Vietnam says 45 of the 62 people aboard the Khoi Nguyen 18 have been pulled out alive, and thanks Chinese rescue forces by name
Forty five of the 62 people aboard were alive by noon on Sunday.
That figure comes from Pham Thu Hang, the spokeswoman for Vietnam's foreign ministry, answering a reporter's question on 26 July about the sinking of the cargo vessel Khoi Nguyen 18. The ship went down while operating in severe weather in what Vietnam calls the East Sea and most of the world calls the South China Sea. Vietnamese rescue forces were dispatched immediately after the incident, Hang said, and the search was still running when she spoke.
The arithmetic in her statement is worth doing carefully, because she does not do it. Sixty two aboard and 45 rescued leaves 17 people unaccounted for. The ministry does not use that number, does not describe those still in the water as missing or as dead, and does not say when the vessel sank or where. Rescue forces and fishing vessels are continuing to look, and families are being kept informed through regular updates.
What Hang did put a number and a name to was the help. Chinese search and rescue teams deployed vessels and helicopters, alongside ships that happened to be nearby, and she thanked them from the podium: she said Vietnam appreciated the Chinese forces' "swift support" and hoped both sides would keep working closely together to find the rest.
That is not a routine sentence. Vietnam and China contest sovereignty across much of this water, and cooperation between them tends to be announced in joint statements long after anything happens, if at all. Here the operation, the assistance and the public acknowledgement all landed inside a day.
The account above is the Vietnam News Agency's, the state news agency, and it is linked below. It is the channel through which the ministry speaks, which makes it the right document for what the ministry said and the wrong document for anything it did not address. No figure for the missing, no position, no time of the sinking, and no account from the operator of the vessel exists in it, and none is supplied here.
