Earthquake Rocks China

A massive earthquake rocked southwestern China on Monday, resulting in a death toll that neared 10,000 Tuesday and creating a new crisis for China's leaders after several that have heavily tested the regime this year.

The quake, among the most powerful to hit a populated area in recent years, flattened school buildings, shops and homes across a wide, mountainous area around the epicenter in China's Sichuan province. Local officials estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people died in a single Sichuan county, called Beichuan, where 80% of the buildings were estimated to have collapsed, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The full scale of the devastation wasn't clear, in part because of damage to communications lines in the affected area. Rain, as well as rocks and boulders blocking roads, hampered rescue efforts, Xinhua said.

The devastation represents the latest of several crises to test China's leadership in a year that was supposed to be dominated by Beijing's hosting of the Summer Olympics in August. Winter storms in January -- China's worst in 50 years -- shut down much of the country's central and southern regions for weeks and killed crops and livestock, exacerbating inflation that was running at decade highs.

In March, antigovernment protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, and the resulting government crackdown, triggered unrest throughout ethnically Tibetan areas in much of western China. Monday's quake struck in part of that region. The Tibet flare-up fueled criticism of China's government internationally, leading to protests during the Olympic torch relay through major Western cities, which in turn caused an anti-Western backlash in China.

Following these crises, the earthquake's aftermath is likely to be watched closely within China as a test of the leadership's ability to coordinate a complicated relief effort -- and of how it balances its own desire to seem self-sufficient against the need to request any resources from abroad that it might not have. Relief groups, already contending with the aftermath of the recent cyclone in neighboring Myanmar, said they were awaiting word from Chinese authorities on whether assistance was desired.

The quake also could offer a test of China's adherence to earthquake standards in the midst of a massive building boom, and could put local officials under pressure as well.

The quake, which struck midafternoon local time, measured at magnitude 7.9, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The initial jolt was so powerful it was felt as far away as Bangkok. It prompted evacuations of offices towers in Beijing and Shanghai, both more than 1,500 kilometers away, as office buildings swayed enough to make some workers nauseated. More than a dozen aftershocks followed, many of them topping magnitude 5.0.

Hundreds of people were trapped under two collapsed chemical plants in a town called, Shifang, where tons of leaked liquid ammonia caused the evacuation of 6,000 people, Xinhua reported.