As of Thursday, the China Search and Rescue team has rescued six trapped people and found 11 victims in Türkiye. The HK rescue team has rescued four survivors. The Zhejiang Rescue Team of Ramunion rescued nine survivors and the Blue Sky Rescue (BSR) team, working with other rescue groups, rescued eight survivors and found 137 victims. 

"The most impressive moment for me was when rescue teams from different countries, including China and Türkiye, were staying here together to save lives," Asmu Erdo, a student from Istanbul Technical University who was a volunteer rescue driver in Hatay province, told Xinhua.

"The Chinese rescuers only took 15 minutes for lunch," the student said.

Over 500 Chinese rescuers in Türkiye

A total of over 500 people from 19 Chinese emergency response teams were in Türkiye to join the international rescue work, according to Chinese Foreign Ministry. 

Live: China Search and Rescue Team carrying out mission in Türkiye

Challenges in such cross-border missions require China's rescue teams to strengthen communication with teams from other countries to form a unified collaboration mechanism.

In Türkiye, bitter cold has hampered the search for thousands of flattened buildings. Temperatures in the Turkish city of Gaziantep plunged to minus 5 degrees Celsius early Thursday, and thousands of families spent the night in cars and makeshift tents, too scared or banned from returning home.

The team was called to the scene after their Turkish counterparts discovered signs of life when clearing rubble. During the operation, the team squeezed a flexible endoscope camera through small gaps to survey the condition beneath and worked with Turkish rescuers to clear the area.

Ivan Kasler, general manager of Turkey's Blueberry Travel, said, "The Chinese rescue force worked selflessly with expertise, experience as well as specialized equipment."

Hao Nan, executive deputy director of the Earthquake Emergency Rescue Committee of the China Association for Disaster Prevention, said to Xinhua that the rescue work in Türkiye and Syria is the most challenging and difficult in his international rescue experience because of language barriers, inadequate equipment, unfamiliar environment, border turbulence and the risk of cholera infection.

Previous work of China's rescue teams

Chinese rescue teams have aided other countries before.

On March 25, 2019, 65 Chinese rescue team members went to the hard-hit city of Beira, Mozambique, to carry out humanitarian rescue missions. Hit by tropical cyclone Idai, the Mozambican government announced on the same day that the number of people affected by Cyclone Idai in the country rose to 794,000.

Following a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Nepal on April 26, 2015, a 62-member China International Search and Rescue Team arrived in the country. 

At the request of the New Zealand Government, China sent a 10-member rescue team to quake-hit Christchurch on February 24, 2011.