Beijing  - The official death toll in last week's earthquake in south-western China's Sichuan province surpassed 50,000 Thursday, with more than 29,000 still missing, the government said.

As of Thursday morning, 51,151 deaths had been registered from the May 12 earthquake that hit Sichuan and neighbouring regions, the State Council information office said.

The Sichuan provincial government said it had rescued nearly 80,000 people from the rubble and evacuated 5.4 million local residents.

The new death toll represented a jump of nearly 9,800 from the previous day's toll.

The office said another 29,328 people remained missing after the magnitude-8 quake and 288,431 were injured.

Domestic and overseas donations for quake victims had reached 21.4 billion yuan (3 billion dollars) by Thursday and 1.9 billion yuan (275 million dollars) had already been sent to quake-hit areas.

The government relief fund for the quake had reached 14 billion yuan (2 billion dollars), the office said.

A total of 79,853 people were rescued from the rubble and more than 5.4 million people were evacuated to other areas of Sichuan, state media quoted Hou Xiongfei, a spokesman for the provincial government, as saying Thursday.

Hou said there were no reports of epidemics or "serious mass health accidents" among the evacuees in Sichuan.

President Hu Jintao visited two tent manufacturers in the eastern province of Zhejiang Thursday to urge them to increase production to meet the needs of the homeless quake survivors, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The government needs about three million tents to house all the refugees and so far has only about one million in Sichuan or en route to the province, according to earlier reports.

China made an urgent appeal for more donations of tents from other nations Thursday, saying it had already received about 150,000 tents from the United Nations and more from countries including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Britain and the United States.

The Health Ministry said Sichuan hospitals had treated 68,608 people injured in the quake.

A total of 28,497 were discharged after treatment, 33,665 remained in hospital and 3,444 people died during treatment, the ministry said.

Meanwhile, workers had restored electricity supplies to most quake-hit areas, but Beichuan county, one of the worst-hit areas, remained without power, the agency quoted the government's electricity regulator as saying.

Aftershocks had also cut newly restored power lines to Sichuan's Hongyuan area, it said.

According to the US Geological Survey, an aftershock measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale shook the earthquake zone Thursday, one of the latest of 7,182 aftershocks recorded in Sichuan. (dpa)