There are no words to console survivors of yesterday’s 7.8 earthquake outside of Chengdu. More than ten thousand are reported dead, and at the time of this writing, the fate of 900 students trapped beneath a collapsed school building hangs in the balance. Not one in ten thousand of us has the compassion to truly grasp the devastation, not of buildings, but of souls suddenly bereft of their loved ones. So we read the latest figures, watch the latest reports, let out a sigh or soft whistle, and consign the afflicted to the same corner of our consciences as the hundreds of thousands stricken in Myanmar.

Perhaps, as the tragedy still unfolds, it is unseemly to look for silver linings and lessons amidst the rubble. Perhaps. Yet if network news teaches us anything, it is that emotion tunes us in, but the search for answers and perspectives keep us watching, long after the binds of decorum slacken.

And there is a note of hope, muted as it is right now beneath wails of anguish and the buzz of non-stop reportage. No doubt inaudible to those closer to the tragedy, it sounds clearer when one considers earthquakes of China past. Both the scope of the destruction, past compared to present, and China’s responses to it, reveal a nation indisputably better-equipped to cope with nature’s worst.

In 1556, the deadliest earthquake in recorded history devastated 500 square miles of Shaanxi Province, leaving an estimated 830,000 dead, claiming victims from Gansu to Hunan. Time has diminished the emotional effect of the tragedy to virtually nil, but not the lesson: the vast majority of victims succumbed to the collapse of poorly built dwellings.

Yes, many structures fell yesterday – schools, a water tower, a chemical plant; Xinhua reports that up to 80 percent of the buildings in Sichuan’s Beichuan County were flattened. An international posse has already assembled on message boards Net-wide, saddling their high horses, making as if to ride after those perennial bandidos, Chinese corruption and government undersight. The posse is well-advised to rally in New Orleans until the knee-jerking subsides and the fiery righteousness cools.

Consider: only 92 kilometers from the epicenter, in Chengdu, a labyrinthine city housing ten million, nary an eager Western reporter has identified so much as a toppled outhouse. Only a few hundred kilometers away, the colossal Three Gorges Dam steadfastly retains its massive reservoir. In Beijing, vainglorious skyscrapers jiggled like Jenga towers. Chang’an Avenue thrummed with evacuated office workers, boisterous as students on a fire-drill, and just as safe from actual harm. The majority of the capital’s workforce, sitting in squat concrete megaliths, didn’t even feel a tremor.

Dare we hazard flippancy by conjecturing what might have been? A geological blip ago, in 1976, an 8.0 temblor ripped through Tangshan, 150 kilometers southeast of Beijing. It left 655,000 dead and 780,000 injured. Although stronger than yesterday’s quake, it lasted only 14 to 16 seconds, compared to yesterday’s 2 minutes plus. With a death toll more than 60 times that reported from the current count [God grant the numerator stay undiminished], we can conclude that China took the terrible lesson to heart, and that her structural integrity has since taken a quantum leap. If not, it would seem safe to conclude that Chengdu and Beijing would have suffered significantly more damage. Message board yahoos claiming there is no building code in China may enlighten themselves here.

Then again, it’s never too hard after a catastrophe to point out that more could have been done, and to remonstrate with those responsible for public order. So let’s move on to an unimpeachable progress point, given to China’s transparency in the wake of this disaster. After the Tangshan quake, unsurprisingly, Chinese officials forbade any attempts at foreign reporting, and rejected all international relief efforts, necessary as they were reported to be by the Red Cross.

The fact that millions of Twitter fans learned of the earthquake before it stopped, owes to the giant glass house the Internet has turned us into, not government transparency. Still, agents of BBC, NBC, and the redoubtable CNN are all on hand to give their accounts of the tragedy unfettered, their websites unblocked in the Middle Kingdom. Relief efforts are organized and comprehensive, by measure of international reporters duty-bound to find fault. If trained geologist Wen Jiabao rejects U.S. efforts of aid, it will be out of a sense of self-sufficiency, not contumely. China’s aid to Myanmar continues to flow, in any event.

So if we can not be on hand to help the victims, and if 24-hour news has numbed us to wholesale suffering, our only humane recourse is to acknowledge China’s advances, mirrored in this tragedy much more poignantly than in its economic galloping, yet perhaps more admirably than in any gold-medal victories come summer.

*Update*

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