September 3

BEIJING, Sept 4 (AFP) - The Chinese public will be the last to know when local seismologists have reason to fear an earthquake is on the way, officials said Thursday.

This is because even in emergency situations, there are strict guidelines for how and where to channel quake data, the China Seismological Bureau told a briefing.

"According to Chinese laws and regulations, no organization or individual has the right to release information about earthquakes to the general public," said Li Qianghua, the bureau's spokesman.

"The seismological authorities of China will inform the local governments of possible earthquakes, and it is the responsibility of the governments to release information to the general public," he said.

His remarks came after eight unusually devastating months, when China was hit by 22 quakes with a magnitude of more than 5.0 on the Richter scale, leading to 291 deaths and 6,700 injuries, 2,200 of them serious.

The 22 quakes, which compare with just nine in all of 2002, have affected 1. 74 million people and caused direct economic losses of three billion yuan (365 million dollars), according to the bureau.

Among the fatalities, 268 were recorded from China's worst earthquake in seven years, striking in northwestern Xinjiang region in February.

Many of the Xinjiang deaths occurred because people had no idea that an earthquake was coming, and were surprised in their homes, workplaces and classrooms as they went about their ordinary business.

The bureau admitted China still had a long way to go in preparing for earthquakes and coping with their effects, even as they threatened to become costlier in life and material losses than ever.

"With the economic development and acceleration of urbanization, earthquake disaster could result in greater economic losses and bigger social catastrophe, " the bureau said in a statement released at the news conference.

The statement noted more needed to be done to build up the national capability for quake monitoring and prediction.

"As to when we'll be able to forecast earthquakes, I think that's as hard to predict as the earthquakes themselves," Li said.

Given the difficulty of predicting quakes the main emphasis is on preparing for relief efforts after the disasters have happened, but even in this area efforts have not been satisfactory, according to the bureau.

"The emergency rescue capacity is far from the requirement of our quake prone disaster situation, and a complete system of emergency relief and rescue has not been set up," the statement said.

One recent step has been to set up a 230-member rapid-reaction force, also deployed in Xinjiang in February, consisting mainly of engineers and medics from the People's Liberation Army.

Although China only takes up seven percent of the earth's landmass, it accounted for 33 percent of the world's major earthquakes of the 20th century.

The country's largest quake in recent times struck the northern city of Tangshan in 1976, killing more than a quarter of a million people.

Earthquakes regularly hit China's Tibetan plateau and Xinjiang region. They are also common in southwest Yunnan province and northern areas but are rare along the eastern seaboard.