Donations from home and abroad had reached 37.3 billion yuan (2.72 billion pounds) by Thursday. China has also enacted a special statute to punish those found misusing relief goods and donations and Beijing has sent 300 auditors to the area.
Japan had shelved plans for its military to fly tents and blankets to China, a Japanese government official said on Friday, after messages on Chinese Internet sites linked the plan to Tokyo's World War Two atrocities in the country.
CHILDREN
Domestic media reports compiled by Reuters put the combined toll from deaths of children and teachers in the rubble of schools at more than 9,000. The Chinese public has been outraged by the disproportionate number.
An official investigator said one the schools that crumpled, the Juyuan Middle School, where hundreds of children died, was fatally weakened by poor design and materials.
"There were certainly problems with site selection, the building's structure and structural features, the construction and materials," Chen Baosheng, an expert from Tongji University in Shanghai, told the Southern Weekend.
And an education official in Sichuan has withdrawn from the Beijing Olympic torch rally in atonement.
The number of prospective orphans in the quake area has dropped dramatically as more children were reunited with their parents, Xinhua quoted local officials as saying.
There were about 1,000 "unclaimed children" in Sichuan as of Wednesday, down from more than 8,000 immediately after the earthquake, Xinhua said, adding civil affairs authorities had been overwhelmed by calls seeking to adopt those quake orphans.
The Ministry of Education has ordered universities to recruit more high school students in Sichuan - 2 percent more than the original quotas - in the upcoming national college entrance exams. Many in the quake area have had to prepare for the competitive test in makeshift classrooms in tents.
On Friday, China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, visited such a school in a tent city in Mianyang, one of the worst-hit areas.
"As science and technology make progress, you will definitely realise a more ambitious dream by landing on the moon and Mars," Yang said, trying to cheer on a class in a Children's Day event shown on state television.
