|| 148,022 || 103,919 || 257,384

|-

| style="text-align: left"|Tangshan Prefecture69,210 || 63,620 || 284,079

|-

| style="text-align: left"|Tianjin Municipality || 24,398 || rowspan="2"|8,262 || ?

|-

| style="text-align: left"| Rest of Hebei|| 839 || ?

|-

| style="text-align: center";|Total || 242,469 || 175,797 || 541,463

|}

While the officially published death toll was 242,469 (see table on the right for a breakdown), historians determined at least 300,000 died after cross-checking the government files. Historians add up these data to at least 300,000 deaths. While 246,465 never appeared on any publications authored by the China Earthquake Administration (CEA), the additional names were verified by the memorial park, which is headed by officials of the Tangshan branch of CEA. During the three-year wait, many high-end foreign estimates gained media popularity.

Within days, Pararas-Carayannis, an oceanographer in charge of IOC's International Tsunami Information Center, gave UPI an estimate of to deaths. Initially, he said his basis was the Shaanxi earthquake in 1556, which he said to have similar magnitude and similar construction standards, i.e. yaodong caves. However, there were no yaodong caves in Tangshan. Later, he said the population density and the 93% destruction rate of residential buildings in downtown Tangshan (where 730,000 people resided) justify an estimate of 655,000 to 779,000 dead.

In August 1976, Taiwan's Military Intelligence Bureau quoted their agents in China had learnt the death toll was over , with about 900,000 injured.

On 5 January 1977, Taiwan intelligence claimed they obtained a document dated 6 August 1976, nine days after the earthquake, that found dead and 79,000 injured. Scholars found 655,237 to be a "suspiciously accurate figure" just 9 days after the earthquake.

Political aspects

The remarkably low death toll of the Haicheng earthquake the previous year – initially said to be fewer than 300, much later estimated at a still very modest 2,041– had been credited to measures taken in response to an accurate and timely prediction. This was touted as demonstrating the validity of the Chinese methods of earthquake prediction (including inspiration from Mao Zedong Thought) and "the superiority of our country's socialist system!"

Many residents initially mistook the earthquake for a Soviet nuclear attack. With China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, "belief in earthquake prediction was made an element of ideological orthodoxy that distinguished the true party liners from right wing deviationists", and it was everyone's duty to criticize those who doubted the feasibility of earthquake prediction.

As a backdrop to this, and of deep concern to the Chinese Communist Party, was a collectively recognized but unvoiced awareness that in traditional Chinese belief, natural disasters are considered disruptions in the natural order of heaven and may signify the current government's loss of the mandate of heaven. This view was underlined by a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in southwestern China just three weeks later. On the other hand, an ongoing mass education campaign before the quake showed that the government was aware and concerned, and the prompt and massive response following the quake demonstrated the government's competence to alleviate suffering and restore normal production, drawing on resources from across the state. Some have contrasted this with the comparative lack of assistance the hardships faced by disaster victims (especially the poor) under previous regimes.

Mao Zedong was already ailing at the time of the earthquake; he died only six weeks later on 9 September 1976, ushering the downfall of the Gang of Four and bringing the Cultural Revolution to an end.

Geology

thumb|upright=1.35|Tectonic elements surrounding the North China Craton on which Tangshan lies.

Tangshan lies at the northern edge of the Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan Plain, an alluvial plain that stretches from Beijing to the Sea of Bohai. This plain – the northeastern corner of the great North China Plain – is where sediments eroded from the Yanshan mountains to the north have filled in the ancient Sea of Bohai, with Tangshan near where the shore was about 4,000 years ago. To the south these sediments have formed a layer of weak soils as much as thick. At Tangshan and northward these sediments are thinner where the underlying strata crops out to form isolated hills. This underlying strata is a thick —typically — layer of mainly sedimentary strata such as limestone and sandstone, with large deposits of coal. Tangshan is located particularly over a northeast oriented syncline, a fold in the sedimentary strata that has brought massive deposits of coal close enough to the surface to be mined. In this area the overlying alluvium varies in thickness from several meters to around . by the collision of two major crustal blocks that left a belt of uplifted mountains – the Central (China) Orogenic Belt (COB) – that crosses China approximately southwest to northeast, passing just west and north of Beijing. Just north of Zunhua another orogenic belt, the east–west trending Yanshan mountain fault-fold belt (also known as the Yanshan seismic belt) marks the northern edge of the North China Craton (and of the alluvial plain). It is also the location of over half of the destructive earthquakes in Hebei province, as under the plain several fault zones (oriented parallel to the Central Orogenic Belt) terminate against the Yanshan mountains.

Many of these faults are ancient, but have been reactivated by the force transmitted from the collision of the Indian plate against the Eurasian plate,

The Tangshan fault that ruptured 28 July runs right under the center of Tangshan City. The southern end of the Tangshan fault (it bends slightly at Tangshan) is near Ninghe, which was also the site of a M 6.2 earthquake several hours after the main shock, and an M 6.9 quake ("C") the following November. The Tangshan fault is considered shallow, but corresponds with a deeper and younger fault with somewhat differing characteristics.

