China confronted India warship off Vietnam: report

Thursday, September 01, 2011
AFP

HANOI — An unidentified Chinese warship demanded that an Indian naval vessel identify itself and explain its presence in South China Sea waters off Vietnam in July, the Financial Times said on Thursday.

The London-based newspaper reported that five people familiar with the incident said it occurred in international waters shortly after India's amphibious assault ship INS Airavat completed a scheduled port call in Vietnam.

It is the latest in a series of actions this year that have caused concern about Beijing's maritime assertiveness among regional nations -- particularly Vietnam and the Philippines.

China says it has sovereignty over essentially all of the South China Sea, a key global trading route, where its professed ownership of the potentially oil-rich Spratly archipelago overlaps with claims by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia.

China's Border Patrol

August 17, 2010
By Austin Bay
Strategy Page

The Pentagon just released its annual report to Congress on China's military. Weapons programs got ink, especially its cyberwar programs, its expanding navy, ballistic missile projects. The report summarized China's strategic priorities as "perpetuating Communist Party rule, sustaining economic growth and development, maintaining domestic political stability, defending China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and securing China's status as a great power."

At the moment, the United States and China have numerous military and defense-related disagreements. Discussions among Pacific region defense ministers held in Singapore this June made that clear. America's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insisted that North Korea's sinking of a South Korean warship last March required a rigorous response by all nations that are committed to peace in Asia. He was challenging China, which has hedged criticism of North Korea. China remains miffed at U.S. plans to help Taiwan modernize its defense forces.

This month, the United States and Vietnam conducted joint naval exercises off Vietnam's coast in the South China Sea. China recently rejected a Vietnamese diplomatic initiative intended to resolve territorial disputes in the region. A senior Chinese defense official called the exercises provocative.

When the global super power and Asia's regional giant chide and argue, the world ought to pay attention. However, that media focus -- U.S. versus China -- can distort.

A quick tour of China's borders suggests friction with the United States is a symptom, not a cause. China faces numerous troubles with its neighbors -- many of the problems exacerbated by Beijing's muscle-flexing and claims of regional hegemony. (China's internal challenges will be the subject of a future column.)

India is China's foremost regional competitor. The economic competition receives the most media coverage, but the military dimension concerns Beijing. China sees India's nuclear weapons, new ballistic missiles and naval buildup as strategic challenges. China continually frets over access to natural resources. The Indian Navy is positioned to interdict ships transporting oil and minerals from the Middle East and Africa to China. India also sees China as a threat. According to StrategyPage.com (July 13), the Indian Air Force's Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment (equivalent to the U.S. Navy's "Top Gun" program) now features Chinese air tactics and aircraft. Indian pilots train to fight Chinese pilots.

Though Beijing and New Delhi have discussed settling remaining Sino-Indian border issues, Chinese and Indian competition for influence in Central Asia, the Himalayas and Southeast Asia is increasing. Both nations remember the 1962 Sino-Indian War. The Chinese quietly acclimated an assault force, preparing infantry for high-altitude operations, then conducted an offensive that punished the Indian Army. The Indian Army won't let that happen again. The Tibetans still resist Han Chinese domination. For Beijing, the aging Dalai Lama remains a diplomatic thorn. China insists on having a role in selecting his replacement.

Central Asia: Kazakhstan's oil attracts Beijing. Kazakhstan wants to sell oil, but it has no interest in becoming a Chinese protectorate. Thus, Kazakhstan and the United States have several mutual interests. China has internal troubles in its western provinces, some stoked by Uighur Islamic radicals.

Siberia: A long, empty border, and Russian military power is ebbing. Yes, Moscow sees China as a market for advanced arms, but Kremlinites know an expansionist China threatens Siberia's treasure chest of natural resources.

The Koreas: North Korea has been an asset for China, a nuclear-armed midget that rattles Japan and America. North Korea, however, is also dirt poor and starving. South Korea is wealthy, modern and militarily-able. In a crisis, at best the Koreas are question marks for Beijing.

Japan: Old enmities mark the Japanese-Chinese relationship. Beijing once let Washington know it approved of the U.S. Navy vessels berthed in Yokohama. From Beijing's perspective, Washington kept a thumb on Japan. The U.S. and Japan are allies. Japan operates Aegis destroyers and needs more. Why? The Jamestown Foundation "China Brief" recently noted China's navy must breach the "natural barrier" of the Japanese archipelago in order to achieve its "blue dream" of high seas operations.

