Reports of 20 or more killed as Beijing's expansionism in South China Sea provoke continued violent backlash in Vietnam

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Violent reaction in Vietnam to China's expansionist stance in disputed seas has turned deadly with reports that 20 or more people have been killed during rioting that began with attacks on foreign-owned factories.

A top Taiwanese diplomat said rioters had stormed a large Taiwanese steel mill in Vietnam, killing at least one Chinese worker and injuring 90 more. Huang Chih-peng said the violence took place late on Wednesday and early Thursday at the Formosa steel mill in central Vietnam.

A doctor at a hospital in the central Vietnamese province of Ha Tinh said five Vietnamese workers and 16 other people described as Chinese died during anti-China rioting on Wednesday night.

"There were about a hundred people sent to the hospital last night. Many were Chinese. More are being sent to the hospital this morning," the doctor told the Reuters news agency by phone.

Cambodia said hundreds of Chinese nationals had poured across the border from Vietnam to escape the riots. "Yesterday more than 600 Chinese people from Vietnam crossed at Bavet international checkpoint into Cambodia," Kirt Chantharith, a police spokesman, told the Reuters news agency. Bavet is on a highway stretching from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's commercial centre, to Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.

Earlier this week mobs burned and looted scores of foreign-owned factories in southern Vietnam, believing they were Chinese-run when many were actually Taiwanese or South Korean. No deaths were reported in those initial attacks.

On Thursday China's embassy in Vietnam urged the country's public security authorities to take "effective measures" to protect its nationals' personal safety and legal rights. The embassy made the remark in a statement published on its website, adding that China had launched an emergency mechanism to cope with the effects of anti-Chinese riots in its southern neighbour.



In Washington the visiting Chinese army chief, General Fang Fenghui, reacted to the situation by accusing the US of stoking tensions in the region. In response the US vice-president, Joe Biden, said the US was "seriously concerned" about what he called China's unilateral actions in its maritime dispute with Vietnam.

Anti-Chinese sentiment has been running high in Vietnam ever since Beijing deployed an oil rig into disputed waters in the South China Sea on 1 May. There have been encounters including ramming and exchanges of water cannon between Chinese vessels operating near the rig and boats from Vietnam, which wants China out of the area.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, “urged Vietnam not to attempt to further complicate and aggravate the current maritime friction”, the state-run Global Times newspaper reported on Thursday.

"China's position on safeguarding its legitimate sovereign rights and interests is firm and clear and will not change," he told Indonesia’s foreign affairs minister Marty Natalegawa in a phone conversation, the Global Times said.

The newspaper condemned the protests in an editorial, calling them “the most stunning attack [on] foreign businesses in East Asia in recent years”.

“The turmoil is the outcome of Hanoi's years of anti-China propaganda,” it said. “Without legitimate grounds and practical capability, Vietnam fabricates and hypes up its jurisdiction over the Xisha and Nansha islands. This uncompromising stance, in an attempt to bring its people together, has actually cornered itself.”

In 2012 Chinese authorities permitted large-scale anti-Japan protests amid rising tensions between the two countries over competing territorial claims in the East China Sea. Protesters in cities across the country vandalised Japanese shops and smashed Japanese-made cars before authorities ordered them to disperse.

China’s propaganda authorities are censoring coverage of the protests, according to a leaked circular obtained by the online magazine China Digital Times. “Absolutely do not report on any news related to ‘Chinese-funded enterprises in Vietnam being attacked by Vietnamese,’” it said. “Do not republish foreign coverage.”