That's a lot of hand-wavy claims. Care to back some of it up with data? Especially the part about China's economic growth being slower if they'd had stricter building codes. Absent any real data, it's equally intuitive to say that it wouldn't have been slower because [insert natural disaster here] would have been a big setback as often as [same natural disaster] occurs on average.

Plus, you know, lots of people would have died who could have been saved by stricter building codes. I'd rather be alive than have a couple more percentage points of economic growth every year.