A
Chinese vessel attacked and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed
waters off Vietnam ’s coast, Vietnam’s foreign ministry said. The 10
fishermen on board were rescued by other Vietnamese boats after the
sinking yesterday around 17 nautical miles (19.5 miles) from a Chinese
oil rig located…
Bloomberg
China Sinking Fishing Vessel Raises Tensions With Vietnam
Vietnam
said a Chinese vessel sank one of its fishing boats, the most serious
bilateral standoff since 2007 and a move that underscores China’s
assertiveness in pushing its claims in the disputed South China Sea.
“It
was rammed by a Chinese boat,” ministry spokesman Le Hai Binh said by
phone of the Vietnamese vessel. The 10 fishermen on board DNa 90152 were
rescued by other Vietnamese ships after yesterday’s scrap, according to
a Vietnamese government statement posted on its website. Some 40
Chinese fishing vessels encircled a group of Vietnamese boats in
Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, it said.
China’s 2012 success in assuming control of the Scarborough Shoal, an area previously overseen by the Philippines,
highlighted to nations from Vietnam to Japan the potential consequences
of Chinese push to assert claims in neighboring bodies of water.
Yesterday’s incident came after Chinese aircraft flew close to Japanese
planes on May 24 in disputed airspace in the East China Sea.
“The
message China is sending Vietnam is, this area of water is Chinese
territory,” Ha Hoang Hop, visiting senior fellow at the Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, said by phone of the boat sinking.
“Yesterday a spokesman for China said Vietnam’s claims are
‘ridiculous.’ They are escalating things at sea and with their
language.”
Vietnamese protest outside the Chinese Embassy on Sunday, May 11, 2014 in Hanoi,... Read More
Oil Rig
China’s
placement of an oil rig near the contested Paracel Islands sparked
violent protests in Vietnam this month and led China to send ships to
evacuate workers from the country after three Chinese nationals were
killed. It spurred confrontations between coast guard vessels, including
the use of water cannons and accusations of boats being rammed. China
says the rig is in its territory and that it has long drilled in the
area.
The tensions come as China’s President Xi Jinping expands
the country’s naval reach to back its assertions in the South China Sea
that are based on the “nine-dash line” map, first published in 1947.
That map extends hundreds of miles south from China’s Hainan Island to
equatorial waters off the coast of Borneo. China and Vietnam both claim
the Paracels, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations members Brunei,
Malaysia and the Philippines have claims to other areas of the South China Sea.
China’s
actions violate international law and threaten peace, security and
freedom of navigation, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said on
May 22 in Manila.
Tensions in the South China Sea risk disrupting the flow of goods, Dung
said, with the resource-rich waters taking in some of the world’s
busiest shipping lanes.
Second Phase
The first phase
of the drilling, which began May 2 off Zhongjian Island in the Xisha
Islands, as the Paracels are known in Chinese, has been completed, China Oilfield Services Ltd. (2883),
which is conducting the operation, said in a statement today.
Exploration has moved to another place and is expected to end in
mid-August, according to the statement.
China and Vietnam fought
a border war in 1979, with China having forcibly taken the Paracel
Islands from Vietnam five years earlier. In 1988, a Chinese naval attack
in the Spratly Islands, which Vietnam also lays claims to, killed 64
Vietnamese border guards as China seized seven atolls. In 2007, Chinese
naval patrol vessels fired on a Vietnamese fishing boat, killing one
sailor.
In March 2013, Vietnam’s government lodged a protest
after it said a Chinese ship fired on a fishing vessel near the Paracel
Islands and caused a cabin fire.
‘No Compromise’
Vietnam’s
leaders will probably protest the latest incident, according to Xu
Liping, researcher at the National Institute of International Strategy
at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.
“But from
China’s point of view it reflects China’s determination -- that there
will be no compromise on the problem of the Xisha islands,” Xu said.
“Vietnam will likely counter-attack, stir-up domestic opinion or send
fishing boats to disturb our drilling platforms. This will continue but
slowly it will get less, when they realize their disturbances have no
use,” he said.
Vietnam’s benchmark VN Index (VNINDEX)
of shares rose 0.1 percent at 9:22 a.m. local time. The gauge has
retreated about 10 percent from this year’s high on March 24. The dong
was little changed at 21,140 per dollar today.
Markets have
“discounted the news on China-Vietnam tension and investors may not be
as panicked as before,” Hoang Viet Phuong, the director of institutional
research and investment advisory at Saigon Securities, said by phone.
Code of Conduct
Addressing the actual territorial claims will take a long time, Singapore’s Foreign Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said yesterday in an interview.
“What’s
achievable is to try and have a code of conduct that tries to work out
how the countries, countries’ ships and so on interact with each other,
what can be done, what cannot be done, what kind of conduct is
acceptable, what kind of conduct is unacceptable,” he said.
Asean
has called for progress on the code with China that would seek to
preserve freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Talks have made
little headway since China agreed in July to start discussions, with
China introducing fishing rules in January requiring foreign vessels to
seek permission before entering waters off its southern coast.
Japan Aid
Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he hoped to boost maritime aid to
Vietnam. Beijing’s “unilateral drilling activities” have raised tensions
in the area, Abe told the Wall Street Journal in an interview May 23. Japan
is separately embroiled in a dispute with China over islands in the
East China Sea. Its Defense Ministry said May 24 that Chinese SU-27
fighter jets flew unusually close to two of its military planes.
The
sinking of the Vietnamese boat reflects “very dangerous actions which
threaten human life,” Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga
told reporters today in Tokyo.
“It is important that all nations work for the return to regional
stability, act calmly, carefully in accordance with international law,
and don’t act unilaterally to increase tensions.”
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: John Boudreau in Hanoi at jboudreau3@bloomberg.net; Henry Sanderson in Beijing at hsanderson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rosalind Mathieson at rmathieson3@bloomberg.net Neil Western
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China may be getting bogged down in it's own Viet Nam War like the Soviets got bogged down in Afghanistan in the 1980s. However, that war and Chernobyl collapsed the Soviet Government. This war could also sink the Chinese government on many levels worldwide as well.
The whole world is watching China right now.
Another point I'd like to make is starting a proxy war in Viet Nam might be what the Chinese government wants to take heat off it for the 2008 like events regarding property happening in China much like the U.S. in 2008. So, it might need to divert attention from China's government policy failures in order to not collapse the Chinese government. However, that is sort of tricky because a government can collapse from external actions or it can collapse from internal actions or both at the same time. Likely both events will plague China for 2 to 5 years or more at this point.
China is a victim of it's own success. Now the people that didn't succeed but who were bulldozed over by China's success might have their day.
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