According to the BBC article   Shortlink http://theyshallwalk.org/?p=1704  7 September 2012

Earthquakes shake south-west China’s Yunnan

“A series of earthquakes have hit south-west China, leaving at least 80 people dead and damaging more than 20,000 houses, state-run media say”  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-19515445

basic kit to survive the minutes, hours and days that come after an earthquake.

Update 11PM Pacific Time Friday September 7, 2012

Wall Street Journal

By BRIAN SPEGELE

BEIJING—At least 80 people were killed and more than 700 were injured after several earthquakes, the largest measuring magnitude 5.7, struck southwestern China on Friday, according to local authorities and state media.

The earthquake’s damage was heaviest in rural Yiliang county, in a mountainous northeastern part of Yunnan province, near the border with neighboring Guizhou province.

At least one elementary school collapsed in the earthquake, local authorities said, and rescue missions were under way. Authorities said it wasn’t clear whether any students had been killed in the quake.

The earthquakes rekindled memories of the 2008 earthquake in Yunnan’s neighboring Sichuan province, which left more than 80,000 people dead. Thousands of students then were killed after shoddily built schools collapsed, sparking nationwide outrage toward the government over lax building standards.

Rural Yunnan and Guizhou are among China’s poorer regions, and heavily populated by non-Han Chinese ethnic minority groups, such as the Yi and Hui people.

In Yunnan, the civil affairs department said the quakes had destroyed some 6,650 houses and had damaged 430,000 others. More than 100,000 residents were evacuated and 100,000 others are in need of relocation, the civil department said.

Officials in Guizhou province said nearly 28,000 people were affected by the quakes, with 18 houses toppled and more than 10,000 houses damaged.

Xinhua said the first earthquake, which reached magnitude 5.7, struck at 11:19 a.m. Friday. At least 16 aftershocks followed, the strongest of which measured magnitude 5.6.

A spokesman for the local government’s earthquake relief center said roads to the area had been severely damaged and police, fire fighters and volunteers were working to repair them. Xinhua said landslides and rock falls had also caused significant damage and were hampering rescue workers’ efforts to reach affected villages.

The Chinese government is under heightened pressure to respond quickly to potential sources of social unrest ahead of its sensitive, once-a-decade leadership change, which is expected to begin in the coming weeks or months.

High casualties among children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake sowed widespread public discontent in China. The government since promised to improve building safety, particularly in China’s earthquake-prone southwest.

The quake was widely discussed on China’s popular online forums Friday, where many questioned how a moderate-strength earthquake appeared to have caused extensive damage to homes and infrastructure. The earthquake measured at a relatively shallow depth of 14 kilometers (8.7 miles), authorities said.

“A sub-6 magnitude earthquake and schools again collapse,” one person lamented on Sina Corp.’s popular Weibo microblogging service.

It wasn’t clear how many schools had been damaged in the quake, but some online users said one school damaged wasn’t in session at the time the earthquakes struck late Friday morning.

Yiliang county, which is administered by the nearby prefectural city of Zhaotong, has a population of 585,000 people, according to the local government, and has been designated by higher authorities as an area of particularly high poverty. The county’s population is largely rural and harvesting rice, corn and other crops serves as a major source of income.

Xinhua reported power and telecommunications in severely hit areas had been widely disrupted.

—Kersten Zhang
contributed to this article.

Write to Brian Spegele at brian.spegele@wsj.com