Chinese residents and soldiers walk near collapsed buildings Monday in Yingxiu, China. Two weeks after the powerful earthquake, the confirmed death toll rose to 65,080 with 23,150 people still missing, the Chinese Cabinet said.

Beichuan, China ? Rows of body bags were laid out along streets for all to see. Sobbing parents furious about shoddily built schools that collapsed and killed thousands of children were able to speak freely. Military helicopters carried reporters to tour the disaster zone.

The earthquake that flattened a wide swath of central Sichuan province May 12 has been a historic event for journalism in China. Never before have the nation’s leaders allowed foreign reporters so much freedom to cover a major disaster.

Chinese leaders haven’t fully explained the new openness, and periods of thaw can be brief here. Only time will tell if it is a real policy shift – a bold break from the Communist Party’s traditional tight control on the release of news, particularly bad news.

It might just be a response to the disaster’s exceptional magnitude – the death toll may exceed 80,000 and 5 million people are homeless – and the government’s pledge to be more open before the Beijing Olympics.

“We have adopted an open policy because we think it was not only the disaster for Chinese people, but the people of the world,” Premier Wen Jiabao said during a weekend tour of the quake zone. “Our spirit of putting people above all and our open policy will not change.”

The contrast to previous disasters is stark.

In the past, regions ravaged by floods, earthquakes, typhoons and other catastrophes were mostly sealed off to foreign media. Information from the no-go zones was treated like state secrets. Reporters trying to cover disasters without official permission – almost never granted – were stopped by police. Notebooks were seized, and photo files deleted.

When Associated Press journalists went to cover a quake that struck the western region of Xinjiang in 2003, police waited for them in their hotel lobby and interrogated them about their reporting. As recently as two months ago, security officials in Sichuan set up roadblocks and turned back journalists trying to cover protests by ethnic Tibetans in the region.

Since the quake, however, journalists generally have been free to go where they want. In the flattened city of Beichuan, reporters were allowed to walk down a block lined with 60 body bags. Soldiers only asked them not to take photos, citing respect for the dead.

AP journalists wandered around hospitals in the provincial capital, Chengdu, where patients were wrapped in bloody bandages and had their heads shaved so deep cuts could be stitched. The reporters stood next to rescue workers on mountain slopes looking for survivors.

A crowd of weeping parents in Wufu made allegations to a reporter that their children were killed in a shoddily built school that collapsed. No official “media minders” were there to remind the parents that they could be punished for criticizing the government.

If there were checkpoints, journalists were usually allowed through, even welcomed. Police and soldiers, who reporters would normally stay away from because of the threat of arrest, willingly gave newsmen directions to some of the worst hit areas.

As a result, the extensive media coverage both within China and without has helped stir up huge amounts of goodwill.

Thousands of volunteers from across China have streamed to Sichuan to help, and billions of dollars worth of donations have been collected. Foreign help – a rarity in a nation that prides itself on not needing handouts – has been welcomed in the form of rescue teams, medical experts and tents.

Until about a year ago, government rules required foreign journalists to apply for permission to travel for reporting beyond their home bases, usually Beijing or Shanghai.

Some of the restrictions were relaxed in early 2007 as part of China’s pledge to increase media freedom – a promise that helped Beijing get picked as host for the Olympics this August. But foreign journalists and monitoring groups still complain of harassment and occasional detentions.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong, said China’s leaders may have decided to be more open in Sichuan because they realized it would be too difficult to control press coverage of such a mammoth disaster.