China's state-controlled media Saturday ignored the increasingly firm US position that a Chinese fighter pilot was responsible for the mid-air collision with a US spy plane.
Instead, the press said the search for pilot Wang Wei was continuing.
"Today is the 13th day after Wang Wei parachuted into the sea and despite little chance of finding him alive, military personnel on Hainan Island continue to carry out widescale search activities," the People's Daily said.
Most Chinese dailies carried Xinhua news agency dispatches that supported Beijing's position that the incident, which occurred over international waters, was the fault of the United States.
Reports from the Sudan, Tunisia, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates all praised Beijing's handling of the incident, its efforts to gain an "apology" from Washington and the release of the US plane's 24 member crew that landed on Chinese territory after the collision.
"Officials and people from around China firmly uphold our governments' handling of the incident and one-by-one say that we must take patriotic fervor and use it to quicken the pace of building up the power of the motherland," the People's Daily said in a separate article.
The tightly controlled press failed to carry the US version of events that Wang's jet dangerously approached the lumbering propeller-driven EP-3 surveillance plane two times before the tail of the jet bumped the plane's propellers on a third approach.
The Chinese papers also failed to carry remarks by US President George W. Bush on Friday that "China's decision to prevent the return of our crew for 11 days is inconsistent with the kind of relationship we have both said we wish to have."
However, some reports covered Bush's remarks on normalizing bilateral relations.
The Beijing Morning Post reported that US spy planes conduct spying missions 200 times a year near China's coastal regions.
It said that in addition to a slew of spy satellites, the US also maintained listening stations aimed at China in Pakistan, Mongolia, Taiwan and Japan.
"The US Central Intelligence Agency also has stations at American diplomatic missions in China in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou," it said.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Daily gave front page coverage to the hospitalization of the emotionally distressed wife of Wang, while calling him a hero who "shed his blood in sacrifice." – BEIJING (AFP)
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