• China is in the process of rapid demographic, economic and social change involving nationwide engineering and building construction on a massive scale.
• For over four thousand years the Chinese have documented and recorded earthquakes. Such a length of data collection can be found only in a small number of places throughout the world and is of tremendous importance to seismologists, builders, engineers and economists.
• Devastating earthquakes have been recorded throughout Chinese history, including the magnitude 8 Shaanxi province earthquake in 1556, which killed an estimated 830,000 people; the highest known death toll resulting from an earthquake. Furthermore, within the last century alone, three of the top ten deadliest earthquakes and over 40 percent of all fatalities from earthquakes throughout the world have occurred within mainland China.
• Chinese scientists claim to have had success at predicting earthquakes, and the evacuation of the population before the 1975 Haicheng earthquake is often presented as the epitomy of successful earthquake prediction. Just one year later, however, the Tangshan earthquake, which flattened an entire city and resulted in more than 240,000 deaths went generally unpredicted.
• Today, rapid urbanisation and building construction have increased the exposure of people and property to the earthquake threat. Consequently, there is an urgent need to evaluate hazard and vulnerability and to build a comprehensive picture of seismic risk across the nation. Only recently has China become aware of the need for earthquake commercial and domestic insurance at local and regional levels, reflecting concern that a major financial loss from a future earthquake could seriously affect the current high rates of economic and social growth.
• Expected earthquake losses are determined from a combination of seismic hazard and vulnerability information on building types and economic production. Various seismic hazard assessment methods have been applied to China demarcating the areas of potential highest hazard in western and northern parts of the country. Vulnerability can be expressed through damage probability matrices and relationship to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Losses within the next 50 years indicate that western China may suffer the highest economic losses. However, as China becomes increasingly urbanised the impact of earthquake losses on cities must be addressed.
• New and exciting projects are planned, underway, or nearing completion, which require the seismic threat to be taken into account. These include the Three Gorges Dam, the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway.

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