Battered China opens the books on its disasters

BEIJING - China yesterday revealed the death toll from natural disasters - until this month considered a state secret - stood at 1629 so far this year.

The country also admitted the disasters had caused economic losses of more than US$20 billion ($28.98 billion).

China, with a population of 1.3 billion, has been battered in recent weeks by typhoons which have triggered floods and mudslides in eastern and southern provinces.

Floods and drought are a fact of life for much of China, killing hundreds every summer.

China had evacuated about 13 million people in the path of natural disasters so far this year and direct economic losses stood at US$20.19 billion, the deputy director of the Disaster Relief Commission, Jia Zhibang, told Xinhua.

The news agency said last week that China had "declassified" the death toll from natural disasters, presenting the step as part of Government efforts to improve transparency.

China has a long track record of imposing news blackouts on accidents and disasters as well as falsifying figures.

The deaths of 85,000 people in the central province of Henan in 1975 - when dams burst during a typhoon - were revealed only in a book about China's worst disasters in the 20th century.

That book was published in 1998 - 23 years after the tragedy.

Xinhua gave no indication whether China would start retroactively revising death tolls for instance from a famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the Communist Party refers to as "three years of natural disasters".

The famine claimed an estimated 30 million lives and has been blamed by many on the Great Leap Forward orchestrated by Mao Zedong's 1958 in which farmers were urged to abandon their fields and make steel in backyard furnaces.

- REUTERS