Taiwan: Taiwan gets American weapons -- a sore spot in U.S.-Chinese relations. While China-Taiwan trade and investment relations are good, Beijing insists it wants to acquire Taiwan -- preferably by diplomacy.

Vietnam: In 1979, China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody border war. That war told even hard-core Vietnamese cadres that Communist brotherhood was kaput. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Vietnam lacked a major power ally to make the Chinese "colossus to the north" think twice. Hanoi complains of U.S. imperialism, but Asia has experienced millennia of Chinese imperialism. At least with the Americans, you get rock and roll. A bellicose Beijing spurs closer U.S.-Vietnamese strategic cooperation.

South China Sea: Potential petroleum reserves always excite interest. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and even Cambodia claim slices of the seabed. Vietnam and the Philippines have both sparred with Chinese forces in the Spratly Islands. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) already has the outline of an anti-China alliance.

Vietnamese Communist Police lectured to Vietnamese Students Who Protested against China

Story forwarded by Info Asia

After China claimed its ownership over the Spratly and Paracel islands, there were hundreds of Vietnamese youths and students in both Hanoi and Sai Gon cities protest against China for invading Spratly and Paracel islands which Vietnamese people claim that those islands are the Vietnamese ancestral islands.

Vietnamese Communist (VC) government usually use forces to suppress the protesters, but in this case, the VC government just used polices to surround the protesters to prevent the violent may happen.

Below is a dialog between a VC police who was trying to lecture to a Vietnamese student protester (see picture) in Hanoi about why the VC government does not stand up to against China regarding to the invasion of those islands.

Student: We want to send a message first to China: that the Vietnamese people are brave and undaunted.

Police: Our government, especially our party leaders, understands your concern. At this time, we should not protest against China. We need to build a good relationship with China, so our former enemy, the US will not use Human Rights and Democracy strategies to interfere with our internal issues.

Student: (angrily screaming) I know we need a good relationship with China, but we cannot stand that China invades our ancestral islands. Our government must stand up to protect our land. We must unite to defend our lands.

Police: (he was angry now and pushed the student to step back) I know we need to protect our land. If our government does not allow you all to protest against China now, do you think you can organize a protest like this? You should be smart and understand it…

Student: (keep screaming) Spratly and Paracel islands are Vietnamese ancestral islands. China must return it back to Vietnam.

Police: (try to calm himself) Listen brother; I know you are young and our government doesn’t allow you to learn the real history of Champa in the central of Vietnam and Khmer history in south of Vietnam in our public school, so you don’t know that the center of Vietnam used to belong to Champa and the South of Vietnam used to belong to Cambodia. Our Vietnamese ancestral lands are just the part of North Vietnam. (He started pulling out a map and showed it to the student) Look at this map, you can see that the Paracel and Spratly islands are actually not our ancestral islands because those islands are closer to the central of Vietnam and the south of Vietnam. Thus, you cannot say that those islands are our Vietnamese ancestral islands. This is why our former Prime Minister, Pham Van Dong, gave those two islands to China on September 14, 1958 because he knew that those islands are not our ancestral islands.

Student: I don’t agree with you. Our ancestor fought to get those lands and islands, so we must be responsible to protect it. Our government already gave to China some of our lands and seas near the border of our country and China.

Police: Don’t worry brother, the up-north lands that our government gave to China are the useless lands. We cannot do any farming with it because they are just mountainous areas and our Vietnamese people are not living there. We just have some of the Indigenous peoples live there, so it is OK to give to China. We don’t need those lands.

You all are too young to understand our government policies. You just see our lands lost to China, but do you see how many kilometers of lands we took from Cambodia and Laos? We don’t just take lands from Laos and Cambodia; we even now control their current governments. China is a big country, but they don’t have that capability, only our great government can do it in the 21th century. I don’t think the US can do that either. Be proud about that brother.

In Laos now, most of the leaders of that country are our Vietnamese or Laotians whose wife are our Vietnamese women. We control their government, military, and economy. Actually, on the world map, Laos is a country, but it already belongs to Vietnam.

