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"All Things Considered" hosts Robert Siegel and Melissa Block are in Sichuan Province covering the massive earthquake. They continue to report on the aftermath and recovery efforts. The hosts were in Chengdu with producers Andrea Hsu and Art Silverman when the quake struck. They were preparing for a special week of China coverage that had been planned for next week. Follow this blog for regular updates. ----From http://www.npr.org/blogs/chengdu/

Officials: China orders probe of school collapses in quake BEIJING, May 16 (Xinhua) -- China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has ordered local authorities to investigate the reasons why school buildings collapsed in the earthquake, said Yang Rong, director of the ministry's department of standards and norms, in an online interview on Friday.     "If quality problems do exist in the school buildings, we will deal with the persons responsible strictly with no toleration and give the public a satisfying answer," said Han Jin, head of the development and plan department of the Ministry of Education in the interview....

The Chinese government’s decision to allow the seemingly unrestricted flow of information out of Sichuan this week in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake has surprised many. However, the general assumption that the Chinese government ‘all of the sudden’ decided to pursue a policy of transparency and openess is incorrect. This decision was in fact made last year when the State Council passed the People’s Republic of China Ordinance on Openness of Government Information.

China earthquake: Exodus begins from Sichuan By Richard Spencer in Hanwang Town, Sichuan Province Last Updated: 11:05PM BST 14/05/2008 Tens of thousands of people have poured down from the mountainsides of Sichuan searching for food and water as rescuers evacuated towns where more than 40,000 people are dead, buried or missing. Rescue teams are digging through rubble, trying to reach survivors of a powerful earthquake in China. Helicopters began to airlift residents out of the villages of Wenchuan county at the epicentre of the earthquake which struck China on Monday, while others walked for hours into the valleys and plains...

HANWANG, China - Thousands of Chinese soldiers rushed on Wednesday to repair a dam badly cracked by the country's massive earthquake, while rescuers arrived for the first time in the epicenter of the disaster. China's top economic planning body said that the quake had damaged 391 mostly small dams. It left "extremely dangerous" cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan and some 2,000 soldiers were sent to repair the damage, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Xinhua said Dujiangyan would be "swamped" if major problems emerged at the dam. He Biao, the director of the...

“I haven’t been able to sleep,” explained a very tired looking student to me in class today. “One of my best friends is attending university near Mianyang and we have so far been unable to get in contact with her. We don’t think she made it.” Thousands of people throughout China are also going without sleep as they desperately wait for information about their friends and loved ones in Sichuan Province. Some cities in Sichuan, such as Wenchuan and Mianyang, have been completely cut off from the rest of China in the wake of the deadly earthquake on Monday. Only...

China quake toll soars as full horror begins to emerge 14/05/2008 DUJIANGYAN (AFP) - The full horror of the devastating China earthquake began to emerge Wednesday as rescuers discovered whole towns all but wiped off the map, pushing the death toll well above 20,000. Military and police teams punched into the heart of the disaster zone, with 100 troops parachuting into a county that was previously cut off while planes and helicopters air-dropped emergency supplies. But the message that came back from this mountainous corner of southwestern Sichuan province was that town after town was flattened by the 7.9-magnitude quake...

An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale has hit China's Sichuan province. The tremor was felt across the entire region - shaking buildings in the capital, Beijing, as well as the Thai capital, Bangkok, and Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. US Geological Survey said the quake struck 57 miles north-west of the city of Chengdu at 2.29pm local time (6.28am GMT). Some 10 million people live in Chengdu.

Beijing Heats Up Space Race Against Japan This Week; Communist Party Pride Excerpt: Tomorrow evening, the China National Space Administration is scheduled to fire a "Long March" rocket from a launch site in the southwestern province of Sichuan. If all goes well, it will propel a satellite into lunar orbit, an important step toward China's goal of beating Japan to become the first Asian nation to put a man on the moon. Visitors check the Long March 3A rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwestern China's Sichuan province last week. China plans to launch its first lunar orbiter...

Thousands of local residents have converged on an upscale hotel in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, setting fire to the building in protest at the death and alleged rape of a 16-year-old girl who worked there. Mobile phone footage taken outside the hotel in Dazhu township showed confused and raucous crowds in darkness in front of a burning building as crowds gathered outside. Witnesses said the crowd reached 20,000 at its peak late Wednesday. “There are still around a few thousand people on the scene and they protested outside the hotel this afternoon,” a shop owner near the Nest...

CHINA—On January 16, over 10,000 joined in a protest outside the Laishide Hotel in Zhuyang town, Sichuan province. During the conflict, protestors set fire to the hotel, which burned for five hours before it was finally extinguished. The protest was triggered by the tragic death of a 16-year-old reception girl at Laishide Hotel. According to a hotel employee who wants to remain anonymous, Yang Daili, the reception girl, was brutally raped and beaten to death by three communist cadres. Angry local residents gathered outside, demanding that the murderers be brought to justice. Instead, the authorities mobilized large numbers of anti-riot...

