China has given some of its most detailed reporting yet on the detention of 28 fishermen by North Korea but continues to maintain a careful balancing act in its sensitive relations with its old comrade-in-arms.

After a lengthy radio silence on the detention of three fishing vessels and their crews, China’s state media has begun to parcel out fragments of information. State-run news agency Xinhua quoted Chinese officials on Monday as saying the vessels had been detained on May 8 “by the DPRK.” On Tuesday, the Global Times, the sister publication of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, gave a lengthy – if still patchy — account of the 13-day captivity of the fishermen, now that they had safely been returned to China.

The Global Times published its report on the front page with a photo of one of the captured Chinese fisherman holding a club in what the paper said was a demonstration of how North Koreans beat him and his fellow crew members.

The full page story referred to the incident as both a “detention” and a “kidnapping.” It went on to say that a gunboat approached the fishing vessels and that uniformed men with automatic weapons boarded them while they were in Chinese waters on May 8. The boarding party smashed their communications equipment, ordered the lowering of the Chinese flag and forced some of the fishermen into the cabin of one of the boats.

“They wouldn’t let us talk and if we moved they would hit us,” the report quoted one fisherman as saying. The captives said they were given rice or gruel to eat, usually once a day.

The report said the Koreans took whatever they could, and that one boat wasn’t enough to hold all of the booty and that a second boat was called in.

The fishermen were later taken ashore and given cigarettes before being forced at gunpoint to sign a document while they were filmed. According to the report, the contents of the document read : ”We entered DPRK waters and were working there illegally. The DPRK treated us in a friendly manner and all was normal during our stay there.”

The report makes the point that it is still unclear who actually detained the Chinese fishermen, with the crew insisting that the boats were boarded in the early morning and the fishermen were unable to see for sure. They did not say whether they had any other opportunities to identify the gunboat.

They also said they did not recognize the uniforms worn by their captors though they looked like naval dress. They also noted the men “were not Chinese.”

The article took pains to say that this did not signal a deterioration in relations between China and North Korea despite the implications of some reports by Western media organisations. It quoted North Korean officials as saying that relations with China remained “friendly.”

Source: WSJ