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I'm shocked at the coverage of the China earthquake, or lack of it, on the front pages of British newspapers today.

Only one paper, the Guardian, gives the story prominence. The others, including the Independent which prides itself on its conscience, focus on domestic stories.

The Independent offers predictions of a return to 1970s stagflation; the Daily Mail covers a tax row; and the Daily Telegraph, proud of its foreign coverage, prints a photograph of a minister's speaking notes for this week's British cabinet meeting revealing fears of a slump in house prices.

Yet watching China Central TV pictures from the earthquake zone, it's evident that the disaster is on an unprecedented scale - at least as far as reportable human suffering. The new openness of the Chinese media and the new willingness of the people to express their unhappiness and disatisfaction with the construction of collapsed buildings and rescue efforts mean that this is likely to be one of the biggest stories of the decade with unimaginable consequences for the government in China in a year that has already pushed that country into a brighter spotlight than ever before.

That British newspaper editors have dismissed it to the bottom of the front page or inside pages seems like a very bad miss with uncomfortable implications - do they think China is a place where disasters often happen and so don't make big news? That there are so many Chinese the loss of thousands isn't extraordinary?

There is always the undignified search for the few British victims in disasters like this - we had that last week with the Burmese cyclone, as the newspapers interviewed relatives of British tourists.

But British newspaper reaction to the China story seems for now to be a quantitatively more insular response.

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