As mentioned above, China is kinda a 3rd world country. The people there are either very rich or very poor, there is no in between.

To develope a city/town, people see alot of money coming in and this starts the GREED in HUMANs, not all but some and these are the minority that help cause more death than there should have been. Generous people donate money to help build schools, hospitals, homes etc…. and these GREDDY people see a way to TAKE MONEY and with no morals they think cos it has 4 walls and a roof thats it, no safety was entered into their thoughts at all, HENCE alot of the wreck was from schools. Although the China Gov has said it will follow up what happened but what can they do, LIVES HAVE BEEN LOST.

I hope the China Gov will over see that the NEW TOWNS/VILLAGES/SCHOOL etc are and will be safe and no more HUMAN ERROR OR GREED will cause more lives lost.

As YJ mentioned, alot of money will be going to Sichuan, hope they are used properly. The whole world is watching.

Better quality buildings? It depends on when China would jump out of their 3rd world mentality. Better buildings equal to higher cost, which means people will have to spend more to buy a house… and the average Chinese aren’t that rich yet.

In future they will have to choose between cheaper cost of living vs the risk of buried under the concrete during disasters… common sense would say that life is more precious than anything else, but sometimes human beings are willing to take some odd risk.

The Chinese government won’t be making much from the Olympic I guess… most of the money will go into the pocket of tourism industry, which in turn would benefit lots of the commoners.

The quake area would take years to fully recover indeed, but compared to the likes of Myanmar… I think China would do better in the rebuilding effort. I don’t think money would be too much an issue for the Chinese government (and with the donations around the world)… and the Chinese do have enough human resources and equipments and a well organised government.

just a question on jas’ comment…the quake was really centered in the tibet area? isn’t sichuan a totally different province?

i also wonder if china has the money to construct better buildings in the future. i know they spent a lot for the constructions for the olympics. but will they gain much more profit back? it would definitely take years for the affected areas to fully recover from the quake.

Some people might argue that it’s better to be safe than sorry; but to think that we would need to move millions of people every time when a quake is predicted… it isn’t really a logical choice with the current accuracy we have.

Agree on the building qualities… too many buildings have collapsed in this quake. While death is unavoidable in natural disasters, thousands of life could be save if the buildings were built with better resistance to shock.

bb… anon#7 was right about the nickname thing; it happens sometimes because of the software that the site is using, and it happen on some other sites that use the same script as well. I am not going into technical details, but it’s just a misunderstanding.

It just freaks me out more that the area where the earthquake centered is in the Tibet area. They got the separation from China literally. That way scary than any other things.

Anyway, true. Nature is an unstoppable force. Be nice if governments and authorities would heed the warnings a little better with the technology that’s available to detect alot of it these days. And of course, obviously it’s not the earthquake that kills, but rather the buildings and infrastructure that collapse unexpectedly on people because of it.

anyway, my mom told me that she heard from some place saying that there’s supposed be to 7 or 8 big disasters that will happen this year.
this is bad, but such things are unpredictable.
the best that humans can do is prepare.
whether the toad migration and the earthquake have any relation or not, i feel that nature is so powerful yet amazing.
there are certainly many things that humans still can’t explain til this day.