How Different The Relief Aid Is

MIANYANG, China — With the death toll from this week’s earthquake rising rapidly, China has departed from past diplomatic practice, seeking disaster relief experts and heavy equipment needed for rescue operations from neighbors it has long shunned as rivals or renegades.

Officials on Thursday asked a longtime rival, Japan, to send 60 earthquake rescue experts, the first such team China has accepted from a foreign country during the current crisis and one of the few official relief missions China has ever accepted from abroad. This week it also accepted help from at least three private relief teams from Taiwan, the self-governing island with which China has long had tense relations.

Quite a difference from this:

As the urgency intensifies to get food, water and medicine into the worst-affected areas of Burma 11 days after the country was hit by Cyclone Nargis, the country's military government continues to baffle the world by stonewalling international disaster relief.

The government has taken pains to appear on state television as the sole source of humanitarian relief, even appropriating donations from others so that soldiers can hand out the aid. The United Nations warns of a second catastrophe unless a huge aid effort is begun immediately, and Buddhist monks and other Burmese citizens are quietly tending to the sick and hungry.

The junta's bewildering resistance stems from its fear that outside influence would weaken its control and from a distorted desire to maintain the impression that it is compassionate in the eyes of Burma's Buddhist majority, scholars say.

"The regime is trying to control the aid distribution because they want to be the ones to offer it ceremonially, partly to show they have legitimacy," said University of Wisconsin anthropologist Ingrid Jordt, who has lived in Burma as a practicing Buddhist nun.

"They are the patrons, the distributors of largesse," said Bruce Matthews, a Burma expert and professor emeritus of religion at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. "What anybody gets is what the military wants you to get.

Theoretically, they are Buddhists. They care about their Buddhist image."