Survivors are helping one another with food, medical care and shelter, said the few aid workers who have managed to get into Myanmar.

'They are true humanitarian heroes,' Ms Bridget Gardner, the International Red Cross representative in Myanmar, told the Associated Press after touring an area where local volunteers were giving first aid to the injured.

Taxi drivers, factory owners, students and teachers are among those organising trips into the Irrawaddy delta.

Medical students have tended to the sick. Others help by clearing debris or rebuilding villages smashed by the cyclone.

'They went through the cyclone too. Some of them do not even have roofs on their own homes,' Save the Children's Kathryn Rawe told Agence France-Presse in Bangkok.

Shopkeeper Mya Win, 49, cooks huge vats of porridge every day to feed the homeless. 'We want to help them in our own way,' she said.

People who have lost everything are turning up at Red Cross centres to help.

Volunteers have set up way stations to treat those whose skin was 'sandblasted' by debris hurled by the cyclone.

The United Nations fears the death toll will surpass 100,000 and estimates that some two million survivors are in need of emergency aid.

Torrential tropical downpours have added to their misery and many have taken to begging by the roadside.

In the storm-struck town of Kunyangon, around 100km south-west of Yangon, one shocked aid volunteer told Reuters how crowds of children mobbed his vehicle, reaching through the window for scraps of bread or clothing.

The desperation is in contrast to the junta's claim to be on top of the situation.

Experts question that claim, noting that even China has not spurned foreign help after it was hit by a powerful earthquake on Monday.

UN humanitarian programme spokesman Amanda Pitt said China 'is a country with massive capacity to deal with any disaster. They know they can't do it on their own'.

The contrast between the two countries has invited inevitable comparisons.

'Yes, they are both authoritarian. But the military leaders in Myanmar see everyone as an enemy and they care only about security,' Professor Win Min, who lectures at Chiang Mai's Payap University, told The Straits Times.

'The Chinese leaders understand security. But they also know the importance of governance.'

Analyst Aung Naing Oo said: 'China is a well-established world leader and it has to pay attention to international sentiments. But for the Burmese leaders, when they face problems, they retreat into their bunkers.'

Most observers said the junta's attitude reflected that of its leader, General Than Shwe.

Myanmar expert Sean Turnell, from Sydney's Macquarie University, described him as a 'deeply irrational and xenophobic man who is very unschooled in the workings of the modern world'.

'He sees the outside world essentially as a threat (and) other regime members dare not act outside what they perceive to be his wishes,' he said.

shpeh@sph.com.sg