A private research facility has installed an earthquake early warning system in Beijing and neighboring areas and has begun testing the newly developed system.

Director Wang Dun of the Institute of Care-Life, a private organization that carries out studies on earthquakes, said the system was installed in schools, neighborhoods, and government buildings in different cities.

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The Chengdu-based organization supplied the technology used for the earthquake warning system.

Wang explained that if one of the cities experienced an earthquake, the others will get early warning signals  from the system in about seven seconds.

Approximately 130,000 square kilometers of land area in the cities of Beijing and Tianjin, and in the neighboring town of Hebei province in Northern China were covered by the earthquake warning system.

Care-Life had already monitored several earthquakes and had sent out more than a thousand accurate early warnings using the early-warning system since it was launched in April 2010.

According to the China Earthquake Administration, the institute that Wang works for is a private association, and the quake predictions are not considered official.

It is also reported that the government is planning to come up with a nationwide earthquake warning and monitoring system in the coming years.

The northern part of China has seen aggressive seismic activity in the recent years, including the magnitude 8.2 killer earthquake that took the lives of more than 242,000 people in Beijing, Hebei, and Tianjin in 1976, one of the most destructive natural calamities in the history of mankind.

China began to focus its attention on early earthquake detection after the 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, Sichuan province killed about 70,000 people.

Other countries like Japan, Turkey and Mexico had launched their own earthquake early detection systems ahead of China.