We've all noticed how Chinese state media's reporting faster, further and much more energetically about the earthquake -- yielding some ironic moments. At one point in the middle of a broadcast Monday night, thanks to a forward-leaning onscene reporter (who no doubt thought she was just doing her job), the state television flagship nearly leaked data that was either not ready, or not fit, for public consumption.

Soon after 10 p.m., the China Central TV news channel was hours into live breaking coverage, a CNN-style propaganda function that’s only become routine since the Iraq war, but is still reserved for must-cover developments. The presenters in the booth in Beijing announced the death toll had surpassed 7,000, according to the latest official figures circulated among central government media. Next the presenters turned to a female reporter in Sichuan, and asked her to describe rescue efforts on the ground.

The reporter piped in that she had just gotten the latest circular from the State Seismological Bureau, and pointed out a “discrepancy” with the count her colleagues just given. But before she could say any more, a male presenter broke in: “Now, let’s not quibble over the exact figures.” Nothing more was heard on the subject. It was an awkward exchange.

Would her count have been larger or smaller? “Well, obviously it was larger,” opined one friend who caught the broadcast, a Chinese publisher. When we spoke today, the first thing he asked was: “What’s the death toll reported by foreign media?” At this point, I told him, we could only rely on the government figures. I heard him ***.

Death tolls in China are still tightly managed, but they’re certainly no longer taboo. We’re not just hearing “nearly 10,000” or “more than 12,000” fatalities at the moment. As of a cabinet news conference on Tuesday afternoon, the latest official tally of the dead from yesterday’s massive earthquake in Sichuan was, to be precise, 11,921. And rising.

This is the deadliest quake since the 1976 Tangshan cataclysm, which was also the mother of all cover-ups of natural disasters in the Communist era. More than three years passed before Beijing even coughed up an official body count - 240,000. It took Mao's death, Deng's return from the political dead, and a Xinhua news agency reporter with the dumb luck and derring-do to file it .