Rescue teams have finished righting a Chinese cruise ship that capsized on the Yangtze River but officials said there was no chance of finding anyone alive.

So far, 97 bodies have been recovered from the Eastern Star disaster.

Chinese authorities began on Thursday to right the cruise ship, after divers sent to search for survivors found no signs of life inside.

Only 14 survivors, including the captain and chief engineer, have been found since the ship carrying 456 people overturned during a freak tornado on Monday night - although there have been claims that there was never a tornado.

The mission has now become an operation to recover hundreds of bodies.

"In a situation in which the overall judgment is that there is no chance of people being alive, we could start the work of righting the boat," Transport Ministry spokesman Xu Chengguang told a news conference.

State broadcaster CCTV announced on Friday morning that the boat had been righted, and that teams would still try to lift the vessel even though the water inside it was weighing it down.

Mr Xu said earlier that the operation would involve divers putting steel bars underneath the ship, which would then be lifted by two 500-tonne cranes.

A huge net was placed near the cranes and another one a few metres downstream to catch any bodies.

Two smaller cranes were also on site and boats were stopped from entering the area.

Survivors

Some of the 14 people who survived the disaster jumped from the ship during the early moments and swam ashore.

Three of them were pulled by divers from air pockets inside the overturned hull on Tuesday after rescuers heard yells for help coming from inside.

On Thursday, rescuers had cut three holes into the overturned hull in unsuccessful attempts to find more survivors.

More than 200 divers have worked underwater in three shifts to search the ship's cabins one by one, state broadcaster CCTV said.

The bodies pulled out on Thursday were taken to Jianli's Rongcheng Crematorium, in Hubei province, where relatives tried to identify them.

Records from a maritime agency show the capsized ship was cited for safety violations two years ago. Authorities in Nanjing held the ship after it violated standards during a safety inspection campaign in 2013, according to a report on the city's Maritime Safety website, which did not specify the violations.

The shallow-draft boat, which was not designed to withstand winds as heavy as an ocean-going vessel can, overturned in what Chinese weather authorities have called a cyclone with winds up to 130km per hour.

The sudden capsizing meant many passengers were unable to grab life jackets.