More Than a Century of Earthquake Fatalities: China as the Most Severely Affected Nation

Earthquakes are among the deadliest natural disasters that many countries face. We present a comprehensive analysis of the fatalities from earthquakes in 1900-2023, with a special focus on China. We use the casualty data from two main sources: China’s Disaster Information Catalog of Global Earthquakes (CN) and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC). There are clear discrepancies between the two sources. We reconcile these discrepancies through manual verification against data from governmental agencies, United Nations reports, and academic literature. In the end, we produce reconciled CN and NGDC catalogs, which are much more mutually consistent. The new catalogs reveal that the total global earthquake fatality is about 2.4 million over the 123 years, and the top three nations with the most fatalities are China (including Taiwan) with about 720,000 or 30% of the global total, Indonesia with 250,000 or 10%, and Japan with 186,000 or 8%. The deadliest event is the 1976 M7.8 Tangshan earthquake with 242,000 fatalities. Among the top 10 deadliest events, four occurred in China (1976 Tangshan, 1920 Haiyuan, 1927 Gulang, and 2008 Wenchuan). On a decadal scale, there were three fatality peaks in China (1920s, 1970s and 2000s) that coincide with the rest of the world. In contrast, the fatality for the successfully-predicted 1975 Haicheng earthquake was 1,328, far lower than statistically expected loss for an M7.3 earthquake. Our result demonstrates improved database consistency through targeted reconciliation, offering new insights for disaster mitigation strategies that reducing future fatalities depends not merely on understanding tectonic hazards, but fundamentally on the relentless improvement of anthropogenic systems. This study serves as a memorial to the victims of earthquakes and pays tribute to the legacy of the 1975 Haicheng earthquake prediction—a milestone in seismology.