Illustration: Liu Rui

By Li Xiguang

Twenty years ago, I was reporting on a meeting between Chinese seismologists and their European counterparts. Most Chinese scientists argued that earthquakes could be predicted while their international counterparts said that earthquakes were unpredictable.

I was then a science writer with the Xinhua News Agency. When I walked back into my newsroom and handed the editor my story titled "International scientists skeptical of earthquake prediction," my editor threw my story into the waste basket. "Earthquakes can be predicted," he said. In this bold statement, he was following a long, but fatally misguided, Chinese tradition.

Chinese seismologists faced another defeat when a massive earthquake of 9.0 magnitude struck northeastern coast of Japan Friday.

While international scientists have lost faith in earthquake prediction, Professor Chen Yuntai, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a leading Chinese seismologist, criticized the government's plan to stop funding earthquake prediction. "Our failures to predict the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the Qinghai earthquake last year do not mean that earthquake is unpredictable," he told the press angrily.

Last year, the government allocated 240 million yuan ($36 million) to the State Bureau of Seismology, where Chen is the leading scientist.

Chen and his colleagues have designed three time frames for earthquake forecast: long-term, intermediate and short-term predictions. Long-term prediction involves a time span of a decade or longer in which it would be ridiculous to evacuate the residents. Intermediate prediction spans a few years, which is also meaningless for evacuation. Only the short-term prediction matters.

Chinese public expectations of earthquake predictions were greatly raised following the successful evacuation of Haicheng, Liaoning Province, in February 1975.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), earthquake prediction was not merely a scientific experiment, but also part of political struggle. The official media hailed the successful warning of the Haicheng earthquake as "being achieved by the sweat and wisdom of workers, peasants and soldiers under the guidance of Mao Zedong's philosophical thought." Any disbeliever in earthquake prediction would be labeled as a bourgeois scientist.

But the Haicheng evacuation was ordered because of a series of foreshocks that shook the area before the earthquake, a rare immediate warning that does not occur before every quake. Observation teams reported changes in the water level, and unusual animal behavior.

 The reputation of the China Earthquake Administration suffered a heavy blow the following year when the Tangshan earthquake killed at least 240,000 people. Only the small mountainous county of Qinglong anticipated the quake and evacuated, and that was a rare combination of intuition, luck, and strong local government.

But many Chinese journalists believe in earthquake prediction. They heavily criticized the China Earthquake Administration for concealing a supposed prediction of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 as part of the government's effort to focus the national attention on the Beijing Olympic Games. The notion that the government might be concealing important information about public safety found fertile ground among the Chinese public.

But the predictions made before Sichuan, as before Tangshan and other quakes, were vague, long-term, and covered a huge region. Without immediate seismic activity before the quake, earthquakes are impossible to predict in any but the most general terms.

Seismologist Charles Richter, developer of the eponymous magnitude scale, commented in 1977, "Journalists and the general public rush to any suggestion of earthquake prediction like hogs toward a full trough. Prediction provides a happy hunting ground for amateurs, cranks, and outright publicity-seeking fakers."

Richter's comment holds particularly true in China when the Internet chat rooms and microblogs are often full of earthquake warnings when there is no earthquake. But when a big earthquake does come, like the Japanese earthquake on Friday, there's no warning from the fringe Chinese seismologists and their followers on the Internet and microblogs.

The author is a professor of journalism at the Tsinghua University. xiguang@tsinghua.edu.cn