Tags for this video have been changed from 'Bay Area, Earthquake, China, Engineering, Code, Regullation, Sad Truth' to 'Bay Area, Earthquake, China, Engineering, Code, Regulation, Sad Truth' - edited by calvados

They left out another important statistic...
Cost to rebuild
California - $1,000,000,000
China - $267

Same thing in 2010:
7.0 hits Haiti: over 100000 deaths
7.1 hits Canterbury, NZ: 0 deaths

Building regulations are a pain in the arse, but they exist for a reason.

It's unfair to compare this remote rural town with a big urban city with well established infrastructure. A better comparison would be the tornadoes that hit rural towns in the US, annually destroying many homes and taking several lives. Yes, those houses could be built to be tornado-proof, but they aren't because it would cost 3x as much and the average residents are too poor to afford it (and storm shelters and advanced warning make it less deadly)

(Of course, China should still be more strict about building codes. Although they'd have to tackle corruption first- too easy to bribe inspectors, and too many contractors cut corners to save money. They are rightly focused on improving food safety now - what other country would you find counterfeit eggs?? )

Do you think that the arrest of Zhou Yongkang is a sign that corruption is not tolerated quite as much any more? See this article from BBC News talking about his university distancing themselves from him for instance.

regulations benefit mankind? don't let the libertarians/anarchists see this!

I disagree, a better comparison would be a remote rural town in the US compared to the remote rural town in China, since what we are comparing is the ability to withstand the same shaking. Comparing earthquake damage to tornado damage is useless and teaches nothing.
In small rural American towns you have the same issues with corruption of inspectors, and also many unscrupulous contractors that will cut any corner they can to make more money (that's the same everywhere, but with less oversight there's more opportunity to do so in smaller communities).
Comparing the damage of a 6.1 in China to the near complete lack of damage and complete lack of injury from the 6.1 in Fortuna/Ferndale, Ca, for instance, would be a much better comparison of apples to apples.

Of course it will, in time and the human lives it cost in the process can't be measured with money, thus human lives does not have a value. That's how private sector works.

I see this popping up everywhere where this video is shown, always some one comes up and says how private sector will just magically start doing things right without regulation when they can do things right with the ones we have in place now. I'm pretty sure these people don't actually understand how world works.

Not that I disagree with the essence of your comment but I'm pretty sure that you didn't understand the satire of Icksters comment. That's why the sarcasm button was added to the comment area.