In Cambodia, the current Cambodia government is running by a party that is our puppet. We say A they never bravely to say B, they are basically just like our slave in a different form. Some of the leaders, especially the head of the Cambodian police and the staffs in the interior department, are our Vietnamese who disguised to be Khmer. We control their economy and we even control the selling tickets to the tourist entering their ancestral temple, Angkor Wat. We get almost what we need from Cambodia, so Cambodia is basically another Champa Kingdom soon.

Student: I admitted that we are controlling Laos and Cambodia now, but our population is increasing very fast, we need to protect our lands so our people can have place to live.

Police: Take it easy brother, Cambodia still has lots of lands and their population is still very small. We can send couple millions of our people to Cambodia next year, so they can help Cambodia People Party to vote in the election of 2008. After election 2008, our Vietnamese people will be more than the real population of the Khmer in Cambodia. This way, it doesn’t matter what Cambodia tries to do, we still use our Vietnamese people living in Cambodia to vote for our benefits, and of course, we will always win. Then, we can start using our Vietnamization strategies just like we did to Cham people in the central, the Khmer in South, the Laotian, to make Cambodia to be provinces of Vietnam.

I just want to let you know more that our goal to take over Cambodia and Laos is already done, we start implementing our goal to take over Thailand next year. We have embedded our people in Thailand since the 1930s. Our great Uncle Ho used to ordain to be a Buddhist monk in Thailand while he was acting as the leader of the Indochina Communist Party.

We have our Vietnamese people living in Thailand for years already. If you followed the news, the Thai government allowed our people to become the Thai citizen couple years ago. Those people will use their “Power of Vote” and with assistant of our government to influent the Thai government. One day soon, we will target Thailand from both Cambodia and Laos directions because those two countries are already our provinces.

Student: (quietly and seem to be convinced by the police) I believed what you said because that is the truth, but our Vietnamese must protect what we already took from someone else because our ancestor had used many efforts, tactics, and strategies to take over those lands for us, and we must protect it. We are Vietnamese. We are patriots. We love our country; we are not Cambodian or Laotian who are willing to sell their country for their own personal benefits. We don’t scare of China. We are ready to die for our country. China colonized us for 1000 years, but they could not assimilate us. We just colonized Champa for couple hundred years; we can eliminate Champa Kingdom from the world map. So, don’t think that China is strong. We must stand up to fight them to get our land back.

Police: (angrily yell to the student) Shut up, Stop screaming. Our government even can imprison the Religious leaders like Thich Quang Do, Father Ly, and the Khmer Monks, you all are just students, watch out. Don’t make me mad, I will send you to prison anytime.

Whale and Spratlys [-Whom will Hun Sen back? China his new benefactor, or Vietnam his former boss?]

Disputes in the South China Sea

Dec 13th 2007 | BEIJING
The Economist

Yet another cold-war revival

WITHOUT fanfare, China has created a colossal new city. It is called a city even though it barely has a population to speak of and consists mostly of water and desolate islands. It would be no more than a bizarre misnomer were it not that the affected area—a swathe of the South China Sea—has other claimants, too.

In recent years, China has become less strident in asserting its claims to sovereignty over islands in the South China Sea. In an effort to strengthen ties with wary South-East Asian neighbours, it has preferred to play down territorial disputes and stress the need for joint efforts to exploit the oilfields beneath the waves.

But wariness persists. Vietnam has been riled by what it says was a recent Chinese decision to upgrade the status of the organisation that China says is responsible for the archipelagoes of the Paracels and Spratlys as well as the submerged reefs of Macclesfield Bank (see map). The outfit in charge of these territories is located on Woody Island in the Paracels. Its jurisdiction is reportedly being relabelled as the “county-level city” of Sansha (an abbreviation of Xisha, Nansha and Zhongsha, China's names for the outcrops), part of Hainan province.

In deference to its neighbours' sensitivities, China has not publicly confirmed the action. But Vietnam made its point by tolerating rare demonstrations on December 9th outside China's embassy in Hanoi and its consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. The Chinese, having used similar tactics themselves during spats with other countries—notably Japan—would have got the message clearly enough.

Vietnam had already been piqued by China's staging of big military exercises in the South China Sea in November, close to the Paracels. China has controlled the islands since it drove out a South Vietnamese garrison in 1974. In the 1990s it extended the runway on Woody Island. In August China's state-run media said plans had been approved to develop group tourism on the archipelago. An official was quoted as saying this would be an important way of demonstrating sovereignty.

