At 2:48 in the morning on May 12, Wu Zhigang was working at his desk at Sichuan Gaojin Food¡¯s headquarters in Suining, a city of about 4 million people in the western Chinese province of Sichuan, when the earthquake struck. Although it is 150 miles away from the quake¡¯s epicenter, the company¡¯s building shook so much that Wu and his colleagues had to run outside.

By 3 p.m. they returned to their desks, but other workers at Gaojin Food weren¡¯t so lucky. The company temporarily halted production at the three of its seven food processing plants located closest to the epicenter. The earthquake knocked out power and water supplies and cracked the plant¡¯s walls. ¡®This will affect our results, but it won¡¯t be a very big impact,¡¯ says Wu, an employee in Sichuan Gaojin¡¯s securities department.

The 7.8-scale earthquake that struck the mountains of western Sichuan province is the deadliest disaster to hit China in nearly three decades. The earthquake has claimed over 12,000 lives, mostly from collapsed buildings. However many economists expect the impact on the Chinese economy of the power outages, communications breakdowns, and blocked roads to be limited. ¡®In the short term, there will be a temporary disruption in industrial production, but it should recover very quickly,¡¯ says Lehman Brothers (LEH) Hong Kong-based economist Mingchun Sun. One reason, he says, is that the quake hit a rural area without a big manufacturing base.