of the Yuan and must have contributed in some part to the demographic collapse that China experienced at the time, which possibly reduced the population by up to a third, though the numbers are confused by unreliable census figures during the Yuan.

Source: George D. Sussman (2011), Was the Black Death in India and China, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 85, No. 3