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Hong Kong: Within 20 minutes of the earthquake in southwestern China, the People's Liberation Army had activated its emergency response and started to mobilise.
Within hours, Premier Wen Jiabao was on a plane to the disaster zone in Sichuan province to direct the relief effort.
Within a day, roads leading to towns and villages toppled by the quake were starting to clog up with cars, trucks and buses carrying water, food, tents and volunteers eager to pitch in.
China's initial response to its worst natural disaster in a generation was fast, large and unprecedented.
It was in stark contrast to the Myanmar junta's slow, opaque efforts after this month's deadly cyclone and the US government's much-criticised reaction to Hurricane Katrina.
"I think it is not an exaggeration to say that this is probably the most swift and effective response to a large-scale natural disaster in peacetime by any government in history," said Wenran Jiang, a political scientist at the University of Alberta.
Francis Markus, of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said the response was "exemplary".
The central leadership's ability to sense the scale of the disaster and launch major rescue work almost at once has won it unprecedented support and sympathy, analysts say.
But that goodwill will be tested by huge challenges in the days and weeks to come, as authorities struggle to provide proper food and shelter for the 5 million homeless, stave off epidemics and conduct satisfactory investigations into quake-related scandals, such as the high number of schools that collapsed.
Qian Gang, a former journalist who wrote a book about the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in northern China which killed up to 300,000, said preventing disease and mitigating the risk of floods from lakes formed by landslides remained the top priorities.
A teacher from a middle school in Beichuan that collapsed, killing hundreds, admitted troops had arrived quickly but said they were initially ineffective. "Not much got done until Wen Jiabao came here," said the man who declined to give his name.
Others complained that it took three days for the government to start to admit experienced rescue teams from Japan, Russia, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore.
"The next few months of work for the Chinese government will be extremely difficult," said Shi Yinhong, a politics expert at Beijing's Renmin University.
I think it is not an exaggeration to say that this is probably the most swift and effective response to a large-scale natural disaster in peacetime by any government in history."
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