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Ship With 457 People Reported Sunk in China’s Yangtze Hundreds Missing After Chinese Cruise Ship Sinks on Yangtze
(about 4 hours later)
A passenger ship carrying at least 457 people sank Monday night during a storm on China’s Yangtze River and most remained unaccounted for as of early Tuesday, the official news agency Xinhua reported. BEIJING — Most of the 458 passengers aboard a chartered cruise ship were still missing on Tuesday morning more than 12 hours after it sank during a storm along the central Yangtze River, according to a report by Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.
The ship, identified as the Eastern Star, had been en route from Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province in eastern China, to Chongqing in southwest China, one of the country’s largest cities. Xinhua said the vessel carried 405 Chinese passengers, five travel agency workers and 47 crew members. Fewer than a dozen people had been rescued, local news media reported, indicating that this could be the worst such disaster in East Asia since the sinking of the South Korean ferry Sewol last year.
“Eight people have been rescued,” the agency said. “Rescue work is hampered by strong wind and heavy rain.” The ship, whose name translates to Oriental Star, was crossing Hubei Province in the middle of the country when it sank at 9:28 p.m., the report said, citing the Yangtze River Navigation Administration. Rescue work was hampered by strong winds and heavy rain.
The agency added that the captain and chief engineer, who were among the rescued, asserted that the ship had been caught by a cyclone as it navigated a section of the river that traverses Hubei Province and that “the ship sank quickly.” The water where the boat sank is about 50 feet deep. Rescuers could hear the sounds of people trapped inside, according to a Twitter post by China Central Television, the main state network.
The Yangtze River, known in Chinese as Chang Jiang, stretches for 3,915 miles, originating in western China’s Qinghai Province and meandering to Shanghai. It is Asia’s longest river and the third largest in the world. Most of the passengers were between 50 and 80 years old and had been traveling on a group tour, according to Hubei Daily. The newspaper reported that one body, which appeared to be that of a tour guide, had been discovered. Hundreds of soldiers, police and paramilitary officers were on the scene. More than 100 boats and divers were on the scene, the newspaper reported.
The captain and chief engineer were among those rescued, and they said the vessel sank quickly after being caught in a tornado, according to the English version of the Xinhua report. The Chinese version, posted online Tuesday did not mention the rescue of the two officers.
Prime Minister Li Keqiang arrived on Tuesday, Xinhua reported. News organizations reported that Xi Jinping, the country’s president and Communist Party leader, had “issued important instructions immediately” to direct rescue operations, an indication of the seriousness with which the party considered the accident.
Among the people on board were five employees from one or more travel agencies and 47 crew members.
The vessel sank in Jianli County of Hubei Province. It was heading between two of China’s largest cities —Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, on the east coast, to Chongqing, an interior metropolis and the country’s biggest city. That journey takes several days.
The passengers were largely from relatively wealthy areas of eastern China, according to by Hubei Daily. The newspaper said 204 passengers were from Jiangsu Province, 97 from Shanghai, 11 from Zhejiang Province, 43 from Tianjin, 23 from Shandong Province, 19 from Fujian and 8 from Anhui.
One resident of Shanghai wrote in a microblog post that he had lost contact with his father, Zhang Yuming, and his uncle, both on the tour. He said both men had taken a bus from the Shanghai Grand Theater on May 28 to the city of Nanjing to board the ship.
The ship was built in February 1994 and was capable of carrying 534 people, Xinhua reported. The ship is owned by the Chongqing Oriental Ferry Company. The accident is certain to catalyze widespread public calls for investigations into both the company and into the government officials who oversee safety regulations and boat traffic along the Yangtze. Ordinary Chinese believe corruption among local officials is rampant, and the Communist Party has made rooting out corruption a priority.
In recent years, passenger ship services have come under scrutiny in some countries following deadly accidents. The Sewol tilted and sank off the country’s southwestern tip in April 2014, killing more than 300 people on board, most of them high school students. The captain, Lee Jun-seok, and key members of his crew fled the boat as it went down.
The Yangtze, the world’s third-longest river, is China’s most important waterway. Tourists often take pleasure cruises along the middle stretch. Those cruises are focused on the area called the Three Gorges, where vertiginous canyon walls rise from the waters and are often shrouded in mist. That section is also the site of the world’s largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, located in Hubei Province.
The section of the Yangtze in Hubei is also the starting point of the middle route of China’s most ambitious water engineering project, the South-North Water Diversion. A series of canals runs 800 miles from a reservoir at Danjiangkou to the area around Beijing, carrying water to northern China, which is in the midst of a chronic drought. Many farmers were forced to abandon their villages during the construction of that project.
In January, a tugboat sank while on a test voyage in the eastern section of the Yangtze. Twenty-two people died in that accident. In the aftermath of the Sewol disaster, ordinary Koreans criticized government officials and executives running the private ferry company. Investigators found that the ship had violated many regulations, including carrying twice its legal weight limit.Late last year, the chief of the ferry company, Kim Han-sik was sentenced to a decade in prison on charges of accidental homicide and embezzlement.