Rattled by quake, Chinese seek overlooked omens

By Lucy Hornby

BEIJING (Reuters) - Battered by bad news of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province, Chinese media and bloggers are asking -- why didn't the government predict it?

No country in the world has reliably predicted earthquakes. But with more than 13,000 people dead and as many missing or buried, a feeling of helplessness is pervading Chinese watching the disaster unfold on television, and many are seeking answers.

"I feel that 2008 has been a terrible year for China," said a worker in Shanghai surnamed Liu, before ticking off a list of bad news -- crippling snowstorms in January, Tibetan demonstrations in March, a tumultuous international journey for the Olympic torch, a train crash in April and Monday's earthquake.

Earthquakes were a sensitive topic in imperial China, where they traditionally signaled the end of a corrupt dynasty. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976 killed up to 300,000 people less than two months before Mao Zedong died.

Eight is normally a lucky number for Chinese, but the earthquake came 88 days before the 2008 Olympic Games were slated to start in Beijing on the 8th of the eighth month at 8 pm.

Despite few precedents for reliably predicted earthquakes, many Chinese expect government scientists should have made some progress since the Tangshan disaster.

Zhang Xiaodong, deputy director of the China Earthquake Network Centre, was forced to defend his department at a news conference on Tuesday.

"You can't go down under the earth to look like you can with the sky," Zhang told reporters, before elaborating on the complexity and irregularity of earthquakes that makes them difficult to forecast.