Rising temperatures may pose a challenge to the long-term food security of China, the world's most populous country, according to a recent official report evaluating climate change. China's output of major crops, including rice, wheat and corn, could fall by up to 37 per cent in the second half of this century if no effective measures are taken to curb greenhouse gases in the coming 20 to 50 years, according to the report. Global warming will negatively impact China's ecological, social and economic systems, especially farming, animal husbandry and water supply, with some damage irreversible, said the report. The...

2,000-year-old periwig unearthed in Sichuan www.chinaview.cn 2005-11-09 17:18:32 CHENGDU, Nov. 9 (Xinhuanet) -- The Chinese might have learned to adorn themselves with periwigs more than 2,000 years ago, said archeologists who unearthed a skeleton wearing a hairpiece from an ancient tombs in southwest China's Sichuan Province. The wig, found on the lower part of the skull, was made of hemprope, says Zhang Rong, a heritage repairs technician with a local museum in Liangshan prefecture, where the finding was reported. Zhang said she had consulted several seasoned hemp knitters in the prefecture before she came to the conclusion. The wig dates...

On July 31 (BJ time), Sichuan government has raised warning level of the so-called "Streptococcosis Suis". It warns the high risk of this disease. Government sent 50,000 immunity professionals to the region. The message is sent through posters, before farmers did not know the disease until there were people infected around them. By the time Boxun issues this message - 4pm (BJ time), XinHua News' web page still shows the death toll of July 30. There is only one item that was from yesterday. It seems that this warning is only for Sichuan Province.

Ancient stone-coffin tombs discovered in Sichuan www.chinaview.cn 2005-07-19 22:23:42 CHENGDU, July 19 (Xinhuanet) - Archaeologists discovered more than 20 ancient tombs with stone coffins dating back nearly 2,800 years ago in southwestern China's Sichuan province, local government announced Tuesday. The discovery of stone coffins, first of its kind found in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Garze, a major Tibetan habitat inwest Sichuan since ancient times, proved other ethnic groups also lived in the area before as Tibetan seldom use stone coffins for burial, said Chen Zujun, an expert from the provincial archaeological research institute. "Traditionally, Tibetan choose water burial, inhumation,...

Archeologists shake up historyNEW EVIDENCE: Artifacts found at a building site and the subsequent discovery of a lost civilization have forced historians to rethink Chinese history as a wholeAFP , JINSHA, CHINA Wednesday, Jul 13, 2005,Page 4 A worker stands on a stack of bags of cement before a huge billboard featuring the famous ''bronze human head figure with gold mask,'' one of the treasures of the Sanxingdui Museum in Guanghan, Sichuan Province in this photo from May. Recent archeological finds from previously unknown civilizations such as the Sanxingdui and the Jinsha are dealing shattering blows to traditional views of...

The floods have left thousands trying to salvage their belongings Devastating floods in southern China have killed at least 29 people and forced more than 250,000 people to flee their homes, officials say. Flood waters swept through the south-western city of Dazhou, where thousands of homes collapsed. At least seven people are missing. The floods are the latest in a lethal early summer, and come after some of the heaviest rains for a century. At least 600 people in the south have died from floods already this year. In Dazhou, some 26,000 homes collapsed as flood waters rose to the...

BEIJING, Tuesday, Dec. 28 - China's biggest television exporter announced major losses Tuesday stemming in part from declining sales in the United States and an unfolding financial scandal involving its biggest American customer. The exporter, the Sichuan Changhong Electric Company, announced earlier that it would be reporting its first loss, up to nearly a half-billion dollars, because of unpaid accounts with Apex Digital Inc., a company in Ontario, Calif. A Changhong spokesman, Liu Haizhong, said on Tuesday that Apex Digital owed it $468 million. The spokesman did not specify what period the amount covered. Changhong estimated that it might be...

UPDATED: 08:09, July 15, 200414 Warring States tombs discovered in Sichuan After over one month's excavation, the archeologists in Sichuan discovered 14 tombs of the Warring States Period in Yonghe Township, Shimian County, Ya'an City, which is known as "Ancient Corridor of Ethnic Culture" in China. There unearthed over 200 rarely seen funerary objects such as Bashu style iron and bronze swords. According to the associate-research fellow Leiyu with Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics Research Institute, The Warring States tombs in Yonghe were located on the terrace of the south bank of the Dadu River. With one side backed by the...

BEIJING (Reuters) - Pushing ahead with a space program that has won international acclaim, China launched a satellite on Tuesday as part of its first joint initiative with the European Space Agency to help track storms in space. Probe No. 1, an equatorial orbiting satellite, blasted off atop a Long March 2C/SM carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan province, the official Xinhua news agency said. China's highest orbiting satellite ever launched, part of the Sino-European Double Star Project, was expected to remain in orbit for 18 months to track space storms and help improve...