ABSTRACT:We interviewed 81 survivors of the severe earthquake in Tan gshan in 1976 and found that 32 (40 percent) reported near-death experiences (NDEs) as measured by Greyson's (1983) NDE Scale. The great majority of these NDEs were of the cognitive and transcendental types, and our observa tions were somewhat different from those of Greyson (1985) in the United States and of Pasricha and Stevenson (1986) in India. These differences sug gest that the components, sequences, and types of NDE might differ with race, religion, psychological and cultural background, and kind of near-death event.Near-death experiences (NDEs), profound subjective events experi enced on the threshold of death, have been reported by people who have been seriously injured or ill but unexpectedly recovered, and by people who have anticipated imminent death in potentially fatal situa tions but escaped from that danger (Feng and Liu, 1986;Greyson and Stevenson, 1980). They represent a type of mental action during the process of dying distinct from other phenomena in the psychology of death.In December 1987, we conducted a study of 81 survivors of the severe earthquake that had occurred 11 years earlier in Tangshan, China. This paper reports the results of that study.Feng Zhi-ying is a chief physician, and Liu Jian-xun is a physician-in-charge, in the Department of Psychiatry at Anding Hospital.