But neither China nor Vietnam wants to see their differences deteriorate, let alone to the level of 1979 when the countries fought a brief border war (occasional skirmishes continued into the 1980s, including one in the Spratlys in 1988). During a meeting in November in Singapore, China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, told his Vietnamese counterpart that efforts to demarcate their land border should be speeded up. The new Sansha city embraces the Spratlys, where the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also have claims. But these contenders have so far kept quiet.

Tensions between the claimants have eased since China signed an agreement with South-East Asian countries in 2002 to resolve their disputes in the South China Sea peacefully. In the past couple of years China, Vietnam and the Philippines have been conducting an unprecedented joint survey of the South China Sea to probe its oil and gas reserves. This, however, is the easy part. When they eventually determine how big the reserves are, they will have to decide how to share them.

What goes around comes around: Vietnam's turn to learn how it feels to lose islands

Tensions Rise Over South China Sea Islands

2007.12.13
Radio Free Asia

HONG KONG—A war of words between China and Vietnam over a disputed chain of islands in the South China Sea has intensified, with Beijing’s announcement that an anti-China protest in Hanoi had damaged bilateral ties.

A witness in Hanoi sent to RFA this video footage of a rare public demonstration, last Sunday, near the Chinese Embassy.

“Things happened in Vietnam recently which damaged the relationship between the two countries,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters after the weekend demonstration outside the Chinese embassy in Hanoi and consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.

“We hope the Vietnam government takes effective measures to control the situation in order to avoid damaging the relationship,” he said.

Several hundred Vietnamese staged a rare public demonstration Sunday near the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi to protest China’s claim over the uninhabited but potentially resource-rich Spratly and Paracel islands.

China’s legislature recently ratified a plan to create a symbolic administrative region called Sansha to manage three archipelagos, including the Paracels and the Spratlys.

“We want to send a message first to China: that the Vietnamese people are brave and undaunted,” the event’s organizer, who declined to be identified, told RFA’s Vietnamese service.

Call for more information

"We want to send a message first to China: that the Vietnamese people are brave and undaunted." - Demonstration organizer

“Second, we want to tell our own government that it must share information with the Vietnamese people. We found out about this most recent dispute with China over the Spratlys and Paracels only through overseas media,” he said.

Nguyen Thanh Tai, leader of the Communist Party Youth League in Hanoi, met with protesters and told them that there was “no doubt” that the Spratlys and Paracels belonged to Vietnam.

“You have shown your heart to the country,” he told them, adding that he would order the Youth League to “form a group” to join with them in the demonstrations.

The protest sparked a flurry of online postings from visitors to RFA’s Vietnamese Web site.

“When will Vietnam, my homeland, have peace, and the Vietnamese people have freedom? When will China stop bullying Vietnam?” wrote a commentator identified as Tao Khang.

Another, called Long, said: “As China is invading Spratly and Paracel islands of Vietnam, [this] is the time when all Vietnamese should come together and fight against the invader.”

One commentator said the call to join the 9 a.m. protest outside the embassy had been sent around on the Skype online messaging service.

“As a Vietnamese, I would like to call on all Vietnamese from around the world, regardless of your age, religion, political opinion, education, or gender to come together to protect our homeland,” another person identified as Pham Hung Vy from Hanoi wrote.

The commentators were reacting to an interview on RFA’s Vietnamese service with a Vietnamese student.

The demonstrators, mostly university students, chanted “Down with China” and “Long Live Vietnam.” Police let the protest continue for about an hour before breaking it up.

The protesters were supporting the government’s position that Vietnam has sovereignty over the islands, a contentious issue between Vietnam and China for years.

The waters around the Spratlys, which are also claimed all or in part by Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei, are believed to hide large oil and natural gas reserves. They are strategically placed in major shipping lanes and contain rich fishing grounds.

Sino-Vietnamese ties have improved in recent years following a brief but brutal border war in 1979.

Original reporting in Vietnamese by Khanh Nguyen. Translated by Khiem Le and Khanh Nguyen. Additional reporting by Richard Finney. Vietnamese service director: Diem Nguyen. Executive producer: Susan Lavery. Written and produced for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.