CHENGDU, China: Can earthquakes be predicted, their destructive impact forewarned? Most scientists would say no. But if some insistent Chinese bloggers are to be believed, nature provided enough warning to have saved many of those who perished this week. In the days before the deadly earthquake shook much of mountainous Sichuan Province, their stories go, ponds inexplicably drained, cows flung themselves against their enclosures and swarms of toads invaded the streets of a town that was later devastated by the quake. "Why did the government ignore the signs?" asked a writer in one chat room. "Did they not care?" Some bloggers have lobbed more-pointed accusations, saying that alerts by a local seismology bureau were brushed off by provincial officials. The claim has been largely debunked, but that has not stopped the spread of rumors and tall tales, some of which are proving nettlesome to the ruling Communist Party as it grapples with China's most calamitous disaster in a generation. When a reporter asked about the rumors during a government news conference being shown live on state television Tuesday, the broadcast quickly switched to stock film of rescue efforts. When it returned to the news conference, the questions had become benign. Later that day, officials announced the arrest of four people for spreading quake-related rumors on the Web and said they would be punished, although they did not describe the punishment or nature of the rumors. Lest any doubters remain, the state-run Xinhua news agency ran an article on Wednesday featuring Zhang Xiaodong, a scientist at the China Earthquake Networks center, who said that seismologists, contrary to popular belief, could not accurately predict natural disasters. "We haven't passed the test of earthquake forecasting," he said. In China, the belief in omens and portents, often rooted in ancient cosmology, is widely held, even by the worldly and well educated. This is a culture, after all, that cherishes lucky numbers, eschews sounds that can be misconstrued as the word for death and places great value in feng shui, the practice of carefully arranging furniture and buildings to bring happiness and health. Even the Communist Party, which ostensibly swept away the opiate of the masses with its 1949 revolution, decided to inflect the Beijing Olympics with as many lucky eights as possible: starting them on Aug. 8, or 8-08-2008, with a start time of 8:08 p.m. While there is no way to know for sure, the current leadership may have one eye on Chinese history, which has long linked political power to the divine, a concept known as the mandate of heaven. Emperors served with the blessing of the heavens, according to such thinking, and those who turned corrupt or insensitive to the needs of the people were drummed out of power after a spate of natural catastrophes. Whether the calamities signaled the end of a government or helped embolden their usurpers is open to interpretation. Most Chinese can provide an earful about the "curse of 1976," the year of the deaths of Mao, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and General Zhu De, former head of the Red Army. It was also the year an earthquake struck the northeastern city of Tangshan, killing at least 240,000 people - a quarter of its population - in one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history. David Neil Schmid, a professor of Chinese religion at North Carolina State University who is a visiting scholar at Zhejiang University, said it was worth noting that the seismometer was invented by the Chinese in A.D. 132 as a way to detect tremors that might spell the end of a ruler's reign. Successive dynasties employed a master of omens who would record and interpret floods, famines and other disasters. "Reading and understanding these aberrations in the natural world has always been a central aspect of Chinese culture," he said. For China, 2008, while thanks to its eight is ostensibly a lucky year, has already brought a spate of unfortunate events. The year began with a huge winter storm that stalled the nation's rail system, stranding millions before Lunar New Year. Then came the rioting in Tibet. The government crackdown that followed has prompted a torrent of protest and international ill will that has fouled what was meant to be a "harmonious" Olympics period. In recent weeks, the authorities in Beijing have been struggling with other calamities: an intestinal virus epidemic that started in central China and has killed 42 children, and a train collision that killed 72 passengers in eastern China. Wang Yiyan, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney, said that even if the Communist Party leadership did not subscribe to superstitions, it was aware that many of its citizens did. The well-publicized journey of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to the disaster zone hours after the quake could be interpreted as sound public relations or, perhaps, an acknowledgment of age-old fears.