U.N. chief visits quake epicentre as toll leaps

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the epicentre of China's huge earthquake on Saturday, meeting victims and drawing an unspoken comparison with the sluggish aid efforts after a cyclone in neighbouring Myanmar.

He arrived by helicopter in the flattened remains of Yingxiu, a small town tucked in a steep river gorge which lost an estimated two-thirds of its inhabitants in the May 12 quake and has almost no safe buildings left standing.

He was met by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who raised the official death toll to over 60,000 and said it may climb above 80,000. China had said on Friday that over 55,000 were dead and nearly 25,000 missing, but nearly two weeks after the quake, hopes of finding anyone alive are nearly extinguished.

As relief workers in white coats and facemasks unloaded relief supplies and thousands of troops worked to clear rubble and bury the dead, Ban repeatedly paid tribute to the leadership of Wen and response of his government, and pledged full support.

"The Chinese government, at the early stage of this natural disaster, has invested strenuous effort and demonstrated extraordinary leadership," he told a small group of journalists.

Beijing has largely won praise for its relief efforts, sending over 100,000 troops and a string of senior leaders to the worst-hit areas and accepting some foreign help even though the quake zone is home to China's chief nuclear weapons research lab.

The contrast with neighbouring Myanmar was unspoken but strong. After Ban's visit there earlier this week the government finally agreed to open up to all foreign aid workers, around 3 weeks after Cyclone Nargis slammed into the country's delta.

In its aftermath the secretive Myanmar government appeared ill-equipped to help an estimated 2.4 million destitute but it barred most foreign aid workers for weeks and pushed on with a long-planned constitutional referendum.

"I'm coming from my visit to Myanmar, where 130,000 people were killed or missing. It was very humbling and very tragic," Ban said.

He had asked China to arrange a visit to quake-hit areas in part to send a signal about how to handle a natural disaster, said U.N. diplomats who declined to be named.

PROMISE TO REBUILD

Wen said in Yingxiu that China is now focused on providing tents, preventing epidemics and averting "secondary disasters" like deaths in landslides or flooding.

Soldiers, relief workers and survivors are already pushing on with cleaning ruins and agricultural work, although mountainous terrain means some places are still cut off after highways buckled, bridges collapsed and landslides blocked roads.

The government has also vowed to at least partly rebuild Yingxiu, although officials recognise that not all of the devastated towns can rise from their own rubble.

One will be rebuilt in an entirely new location and the collapsed buildings of old Beichuan left as a memorial.

And 10,000 survivors from the quake-hit county of Qingchuan will have to be resettled in other provinces, the official Xinhua news agency reported, because the "tough natural environment" of their former home means there is nowhere safe for them to live.