If someone wanted to turn a shipwreck that claims 16 lives into more of a mess than it already is, here’s a tip: paint different national flags on each one, preferably making them from countries with a touchy relationship already.

Remember the uproar after Virginia Tech, when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the shooter was Chinese, and the national sigh of relief when it turned out he was Korean? This is a smaller scale, but I smell the same whiff of face-saving and nationalizing with last week’s shipwreck in the Yellow Sea. Xinhua is reporting heroic search and rescue efforts; Yonhap is grim and forlorn.

Chinese divers pulled two bodies from the ill-fated Golden Rose today, while a third remains with the sunken Korean vessel 61 kilometers southeast of Dalian, where it went down last week after colliding with a Chinese freighter Jinsheng last week. After the crash, the Jinsheng continued on toward Dalian without aiding the Golden Rose or its crew, arriving seven hours late but unharmed.

Chinese authorities may in fact be investigating the Jinsheng’s actions last week. Some punishment could be meted out. Lots could be happening behind the scenes, but so far the Chinese press has printed only one storyline:

YANTAI, Shandong Province — Chinese rescuers have recovered a second body, confirmed to be the captain of the Republic of Korea (ROK) ship that sank off the east China coast ten days ago after a collision with a container ship.

The body was found in the captain’s office on the second floor of the vessel, said an official with the rescue and salvage bureau under China’s Ministry of Communications Tuesday evening.

On Monday, Chinese divers recovered the first body of a crew member.

By Tuesday evening, Chinese rescuers had found three bodies of the 16 crew members of the ROK ship, but only managed to salvage two of them.

The ROK ship, “Golden Rose”, which was loaded with 5,900 tons of steel, sank around 3:00 a.m. last Saturday off the coast of Yantai after it crashed in heavy fog with the “Jinsheng”, a freighter operated by Shandong Lufeng Shipping Company Ltd. The “Jinsheng” is registered in Saint Vincent.

Of the 16 sailors from the “Golden Rose,” eight are ROK nationals, seven from Myanmar and one from Indonesia, according to figures from the Ministry of Communications.

More than 300 Chinese ships and three aircraft, as well as 30 experienced divers and a diving vessel, have taken part in the search for the missing sailors. China has invited the ROK to send its own rescue boats and coast guard vessels.

(Xinhua, via China Daily)

Who braved wind and fog to pull those corpses from the briny depths? Chinese divers, of course. Look how many ships are out there.

It’s a far cry from a week ago, when “Chinese maritime authorities mobilized 22 boats and two helicopters for search and rescue operations,” as the Associated Press reported on May 13. China rejected calls for a joint rescue operation, the same story notes.

Yesterday’s story also makes note of the Jinsheng’s registry in Saint Vincent, as Beijing Newspeak mentioned before:

A diplomatic desk reporter, when pressed about an inadequate translation of a Foreign Ministry statement pledging to use “all its strength” to search for the missing sailors, said, “Well that’s all the information we received. And anyway the ship was registered in Saint Vincent, which means it was an accident between two foreign ships which happened to occur in China’s waters and China is doing all it can to save the sailors.”

The numbers still don’t match, either, as Chris O’Brien also pointed out. Was it seven Koreans and eight from Myanmar, or the other way around? (The last one is Indonesian.)

Compare that with part of Yonhap’s version:

One of the bodies was identified as that of Heo Yong-yun, the 58-year-old South Korean captain, while the other was believed to be of Tin Aung Hein, a Myanmarese seaman, according to local police. The bodies arrived at Yantai aboard a small cargo ship with a temporary body storage facility at about 1 a.m. Heo’s body was driven to a funeral hall in the suburbs of the Chinese city, where his family members were waiting.

All 16 crew members of the 3,800-ton Golden Rose went missing after their ship collided with the Saint Vincent-registered freighter Jinsheng in heavy fog on May 12 and sank in waters 61 kilometers southeast of Dalian, a city in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning.

The crew was composed of seven South Koreans, eight Myanmarese and one Indonesian, according to South Korean coast guard officials.

Chinese divers found one more body from the ship Tuesday morning but failed to retrieve it due to high seas and strong winds.

No glory here, just bringing home the dead. Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 12:17 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.