In the current climate of tight news media restrictions pushed by President Xi Jinping, even traditionally aggressive outlets have been reined in, said Xiao Qiang, China Digital Times’s editor in chief and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now it’s much, much more restricted,” he said.

While the ship’s captain and chief engineer have been detained, the authorities have said nothing about whether they were warned of weather conditions, how they escaped the ship and whether they radioed for help or ordered passengers to evacuate.

Whereas rescue efforts after the TransAsia Airways crash in Taiwan in February or the sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea last year were broadcast on live streaming video, video of the Oriental Star response has come almost exclusively from edited China Central Television footage. The front pages of many Chinese newspapers and foreign newspapers, including The New York Times, carried the same Xinhua photograph of a 65-year-old woman being rescued.

Recent disasters in China have set off public criticism of the government and demands that officials take responsibility for shortcomings, such as poorly built schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the rapid expansion of high-speed rail, which some saw as contributing to a deadly train crash in the city of Wenzhou in 2011.

Image A relative of a missing passenger waited on the banks of the Yangtze River on Wednesday. Credit... Aly Song/Reuters

Li Datong, a former newspaper editor in Beijing, said that coverage was being strictly controlled even though the political implications of this accident seemed much more limited. “This isn’t especially sensitive,” he said. “It’s a disaster, and there’s nothing people can do. In a few minutes, the ship turns over.”