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This post was written by CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton, who reported from China on the Sichuan earthquake, and now revisits some of the people she met there.
Read her Evening News report here.

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When reporting from a disaster zone, it’s often far too easy to reduce a entire event to a series of sterile numbers – the number of people killed, the dollar amount of damage done and precisely how long it will take for things to get back to normal.

China is home to one-fifth of the world’s population, so there’s an even stronger temptation for reporters here to allow huge numbers to dominate a major story: Sichuan’s earthquake left 80,000 dead, more than 8,000 missing and about 5 million homeless. Even people living near the quake’s epicenter had a hard time grasping the scale of what had happened.

So sometimes, it can help to focus on just a few individuals affected by a disaster. For more than two weeks in May, I worked with the tireless CBS News crew to highlight every angle of the Sichuan earthquake for our viewers back home. We met dozens of people throughout this chaotic period, but one stands out in my memory ...

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Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com

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Last week in New York the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) honored reporters from Pakistan, Russia, Mexico and China—journalists who have risked their lives investigating corruption, organized crime, arms smuggling, even the murder of three of their colleagues. When we called CPJ to hear more about the honorees, we learned that one, Gao Qinrong, from China, would not be attending because his government had denied him a passport.

Gao had uncovered a scam irrigation project in his home province—a striking example of local authorities’ self-aggrandizement and corruption. For writing that story, Gao spent eight years in prison; he was released last December. When CPJ asked us if we wanted to talk with him (through a translator), we of course leaped at the chance.

1. Mr. Gao, thanks so much for speaking with us, and let’s start, more or less, at the beginning. Tell us about the story you wrote that ultimately put you in prison.

It was about a fake irrigation project in Yuncheng, a city in Shanxi Province, which is southwest of Beijing. This project was costing the government about $38 million, and it was a scam.

It’s a region that doesn’t get much rain, so people are very dependent on the weather. In 1995, local leaders learned about a foreign irrigation technology that they thought might solve the region’s problems. It involved
building these large pools with pipes in the bottom to collect water. But the soil wasn’t the right quality. It was sandy and sticky, not suitable for this type of irrigation. Agriculture experts agreed from the start that it wouldn’t work, but the leader of the district, Huang Youquan, wanted personal glory, he wanted to enrich himself and enhance his reputation, so they began this huge building project.

2. Who were you working for at the time? Was this a story that your editors assigned?

I was working for the Xinhua News Agency, the state news agency. I found the story myself. One day I was traveling to Yuncheng from my home in Taiyuan, which is the provincial capital, and I overheard people on the train making jokes, in the form of a rhyme, or a proverb, about how whenever you walked down a road, there were these empty pools being built.

Of course I was very interested when I heard them talking, and I worked on the story for about a month...

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Mark Knoller is a White House Correspondent for CBS News.

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Much to the irritation of China, today marks the fourth time President Bush is meeting with the Dalai Lama.

Leaders in Beijing view it as American interference in China’s internal political affairs because of the Dalai Lama’s criticism of Chinese oppression in Tibet.

“We understand the concerns of the Chinese,” Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto said this morning, though he denied the U.S. was meddling.

So as not to rub China’s nose in it, the President’s meeting is not listed on his public schedule today. The get-together was taking place behind closed doors in the White House residence. There’s no photo-op for the press, and unlike previous meetings, there’ll be no release of a White House photo, as was the case on November 9, 2005.

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Products made in China are coming under increased scrutiny, after products like contaminated pet food and toothpaste made headlines.

Isn't it time that China raised its standards?

Just click the monitor for more.

The Chinese government has taken the tough-on-corruption stand to its ultimate conclusion, sentencing to death the former head of the food and drug administration for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines. According to The Associated Press:

The developments are among the most dramatic steps Beijing has publicly taken to address domestic and international alarm over shoddy and unsafe Chinese goods — from pet food ingredients and toothpaste mixed with industrial chemicals to tainted antibiotics.

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