Chinese donate their newfound wealth after quake

But when computer salesman Li Guang and his girlfriend Huang Minxia saw on TV the devastation wrought by China's massive earthquake, they quickly loaded up their China-made Chery QQ compact with bottled water and instant noodles and drove more than 160 miles to lend a hand.

"It's a small car, but we just wanted to help," said Li, from Chongqing, a city next to hardest-hit Sichuan province, as he looked out over shattered homes near the town of Longhua at the end of a long, earthquake-cleaved mountain road.

In a China normally racing full-throttle toward getting rich, the deadliest disaster in a generation has touched off an unprecedented outpouring of charity, especially among newly wealthy and urban Chinese. Donations are flooding in, more money than charities in China collected all of last year, and so are volunteers.

In the week since the quake, donations have totaled $1.3 billion -85 percent raised within China, the Xinhua News Agency said Sunday, citing the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

With living standards soaring with the economy's spectacular performance in recent years, a new group of rich Chinese are expressing interest in philanthropy. The ministry's China Charity Information Center projects that private foundations will overtake the government and aid and activist groups to become the country's main source of charity in five years.

Many, like Li, are taking advantage of soaring private car ownership and a new, expanding highway system to join the line of government and military convoys rumbling toward the epicenter.

Across the sprawling disaster zone, thousands of cars and SUVs decorated with large handwritten signs -"Hardship comes from one direction, help comes from everywhere" and "For the people, for the Beijing Olympics" -were coming from as far as the capital, Beijing, more than 900 miles away.

"I always wanted to take a long trip, and this is for a good cause," said Huang Daxian, a stock trader from Guangzhou, 760 miles away. Wearing a Bluetooth cell phone headset in his ear, he sat in his white Honda SUV full of donated clothing, instant noodles and bread rolls at a drop off point in Hanwang town where homeless from throughout the rolling quake-ravaged foothills have converged to seek help.

Private cars swarmed so thickly on roads that police set up donation drop-off points outside cities and towns to clear the way for military and government convoys. People living in tent camps beside cracked, debris-swept roads posted handwritten signs asking for urgently needed items -water, rice, vegetables. Cars paused to hand out a box or two and then drove on.