A total of 2.48 million people living in earthquake zones in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have moved into new quake-proof homes in the last two years, a local government official said on Wednesday.

The national program launched two years ago has seen 596,000 quake-proof homes built in 88 counties and cities in this westernmost region of China, said Nuerlan Abudumanjin, vice chairman of the regional government, at a national meeting on quake-proof housing in rural areas which closed here on Wednesday.

By the end of last year, the region had spent 11.745 billion yuan (US$1.46 billion) on building of quake-proof housing, of which, 869 million yuan was allocated by the central and local governments and 10.2 billion yuan was raised by farmers and herders.

The new homes had survived an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale in Wushi County, and a 5.2 quake in Pishan and Moyu counties last year, Abudumanjin said.

Xinjiang is a quake-prone region with 105 earthquakes measuring 6 and above reported since the beginning of the last century. A quake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale on Feb. 24, 2003, left 268 people dead and caused an economic loss of 1.37 billion yuan in Bachu and Jiashi counties.

Eighteen academicians with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering appealed to the government in 2004 to launch a project to rebuild rural homes to improve their ability to withstand quakes. Xinjiang began the project in the same year.

The project has since been implemented in more than 19 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions on China's mainland.

Two years ago, Xinjiang had 2 million rural families with 8 million people or 80 percent of the region's rural population, living in houses with mud walls, Abudumanjin said.

Xinjiang had adopted a series of preferential policies to encourage farmers and herders to rebuild their homes.

Each of the region's 720,000 poverty-stricken rural families were granted 2,000 yuan in subsidies and those who faced serious financial burdens were each given 3,000 yuan to rebuild their homes.

The government standard requires quake-proof houses to be constructed of brick and concrete or reinforced concrete. The government also set a price for building materials to protect the interest of farmers and herders.

All the provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions on the Chinese mainland have reported earthquakes measuring 5 or above on the Richter scale in the last 100 years.

"The collapse of rural houses in natural disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons, floods and landslides is the major cause of fatalities and loss of property," said Liu Yuchen, deputy director of China Seismological Bureau.

"This has much to do with the irrational location and poor structure of houses, and poor quality materials used to build rural houses," Liu told the national meeting on quake-proof housing.

The new rural houses were more durable in quakes measuring 6 on the Richter scale, Liu said.

The national project aimed to protect life and property and improve the living standards of the people, said Huang Wei, Vice Minister of Construction.

Xinjiang will build quake-proof houses for six million more rural people by the end of 2010, Abudumanjin said.

(Xinhua News Agency June 22, 2006)