Question of prediction

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Whether the Tangshan earthquake was predicted has had considerable political as well as seismological significance.

The 1975 Haicheng earthquake (about 400&nbsp;km [250 miles] northeast of Tangshan) is regarded by seismologists as the only successful prediction of a major earthquake, although no mechanism has been proposed to explain this prediction, and no successful predictions have been achieved since. The surprisingly light death toll – initial reports were of "very few people killed", but later determined to be a modest 2,041 and incidentally a validation of the Chinese methodologies. However, it was later determined that the most important factor in anticipating the Haicheng earthquake was the extended series of significant foreshocks ("powerful messages from nature"), and the low casualty rate was due largely to the time of day, hitting in the early evening when most people were neither at work nor asleep.

Tangshan was not so fortunate. Seventeen months later the 242,419 fatalities of the similarly sized Tangshan earthquake was therefore a considerable shock politically as well as seismically. While some of this greater mortality might be attributed to the exposure of a larger population, or the time of day (Haicheng was struck in the early evening, Tangshan while most people were asleep

At the time, the Chinese methods of earthquake prediction mainly consisted of watching for various precursors, including foreshocks, and were celebrated for their success at Haicheng and elsewhere. Many seismologists consider the Tangshan earthquakes to have not been predicted, even "famously unpredicted", and that it was not predictable due to a lack of precursory anomalous phenomena. The warnings that were made and precautions taken happened largely at the local level, based on general middle-term predictions, enhanced public awareness due to an educational campaign, and a series of foreshocks. It is significant that at Tangshan there were no perceptible foreshocks.

On the other hand, it is reported that several people at the State Seismological Bureau (SSB) wanted to warn of an impending earthquake somewhere in the region between Beijing and the Bohai Sea, and that this was discussed at several meetings. One of these was a week-long national conference on earthquake predictions and preparation that convened in Tangshan on 14 July (two weeks before the earthquake) where Wang Chengmin is said to have warned there could be a magnitude 5+ earthquake in the Tangshan—Luanxian area between 22 July and 5 August. However, in addition to the distractions of the Cultural Revolution, there was a possible disagreement within the SSB on whether the next large earthquake would be in eastern China (e.g. the Beijing area) or western China, As it turned out, western China was hit by the magnitude 7.2 Songpan-Pingwu earthquake only three weeks after Tangshan, showing that those arguing for the imminence of an earthquake in Western China were not entirely wrong.

At another meeting, on 26 July, there was a purported suggestion to not issue any warning, to avoid alarming the population. The next morning, at an emergency meeting he requested with the Bureau's leadership, Wang was reportedly told by Deputy Chief Cha Zhiyuan that "We are currently very busy. We will discuss it again next week." However, Cha has disputed this, claiming that Wang said there would be no major earthquakes.

Some of the bureaucratic reticence to issue warnings and order precautionary measures likely resulted from too many predictions. These were often based on doubtful theories notorious for false alarms that earthquakes can be predicted on the basis of droughts, daily temperatures, variations in geomagnetism,) to warrant large-scale societal and economic disruption. Such disruptions could be serious: a false alarm in October 1976, issued by the Shaanxi provincial government, is estimated to have disrupted the lives of 65% of the population of that province for half a year. It has also been estimated that "in the fall of 1976 about 400 million of the then total population of 930 million of China spent some nights in temporary earthquake shelters." This illustrates the classic dilemma of earthquake prediction: increasing the sensitivity to the possibility of an earthquake (i.e., reducing the failure to predict) increases the number of false alarms, which often has a significant cost.

Cultural references

Chinese director Feng Xiaogang's 2010 drama film Aftershock depicted how a family led their lives after the earthquake.

Footage of the incident appeared in the film Days of Fury (1979), directed by Fred Warshofsky and hosted by Vincent Price.

Accounts from earthquake victims are presented in the book The Good Women of China (2002), written by the Chinese author Xue Xinran.

Chinese director Chen Chang's 2026 drama Love Story in the 1970s (2026) depicts from episode #1.22 the impact on population from a newspaper reporter's and a surgeon's points of view, with some archival footage.

See also

  • List of earthquakes in China
  • List of disasters in China by death toll
  • List of earthquakes in 1976
  • Tangshan Earthquake Memorial Park

Notes

References

Sources

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  • . English translation by JPL of a lecture originally published in 1976 in a special issue of the Journal of the Seismological Society of Japan (in Japanese).

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Further reading

  • Qian Gang. The Great China Earthquake. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989. .
  • James Palmer. Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China. New York: Basic Books, 2011. (hardcover alk. paper) 9780465023493 (ebk. alk. paper).
  • Report on The Great Tangshan Earthquake of 1976: English translation of an extensive Chinese report from 1986.
  • "Integration of Public Administration and Earthquake Science: The Best Practice Case of Qinglong County" at GlobalWatch.org
  • An isoseismal map (showing the different zones of shaking intensity) of the Tangshan earthquake can be found here .