Six days into the Nepal-Tibet flood disaster, CGTN's homepage has finally learned to count the dead. Sort of. The headline: 'Number of dead rises to 788 in Nepal after flood.' Nepal's dead get a digit, in the headline, where digits go. Now find China's dead. They exist — 16 confirmed, with 546 people still missing at Gyirong Port, per Sunday's official news conference. But those numbers live in the body of a story headlined 'Rescuers race against time for survivors, cause of mudslide identified.' When the dead are Nepal's, they get a number. When they're China's, they get a verb. * We've been tracking this ledger all week. On day one, CGTN's flood coverage counted tents, firefighters and drones — everything but casualties. By day four it had conceded 'over 550 missing' on its own side of the border. Day six's official arithmetic: 16 dead, 546 missing. Five days of mud, and the missing column still hasn't been allowed to become the dead column. The BBC's estimate for the whole disaster — 'hundreds feared dead, thousands missing' — suggests where 546 of those entries are eventually headed. Watch which headline they land in. * Then there's the geography. CGTN's explainer is titled 'Map reveals Nepal mudslide's deadly path.' Another piece opens: 'A massive mudslide originating in Nepal struck a port... in southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region.' Sunday's press conference identified the cause as a glacier collapse on a Nepalese mountain, driven by climate warming — and, to be fair, that's where the glacier is, and CGTN quotes named Nepali geologists co-signing the finding. The physics is honest. The pattern is the tell: in headline after headline, the disaster is Nepalese and the response is Chinese. 'Xi orders all-out rescue.' 'Xi chairs CPC leadership meeting on Gyirong mudslide rescue efforts.' 'Against nature and time, China races to the rescue.' 'Land, water and air rescue teams push into the heart of mudslide zone.' The catastrophe immigrated; the heroism is domestic. * The inventory journalism survives, too: 2,141 personnel, 269 rescue vehicles, 'more than 3,900 sets of equipment.' Plus a diplomatic flourish — 'no foreign tourists are currently stranded in Gyirong County' — for the 23 countries with nationals among the missing. Everything in the frame is response, logistics, reassurance. What's missing is what disasters actually produce: survivors talking, families waiting, bodies counted. * And here's why that absence isn't an accident. The BBC reported this weekend that the flood footage shared around the world is 'almost impossible to find' on China's censored internet — 'only a single image broadcast by state media,' with little of the flood itself and no 'accounts from survivors or anxious families.' Read that against CGTN's output: an 'exclusive animation' of the glacier collapse, a stringer dispatch from the ruins, a reporter explaining the deadly path 'from the scene.' All of it in English. CGTN is the international arm of Chinese state media — the vivid reconstruction of the disaster is export product. The audience at home gets the single image. * So the day-six ledger reads: Nepal's dead, numbered in headlines. China's dead, 16 and counting, tucked under a rescue verb. The cause, Nepalese. The heroes, Chinese. The animation, for foreigners. The censorship, for citizens. Every fact CGTN prints checks out, as far as we can verify it — that's not the problem. The problem is that the facts have been sorted, and the sorting only ever runs one direction.