China lists five Tibet flood deaths as Nepal’s count reaches 579

The same Wednesday collapse produced two official death files by Friday. Nepal's agencies put the confirmed dead at 579 and the missing near 2,000. China's state broadcaster CCTV put the Tibet count at five dead and 558 missing in Gyirong County, the district that holds the Chinese side of the crossing.

Those missing figures are not small. Five hundred and fifty-eight people unaccounted for on one side of a ridge, against five confirmed deaths, is a ratio that disaster statisticians flag. Nepal's missing list grew on Friday after hydropower firms added more than 900 workers who had not been in the first tallies. China has not published a comparable breakdown of who the 558 are, beyond a CCTV note that 260 of them are foreign nationals.

Gyirong is not an empty county. Several thousand people live around the port and the road that links Kathmandu to Lhasa. Villages on that road took the same surge of ice, rock and mud that buried Rasuwa and Nuwakot. Premier Li Qiang went to the site, a rare trip for a sitting premier, and about 500 military and paramilitary personnel were sent in. The political signal is urgency. The public numbers have not moved with it.

Reporters have had far more room on the Nepal side. They have spoken to survivors, filmed tunnels packed with mud, and followed bodies recovered tens of kilometres downstream. On the Tibet side, information still runs through state outlets. Independent access to Gyirong is limited. That gap, more than any single number, is what Saturday commentary in Delhi and London has been arguing about.

Overlap is possible. A person counted missing in Nepal can also sit on a Chinese list if they were last seen at the border post. Foreign pilgrims heading to Kailash and Mansarovar crossed at that point. Indian, American, Ukrainian, Australian and British names appear in both countries' notes. Until the two governments share identification files, adding 579 and five will double-count some dead and miss others.

China's water ministry has been more open about the hydrology than about the bodies. It estimated 1.5 to 2 million cubic metres already ponded in new lakes above the Bhote Koshi and warned of a high breach risk. That is a concrete figure. The death file is not.

Saturday's question is whether Beijing updates the five as recovery crews work through Gyirong, or whether the official dead stay frozen while the missing number does the work. Nepal's count has moved every day. China's has barely moved at all. For families waiting on names, that difference is the story.