Death toll mounts as China rights capsized ship

Emergency workers were hoisting the Eastern Star from the Yangtze River on Friday after righting it early in the day, as the grim search for bodies in the cruise ship that capsized on Monday night picked up pace.

The cruise ship had 456 passengers, mostly retirees on an 11-day trip along the Yangtze, and crew on board when it capsized at Jianli in central China's Hubei province in freakish bad weather at 9.28 pm on Monday. Only 14 people have been found alive, and rescuers had retrieved 97 bodies by Friday evening.

Transportation ministry spokesman Xu Chengguang said disaster teams would now focus on draining off water, and finding and identifying bodies.

Groups of divers tied slings around the 2,200-tonne ship to allow it to be righted, and by morning, its badly damaged blue roof could be seen above the waters of the Yangtze. Large cranes on barges started to lift it from the river bed on Friday afternoon.

All week, the authorities have been keeping a close eye on family members and not allowing them to talk to the media.

The media has also been kept on a tight leash, with occasional briefings and one trip to the site, but generally reporters are kept at a far remove from where the rescue is taking place, and police are trying to keep relatives away from the media. The main state media are at the site of the disaster.

Frustration over the lack of information has grown among families of the missing, around 1,200 of whom are in Jianli now.

The crackdown is similar to the way parents of children who died in shoddily-built schools in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 were treated.

China’s top leadership, the Communist Party’s politburo standing committee, called on local authorities to take measures to help grieving families and to “earnestly safeguard social stability”.

One young woman, whose grandparents were aboard, the ship has been calling this correspondent regularly looking for information, and other families say they are planning to march en masse until they get some answers.

The family members have many questions. They ask why the captain, who was identified by state media as Zhang Shunwen, was taken into custody along with the ship's surviving first officer.

They demand to know why the ship did not take shelter from the storm, and how come the captain and crew members managed to get their lifejackets on in time, but do not have appeared to have sounded the alarm to warn the passengers.

Some have demanded to know why the boat did not dock in the storm blamed for its sinking, and how the rescued captain and crew members had time to put on life vests but did not sound any alarm.

They also want to know why it took so long to turn the ship the right way around.

Some people are taking matters into their own hands. Xia Yunchen (70) a university lecturer from Qingdao, whose older sister and brother-in-law were on the vessel, burst into a news conference with government officials, shouting angrily about the way the relatives of the missing and dead were being treated.

"Is it necessary to treat the common people, one by one, as if you are facing some kind of formidable enemy?" said Ms Xia.

She said afterwards that she doubted that a tornado was the reason for the disaster, and she wanted an honest investigation. She also demanded that relatives be allowed to view loved ones before victims’ remains were cremated.

“You view the common people as if we are all your enemy. We are taxpayers. We support the government. You had better change your notion of this relationship. You are here to serve us. You need to be humane,” she said, before being escorted out.

The rescue mission involves more than 3,400 soldiers, 1,700 People's Armed Police, as well as 149 vessels, 59 machines and a helicopter, the news agency Xinhua reported.

Additional reporting, Reuters