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I appreciate about your international experience. At least, you make judgment upon your own experience in China.
This disaster shows that we are lack of experience, professional rescue team and machine. We couldn't see some heavy machines were used in rescue on TV. Most soldiers used their hands to dig and drag. Many lives were gone in waiting for rescue.
Rescue in such earthquake is definitely not just as simple as what you mentioned, one could rig up with a chain and could save his neighbor in minutes. Your neighbor could die, machines could be destroyed, you could be hurt even be killed when your neighbor uses backhoe to lift debris in order to save your life.
Without this earthquake, government would pay less attention to invest on purchase of rescue equipment and training of professional rescuers. That's a huge-cost reminder.
My grandpa is a teacher of rural elementary school. The school is build by a private building team without corresponding grade qualification. It's impossible for that building to survive during any earthquake bigger than 5. Maybe we should stop rushing to popularize nine-year system compulsory education and reconsider whether our students could enjoy safe life and high-quality education in our school now.

frankly, if the British had ventured on in with the Opium back then and 'taken' more land, there'd be fewer dead children in Sichuan today.

I hope I misunderstood you at this point; if I really did so, tell me ASAP.

Otherwise, it's disgusting opinion. According to your logic, I would find any mistake made by British or US government, then compare with German gov, and say, "See, if Hitler took more land at that time, maybe they would be better ".
Some logic like, robber killed the whole family except a little boy and took away his parents' wedding ring. Some years after tragedy, robber returned the ring to boy, should the boy say, " Look, the ring is brand-new, thank you for keeping it for so many year." ?

Great! Glad to see there can still be some non-politically correct debate stirred on FR.

"Was British imperialism a force for good?" is a very old debate topic, and it's a pretty good primer to practice with before considering America's cultural and economic 'soft-empire' in today's world.

India was the jewel in Britain's imperial crown and by plundering its rich resources Britain went from piracy to power, eventually holding sway over vast tracts of the globe. But despite the indisputable causes for shame, the historian Niall Ferguson argues in his new book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, that British imperialism had its virtues, and its shortcomings were outweighed by its benefits.

Few events in history can be pigeon-holed into "all good" and "all bad."

FIFTY MILLION plus people died because of WWII. Dreadful. The Pacific and Europe have remained free for half a century. Wonderful.

Was the war good? Would an Imperialist Japanese dominance in the Pacific have been 'better' than the Anglo/American domination? Of course, I say no. You may believe otherwise.

I look at a map like this [ Map of Freedom in the World] and see fingerprints of an empire that left vast swaths of enlightened and improved economic and intellectual freedom, with much less death and destruction than would've been perpetrated on the world by alternate actors.

In Sichuan, I see a preserved ancient culture that does not value freedom and human life as it is in London, or Colorado. I do not subscribe to brityank's aspersion that "it is no different here, or in Britain." It is radically different.

All cultures are not equally good for individual liberty, freedom, health and prosperity.

I suspect that had Britain colonized and influenced that area, like so many others during harsh imperial rule, that fewer people would've died in that disaster. That's all.