There was no sign that the dam formed by a landslide after the devastating May 12 quake was about to burst.

The official Xinhua News Agency cited senior Mianyang official Tan Li as saying the 1.3 million people in the Mianyang region—many of whom lost their homes in the earthquake and are living temporary shelters—must leave and seek higher ground.

Chinese troops were still working in the northern part of Sichuan province to drain the lake, which formed above Beichuan town after a quake-triggered landslide blocked a river.

The soldiers were using 40 heavy earth-moving machines to dig drainage channels. Officials quoted in state media have not said how long the work would take.

Some 158,000 people living downstream from Tangjiashan lake already have been evacuated, and troops have sealed off Beichuan to the public.

The confirmed death toll from China's worst quake in three decades was 68,858, the government announced Friday, an increase of about 350 from a day earlier. Another 18,618 people were still missing.

In the chaos after the magnitude 7.9 earthquake, which made 5 million homeless, many survivors were separated from their families.

Thousands of children and parents who had been separated have been reunited, officials said Friday, while the government has been inundated with requests from families to adopt other children orphaned by the disaster.

Social workers have helped bring together more than 7,000 children and their families since the earthquake struck Sichuan province May 12, said Ye Lu, director of social welfare at the provincial Civil Affairs Department.

"A little more than 1,000 children remain unclaimed or orphaned," Ye said.

The government has been overwhelmed with calls seeking to adopt those children, Ye said.

"We are still getting thousands of calls per week asking about how to adopt, but we are still hoping to find the parents of these 1,000 kids," he said.

Also on Friday, government officials in Tokyo said Japan would not use military planes to deliver relief goods to China after Beijing voiced uneasiness over the idea.

China had been in talks with Tokyo about using Japanese military planes to deliver aid, which could have become the first significant military dispatch between the two nations since World War II.

But Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said Tokyo would not insist on using the military.

Japan invaded China and conquered large parts of it in the 1930s before being defeated by the Allies in 1945, and many Chinese still strongly resent Japan for its military aggression.

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