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A series of quakes and aftershocks caused low, mud-brick buildings in Qinghai Province's ethnically Tibetan Yushu county to collapse, residents and state media said.
"I see injured people everywhere. The biggest problem now is that we lack tents, we lack medical equipment, medicine and medical workers," Zhuohuaxia, a local spokesman, told the Xinhua news agency.
Troops have been dispatched to the area and some aid shipments from private organizations have set off from the provincial capital, Xining.
"People are very scared," said Pierre Deve, with Snowland Service Group, a local non-government organization, adding that many had already given up hope for those still trapped.
The Tibetan plateau is regularly shaken by earthquakes, but casualties are usually minimal because so few people live there.
Many residents of the remote area could be left without shelter in temperatures that hover near freezing in Yushu and even colder in mountain villages. Government officials told state media the majority of houses had been badly damaged.
Photos showed larger concrete buildings mostly intact, with rubble around them.
The Japanese government has offered emergency aid, Japan's government spokesman Hirofumi Hirano said.
"The response was that there was no need at this stage," he told reporters.
SOME SCHOOLS COLLAPSE, MOST STUDENTS ESCAPE
Xinhua reported that the early morning quake had caused some schools and part of a government office building to cave in. Some vocational school students and primary school students were trapped in the rubble, it said, although residents said most students had been able to flee to playgrounds.
"Most of the schools in Yushu were built fairly recently and should have been able to withstand the earthquake," said Wang Liling, a volunteer worker for Gesanghua, a Chinese charity that helps school children in Qinghai. Her group, she said, had heard that a vocational school collapsed in Yushu.
"Many homes have been damaged, but we'll have to wait until this evening, when our staff arrive there, to understand anything specific."
The widespread collapse of school buildings when other surrounding buildings stayed standing, caused anger and accusations of corruption after the devastating May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, which killed 80,000.
"A lot of one-storey houses have collapsed. Taller buildings have held up, but there are big cracks in them," resident Talen Tashi told Reuters.
People from the Yushu prefecture highway department were frantically trying to dig out colleagues trapped in a collapsed building, department official Ji Guodong said by telephone.
"The homes are built with thick walls and are strong, but if they collapsed they could hurt many people inside," Zhuo De told Reuters by phone from Xining after contacting his family in Yushu.
The quake was centered in the mountains that divide Qinghai province from the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The foothills to the south and east of the area are home to herders and Tibetan monasteries of Yushu county, while the area to the north and west is arid and desolate.
The quake was centered 150 miles north northwest of Qamdo in Tibet and 235 miles south southeast of the mining town of Golmud in Qinghai, and had a depth of 6.2 miles, the United States Geological Service said.
A magnitude 5.0 quake struck the same region late on Tuesday night, and aftershocks of magnitude-6 and over rattled the town Wednesday morning, sending fearful residents into the streets. (Additional reporting by Chris Buckley, Ben Blanchard, Liu Zhen and Huang Yan in BEIJING, and Isabel Reynolds in TOKYO; Editing by Ron Popeski)
Source - http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63D01120100414