New survivors were plucked from the rubble on Saturday as rescuers in China waged an increasingly desperate battle to save lives five days after a huge quake killed an estimated 50 000 people.

With towns and villages reduced to a mass of twisted metal and concrete, recovery teams used sniffer dogs and cutting equipment to try and find victims trapped under buildings across the southwestern province of Sichuan.

A German tourist was pulled out of the wreckage on Saturday by soldiers after being buried for 114 hours, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

The confirmed number of people killed by the 7.9 magnitude quake was 22 069 late on Friday, with officials in Sichuan province saying another 14 000 remained buried.

But as foreign aid teams joined the rescue effort, search and rescue workers remained resolute in their mission to find survivors.

"Giving up is excluded from our dictionary," a rescue worker was quoted as saying by Xinhua, after a child was pulled out alive on Friday from a ruined school in the town of Beichuan.

"The possibility is very great that we can rescue the buried," the rescuer said.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who state media has reported was personally leading rescue efforts, said: "Where there is a beam of hope, we will spare no efforts to save the trapped."

In Mianyang, 10 000 homeless people have squeezed into a sports stadium, where they anxiously scanned updated lists of new arrivals in fading hope of a reunion with loved ones.

Foreign help

China initially rebuffed offers of help from foreign rescue experts, but teams from Japan, Russia, Singapore and South Korea have now all begun operating in the disaster zone.

Teams have also headed in from Taiwan — which China considers to be part of its territory — and Hong Kong.

The international experts have brought in sniffer dogs, fibre-optic scopes, life detector systems and hydraulic cutters and spreaders.

In Yinghua town, an AFP reporter witnessed rescuers pulling a man out from beneath tottering rubble after they amputated his leg and arm to free him.

Increasingly, rescuers have been dragging out bloodied corpses, bringing a new problem of disposal in communities that have almost nothing left.

But with another 4.8 million people left homeless by the disaster, according to Sichuan officials, there is also much anger at how towns and cities could be felled in a matter of minutes.

Close to 7000 schools — a disproportionately high number of buildings — were destroyed in Sichuan province by the quake, which struck in the afternoon when many children were in class or taking their daily naps.

"Look at the building materials they used," said one resident in the rural community of Juyuan where the middle school was destroyed.

"The cement wasn't mixed with water in the right proportion. There are not enough steel beams," the resident said, blaming poor workmanship for the four-storey school's collapse. Hundreds of children were killed while nearby buildings remained standing.

'Most destructive' quake

The scale of the quake — which rattled buildings across China and in cities as far away as Thailand and Vietnam — has become clearer after teams hiked to remote towns cut off by landslides.

Entire towns have been flattened, mountainsides sheared off, roads split in two, and countless thousands of buildings toppled or in danger of collapse.

With time running out for survivors the United Nations has released $7-million in aid for China following the quake, UN spokesperson Michele Montas said on Friday.

The money, which will be taken from the organisation's Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), will be used by different UN agencies and programs to help China meet urgent humanitarian needs.

"The United Nations stands ready to provide further support, as required, to the government of China in its efforts to respond to the humanitarian needs caused by the disaster," Montas said.

The Chinese government has described the quake as the "most destructive" the country has known since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949 — more powerful than the 1976 Tangshan disaster, which claimed 240 000 lives.

AFP