国内英语新闻:China's civil affairs ministers visit quake and mudslide survivors ahead of lunar new year

BEIJING, Jan. 26 (Xinhua) -- China's civil affairs ministers visited survivors of last year's 7.1-magnitude Yushu earthquake and Zhouqu mudslide prior to China's lunar new year.

Dou Yupei, vice minister of Civil Affairs, led a team to Yushu in northwest China's Qinghai Province to visit quake survivors and local cadres beginning on Sunday.

Dou told Xinhua that quake survivors in Yushu now had access to food, clothing, safe drinking water, shelters and medical services, and the reconstruction of quake-damaged houses was well underway.

Further, the ministry has distributed 45,000 cotton-padded tents to Yushu to house survivors during the extremely cold winter on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.

So far, 160,000 tents have been set up to assure that all survivors have a roof overhead, according to the ministry's statement issued Wednesday.

Yushu was jolted by a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on April 14, leaving 2,200 people dead and 220,000 local residents affected.

Another vice minister, Sun Shaocheng, visited survivors from a massive mudslide that left 1,700 people dead or missing in Zhouqu, Gansu province.

To provide warm shelters to survivors, the Zhouqu county government invested three million yuan (455,000 U.S. Dollars) in renovating vacant school buildings or installing facilities in newly-built apartments.

All survivors who previously had taken shelter in make-shift tents were relocated to these buildings before Oct. 13, according to the ministry's statement.