Chinese premier meets earthquake survivors

CHINESE President Hu Jintao met with earthquake survivors yesterday in a remote, mountainous Tibetan region where rescue supplies were arriving at a faster pace.

Hu cut short an official trip to South America to deal with the disaster, which killed more than 1,700 people in western China. Amid heavy security, Hu visited a village on the outskirts of Jiegu then headed to a field hospital beside the Jiegu sports stadium.

Crowds of patients and visitors craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Hu as he chatted with medical staff and rescue teams for about 15 minutes. He took no questions and did not speak with journalists.

Hu was expected to meet later with people living in a sprawling refugee camp that has sprung up on the town’s dusty horse racing track.

Most of the survivors are now living in tents and have basic food and clean water, Zou Ming, head of disaster relief at the ministry of civil affairs, told a news conference.

Still, Zou said, getting aid to the region, which is a 12-hour drive from the provincial capital, remains a problem.

He said 25,000 tents, more than 50,000 cotton-padded quilts, and 850 tons of instant food and drinking water have been delivered to the quake zone.

The death toll rose yesterday by a few hundred to 1,706 with 256 still missing, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the rescue headquarters in Jiegu.

A 68-year-old man was pulled from the rubble yesterday, four days after the quake hit on Wednesday morning.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported he appeared to be in stable condition but didn’t provide any additional details.

Hundreds of the dead have been cremated. In a hillside ceremony on Saturday, Buddhist monks in face masks set ablaze piles of blanket-wrapped bodies in a mass cremation, as necessity forced them to break with the local tradition of “sky burials” – leaving corpses on a platform to be devoured by vultures.