I Feel The Earth Move Under My Feet (in China)

Spring has sprung
Fall has fell
Here the birds sing
and the ducks kvell

But in China
Where the Peking Ducks
Hang Up-Side-Down in the windows
It’s a death knell

Premier Wen Jiabao said China just suffered a 7.8 earthquake and he was flying to the area where he could see lots of dead bodies stacked all over the place. When asked why, he said, “Me politician. Me love photo ops:

It has been difficult to get information from the epicenter of the earthquake because mountain roads were damaged and telephone lines severed. Deng Changwen, vice director of the Sichuan bureau of telecommunications, told Chinese television there had been a “total failure” of the communications network.

The hardest hit area, Beichuan County in Sichuan, was estimated by Xinhua to have 3,000 to 5,000 dead and up to 10,000 injured.

In addition, China’s censors are once again making information difficult to come by. The Communist Central Party issued an order that news organizations could not send reporters to Sichuan and could only run news from Xinhua, according to a source.

When I emailed President Bush in Washington, D.C., he emailed back saying the United States was offering whatever help it could to China, adding “I am particularly saddened by the number of students and children affected by this tragedy.”

It will take a while for news to get out of western China, but so far they’re saying at least 8,000 people are dead.

China’s Xinhua news service reported that at least three schools had collapsed. One of them near the epicenter in Sichuan province was a three-story high school where about 900 teenagers were reported to be trapped under the rubble. At another two schools in Chongqing, nearly 400 miles away from the epicenter, four children were confirmed dead.

“The children panicked. They were pushing one another. They were very small. It was easy for them to get hurt,” said Zhao Cunfu, a teacher at the Lirang Village Elementary School near Chongqing where 21 children were injured.

The quake was recorded at 2.28 p.m. with an epicenter in Wenchuan County, about 60 miles to the northwest of Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital. The county is famed for the Wolong Nature Reserve, where Pandas are bred. The ethnic Tibetan town of Aba in Wenchuan County was the scene of anti-Chinese protests in March and has remained under heavy guard by the Chinese paramilitary ever since.

The quake was felt as far away as Bangkok and Beijing and caused a panic in Chengdu, a city of 12 million.

“Cars were bouncing along the street. Everyone came rushing out of their buildings,” said Chris Fay, a British bar owner in a telephone interview over the howl of sirens in the background. He said there was “a lot of panic,” but not extensive damage other than the collapse of an old wall and eaves of houses that had fallen down.

“It lasted a long time, maybe four or five minutes,” said Daisy Cang, a bookstore employee in Chengdu who said she was alerted to the quake when the beer cans stacked in her refrigerator toppled over.