US search for missing airmen in China gains new attention after Xi-Trump summit
Por Teresa Elena Frontado — South China Morning Post – News feed
Advertisement US-China relations US US search for missing airmen in China gains new attention after Xi-Trump summit
Access to crash sites and wartime Chinese archives is key to resolving about 700 cases and bringing missing US servicemen home
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Teresa Elena Frontado in Honolulu Published: 11:10pm, 5 Oct 2026 Updated: 11:30pm, 5 Oct 2026
For more than eight decades, the remains of US fighter pilot Morton Sher lay unrecovered in China. A photograph of a memorial to him in a Hunan village eventually helped investigators find where his plane crashed in 1943.
Sher was buried in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, in December 2025, a homecoming that offers a rare example of what US-China cooperation can achieve for families of missing servicemen.
That cooperation has now drawn fresh attention. After the recent summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump, Beijing said that the two militaries had agreed to continue cooperating in the search for the remains of missing US servicemen in China. The account also said the militaries would seek to conclude a separate memorandum on military crisis communication and prevention “as soon as possible”, but it did not specify new recovery missions or arrangements for access to sites and records. Select Voice Select Speed 0.8x 0.9x 1.0x 1.1x 1.2x 1.5x 1.75x 00:00 00:00 1x AI-generated voice
