"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."

So the late General William Westmoreland - on camera - told filmmaker Peter Davis in Davis's Hearts and Minds, a 1974 award-winning documentary on the Vietnam War. Westmoreland had been the commander of U.S. military operations in that Asian country during the most intense years of conflict. His odious comment, delicately omitted from his obituaries when Westmoreland died three years ago, expressed a not-uncommon sentiment in even recent western history.

What we're seeing now in China gives the lie to such noxious beliefs. In an astonishing reversal of their historic policy of secretiveness, China's leaders have apparently embraced something approaching honesty when it comes to the cataclysmic earthquake that devastated a large section of the nation and has killed perhaps more than 50,000 people.

This openness is in sharp contrast to that government's obsession with secrecy and control in the face of other natural disasters, such as an earthquake in 1976 that likely killed upwards of 250,000 people, or with the outbreak of deadly SARS just a few years ago, when it took months for the totalitarian regime even to admit there was a problem.

It's surprisingly smart on the part of the country's leaders. The coverage has riveted international audiences. Unpleasant reports of violent Chinese suppression of Tibetan dissenters have vanished. More important, the Chinese people - who have for years been ciphers to most Americans - are shown as frantic men and women seeking their children, their parents, their friends, and grieving their losses.

This relative openness is both internal and external. Images of

the devastation and of the wretched survivors, desperately searching mountains of rubble for any sign of life, fill state-controlled television. Chinese authorities are openly appealing for help, particularly for supplies and equipment, from other governments and from charities. More amazingly, western reporters have been allowed to flood into the country along with rescue workers. Bruised and broken people plead to the world for food, water, medicine. The pictures of dazed parents, sitting mutely on piles of debris while rescue workers dig into the wreckage of a collapsed school, are heart-rending.

Among those reporting from the disaster zone are a crew from NPR's All Things Considered, a highly respected program that mostly traffics in well-researched and well-written set pieces rather than in breaking news. Two of its hosts, Robert Siegel and Melissa Block, were coincidentally close to the epicenter of the quake, preparing a week-long series of stories on modern China. Their spot reporting has been exceptional.

No story captures the horror and grief more movingly than one Block did Wednesday as she chronicled hour by hour the agonizing and increasingly futile attempt by two parents to find their only child, a 2-year-old son, who was with his grandparents when the quake destroyed their apartment building.

It was a superb piece of reporting, well worth seeking out on the web. And no one with a heart could listen to that narrative and buy into Westmoreland's canard about Asians' disregard for the worth of human life.

Natural disasters are more and more in our faces, thanks to 24/7 cable news networks and the internet. In years and centuries past, even monumental catastrophes were very much local in their impact. People elsewhere simply didn't know about them. Even as recently as 1883, news of a cataclysmic eruption of Indonesia's Krakatoa volcano - one so devastatingly explosive that it actually altered global climate for a year - took weeks to enter people's consciousness.

Today, the catastrophic explosion would have been internationally known virtually instantaneously.

As is being demonstrated in the coverage of China's earthquake, an increasingly important part of each disaster story is an analysis of the respective government's ability to respond to the needs of its citizens. When Hurricane Katrina devastated hundreds of miles of coastal Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Americans witnessed incompetence at every level of government. The pathetically inadequate reaction of the federal government, as the only entity large enough to deal with such a widespread disaster, was particularly inexcusable.

Still, our government's inadequate handling of Katrina pales in comparison with the unimaginably callous behavior of the military junta that has ruled Burma - which they call Myanmar - for nearly 50 years.

They are a vicious but startlingly inept bunch, in thrall to superstition and astrology. In the aftermath of the calamitous cyclone that destroyed large swaths of that south Asian country two weeks ago, they are aggressively blocking both reporters and any and all offers of assistance.

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