New strategies needed to battle future shocks

The losses from the quake in Sichuan keep mounting. Nearly 70,000 are confirmed dead, nearly 20,000 remain missing and more than 360,000 were hurt by now. The losses in financial terms are hard to estimate at this moment.

China has been one of the countries suffering most from earthquakes. In the 20th century, 35 percent of the earthquakes with their epicenter located in continents and measuring over 7 magnitude took place on the Chinese soil. In the same century, 1.2 million people died in earthquakes around the world and 600,000 of them were Chinese.

The geological structure of China is the primary reason behind the lingering earthquake nightmare. Two of the most active seismic belts of the world, the circum-Pacific seismic belt and the Mediterranean seismic belt, cover part of the Chinese territory.