By Tyra Dempster
BEICHUAN, China (Reuters) - China has evacuated more than150,000 people living below a swollen lake formed by thismonth's devastating earthquake amid fears it could burst andtrigger massive flooding, state media said on Wednesday.
China also called on neighbour Japan to send its militaryto help with relief operations, Japan's foreign ministry said.
The Tangjiashan lake was created when landslides caused bythe May 12 earthquake blocked the Jianjiang river above thetown and county of Beichuan in mountainous Sichuan province,near the epicentre of China's most destructive earthquake indecades.
The official death toll from the 7.9 magnitude quake isalready more than 68,000 and is certain to rise further, withnearly 20,000 listed as missing. Aftershocks on Tuesday toppled420,000 houses, many already uninhabitable.
China's request to Japan, which Tokyo said it wasconsidering, would mark the first time Japan's military hasbeen deployed in China since the end of World War Two andunderscores the huge challenge the country is facing torebuild.
Sino-Japanese ties, long troubled by Japan's brutaloccupation of parts of China from 1931-45, have been on themend in recent months and Japan sent rescue teams and a medicalteam to Sichuan province shortly after the May 12 quake.
Chinese President Hu Jintao told a group of visitingTaiwanese politicians that relief efforts were proving hard.
"The quake's massive destruction, huge casualties and theextreme difficult relief work are all very rare in history," Husaid. "It has caused great losses to human lives and property.We are deeply saddened."
As it struggles to provide relief to the stricken region,authorities were also trying to stave off further disaster fromits unstable dams and reservoirs.
Downstream from the Tangjiashan lake, residents wereevacuated overnight as engineers dug a diversion channel toprevent flooding.
Up to 1.3 million people could be relocated if the lakebarrier collapses entirely, the China Daily said in its onlineedition.
In Taihong, resident Han Haiyun, 60, was lucky to be awayfrom her house when a landslide demolished her village.
"I would never have thought something like this couldhappen in my life," she said. "It's impossible to put intowords."
The water level in the lake, one of 35 "quake lakes" formedby the tremor and holding the volume of about 50,000Olympic-size swimming pools, has kept rising and the giantsluice would not be ready for another week, the China Dailyquoted experts as saying.
Immediately below the lake, the river runs in a loopbetween flattened high- and low-rise buildings, but threatenscommunities downstream, which held evacuation drills onTuesday.
In Tianlin village, among the first to be flooded if thelake bursts, gongs and loudspeakers directed 680 villagers torush to surrounding hills within 20 minutes.
Over the last century, about 5,500 people have been killedby flash floods when barrier lakes burst through dams made bylandslides, according to a 2004 paper by geologists at theChinese Academy of Sciences.
In 1786, the breach of a landslide dam 10 days after amajor earthquake killed about 100,000 people in Sichuan.
The region along the faultline is densely packed with dams,raising concerns that if either the quake lakes or the weakeneddams burst, the rush of water could cause others to fail.
ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES
The earthquake will also make it difficult for China tomeet its target of limiting inflation this year, a seniorofficial said, because of the damage to agricultural productionand heavy investment in reconstruction work.
"At present it's very hard to say concretely how manypercentage points of pressure will be exerted, but there isdefinitely pressure," said Xu Xianchun, deputy head of theNational Bureau of Statistics.
Meeting the country's 2008 inflation target of 4.8 percentwould be "very hard", he said.
Beijing has allocated 200 million yuan (15 million pounds)to Sichuan especially for defusing the threat of the quakelakes, 28 of which were still rated as dangerous, Xinhua newsagency said.
The country also released about 4,400 tonnes of edible oiland more than 15,000 tonnes of grain from its reserves to helpmaintain supplies and price stability in affected areas, theNational Development and Reform Commission said.
A massive relief effort, which involves providing food,tents and clothing for millions and the reconstruction ofhousing and infrastructure, is expected to take up to threeyears.
(Writing by Nick Macfie and Lindsay Beck; Additionalreporting by Beijing bureau, and Teruaki Ueno and IsabelReynolds in Tokyo; Editing by David Fox)
