US search for missing airmen in China gains new attention after Xi-Trump summit

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…

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.