The same glacier collapsed on both sides of the same border. On August 26, ice, rock and floodwater tore down the China-Nepal frontier — through Gyirong Port on the Chinese side, and 72 kilometres of the Trishuli valley in Nepal. Nepal's confirmed dead passed 1,250 this week, with thousands still missing; today rescuers there pulled two workers alive from a tunnel after nine days, and the world's front pages carried it. So how has China's state broadcaster covered its half of the mountain? * Here are actual CGTN headlines from the disaster: "China steps up rescue, relief efforts after mudslide hits Xizang's Gyirong." "Rescue, relief efforts intensify in Gyirong following mudslide." "Experts: What makes the Gyirong Port rescue so difficult?" "Barrier lake forms after Gyirong mudslide." "3D imagery reveals path and causes of Xizang's Gyirong mudslide." It's a logistics documentary: 681 rescue personnel, 13 rescue dogs, an emergency corridor for heavy machinery, a premier on site. Everything in the frame is a solution. It's genuinely impressive coverage — of the response. * Now the number the response is responding to. Xinhua's count by late August: "seven dead and 554 still missing." Read that ratio again. Seven dead. Five hundred fifty-four missing. Across the ridge, in a country with vastly fewer helicopters, the same water killed more than a thousand people — and Nepali authorities kept saying so, daily, in public. "Missing" is doing something specific in the Chinese count: it's the tense that never has to graduate. The dead require funerals, names, causes. The missing just require the search to continue — heroically, on camera, indefinitely. * And we know the quiet part, because China Digital Times documented it: of 714 flood-related Weibo topics tracked in the first 48 hours, 306 abruptly vanished — including one pointing out that Gyirong Port had only reopened to cross-border traffic six months earlier, deleted within hours at a heat score of 347,000. The surveillance clip of the border gate being swept away was scrubbed across platforms with fingerprint-level precision, while generic flood footage circulated freely. Search results were sanitized down to before-and-after photos and official briefings. Ten people were punished for "spreading rumors." * Which gives you the editorial rulebook in one line: the mudslide's geology is allowed to be fascinating — 3D flyovers, barrier-lake explainers, expert Q&As — but the mudslide's biography is not. HOW the mountain fell: content. WHY a freshly reopened border hub sat in its path, who chose the site, what the glacial-lake monitoring said: rumor. * Regular readers have met this house style. Two days ago we caught CGTN writing about Middle East security without mentioning the war. Same pen here: the network doesn't lie about what it shows you — the dogs are real, the corridor is real, the two survivors next door are real. It curates what exists. On one side of the mountain, a catastrophe with a death toll. On CGTN's side, a rescue with a backdrop. * A state broadcaster covering a disaster as a performance review for the state: graded on the response, never on the toll. The 554 are still missing. The questions are, too.