Typhoon Haiyan Through the Lens of China's 2008 Quake Around the time I visited my second mass grave for victims of Typhoon Haiyan, I concluded this disaster was different. I had covered a catastrophic natural disaster before, the 2008 earthquake in China's Sichuan Province that left nearly 90,000 dead or missing. The storm that hit the Philippines was, in comparison, a smaller affair. The death toll there now stands at 5,235; it is unclear if it will surpass the estimates of 10,000 victims that emerged immediately after the storm hit on Nov. 8. And yet the typhoon in the Philippines - with the bodies that went uncollected and unburied for days, with the crowds of hungry people waiting by the roadside for aid - somehow felt more disastrous than the earthquake in China that killed more than 10 times as many people. How does one account for that difference? That was a question that kept occurring to me as I reported on Haiyan's destructiveness. Part of the explanation lies in the capability of the governments of China and the Philippines to respond to disasters. And part of the difference lies in the nature of the disasters themselves. Typhoon Haiyan cut a broad trail of destruction. It brought wind speeds approaching 150 miles per hour and a storm surge that brought a wall of water as high as 13 feet across coastal sections of Leyte Island. It flattened homes, carried away cars and pulled people out to sea, or trapped them in rapidly flooded buildings. Workers were still removing mud and debris from the road linking Tacloban's airport and its city center more than a week after the storm. The magnitude 8.0 earthquake in Sichuan flattened several mountain towns in Sichuan, including Beichuan, the ruins of which have been left as a memorial to the dead. The biggest city that was badly damaged by the quake was Dujiangyan, a metropolis of 630,000 people where several apartment buildings, schools and hospitals collapsed. The nearby megacities of Chengdu and Chongqing were largely untouched. In China, one had to search hard to see the dead. Part of that was characteristic of an earthquake, in which many of the victims were buried underneath collapsed buildings. Part of that was the nature of information control in China. For several days soldiers blocked journalists from traveling down mountain roads to towns like Beichuan. After The New York Times reported on the scenes of grieving parents at a morgue near Dujiangyan, it was closed to outsiders. In the path of Haiyan, the dead were visible everywhere. For days corpses sat alongside the main road from the Tacloban airport. One morning I went out with a crew of Philippine Red Cross volunteers tasked with recovering bodies. They started on a beach a few hundred yards from a largely intact hotel where many journalists and aid workers were staying. By noon they had found nearly half a dozen bodies among the debris. They put the victims in body bags, then placed them beside a road, where they sat for another day until they were taken away. Corpses were lined up in the yard of government offices near Tacloban's city hall for nearly a week before the government began putting them in a mass grave. In Sichuan, limits on access, which included soldiers blocking roads, made reporting on mass graves extremely difficult, and only a few images and lines capturing such scenes emerged in stories in the first weeks after the quake. The extent of such graves came out only later, as in a 2011 story in the official China Daily about a man who tended a graveyard where 6,000 people from the town of Yingxiu were buried. The huge military presence in the quake zone wasn't meant solely to thwart coverage. The People's Liberation Army had key roles in rescue and relief operations. Roads were jammed with People's Liberation Army trucks. On clear days the air was filled with the sound of P.L.A. helicopters headed for remote villages. Unlike in the Philippines, where complaints about the slow delivery of aid were a daily occurrence, I found just one person in Sichuan who said he hadn't received enough food. Last week Rear Adm. Jaime S. Bernardino, the second in command of the Philippine Navy, acknowledged the response to the typhoon had been "a little too slow," something he attributed to the magnitude of the storm. In an interview on the Dagupan City, a Philippine Navy transport ship that had brought nearly 400 tons of supplies to Tacloban and ferried nearly 4,000 refugees out, Admiral Bernardino used a bottle of water to represent the magnitude of destruction in a typical typhoon. Then he held his hand three-quarters of the way to the top to designate the Philippines" military response. "It might not be the desired quantity, but we can do it any time, all the time," he said. He said the military performed better than usual in this calamity, "but the destruction was way, way above," he said, holding his hand above his head. The magnitude of the disaster did contribute to the slow response in the Philippines. Roads were jammed with debris, and Tacloban's airport was overwhelmed. Even in Cebu, a major city largely unaffected by the storm that was used as a staging ground for aid deliveries, there were backups of supplies because of a lack of equipment, like forklifts to unload planes. The lack of preparedness set off rounds of political squabbling in the Philippines. President Benigno S. Aquino III sought to play down the disaster, saying in a Nov. 12 interview with CNN that a death toll of 2,000 or 2,500 was more likely. Tacloban's mayor, Alfred S. Romualdez, blamed the national government for not sending in enough troops to stabilize the city. In China, there was little such talk. The chief public complaint, that corruption and shoddy building practices led to the collapse of schools where other buildings stood, was stifled. Parents of dead students were warned by the authorities not to give interviews. Tan Zuoren, an activist investigating the student death toll, was imprisoned for "inciting subversion of state power." The artist-activist Ai Weiwei was assaulted and badly injured by the police in Chengdu when he went to speak on Mr. Tan's behalf. Six months after the quake I went back to Sichuan and was astonished by the pace of reconstruction. The disaster and its response seemed to reflect modern Chinese history and the transition from the deadly political campaigns of the Mao era to the growth-focused drive of Deng Xiaoping's reform era. The questions of the past, of what went wrong and why, were buried by an all-consuming drive to grow, rebuild and move forward. In the Philippines such questions are already being asked, and will continue to be. For now one worrisome question remains unanswered: Will the slow disaster response set the tempo for rebuilding?