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As news spread in China that a Chinese fishing boat had rammed and sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat about 20 miles from a deep sea oil rig that China has placed in waters contested by both countries, the reaction in social media appeared overwhelmingly supportive — even bellicose.

Critical voices appeared to be censored, including one that sharply criticized the Chinese Foreign Ministry, saying a comment it made about Vietnam after the incident calling into question the country’s credibility was “beneath the dignity” of a major power. But most commentators whose opinions were permitted to remain online by China’s tens of thousands of censors in the police and Internet companies, seemed excited by the action.

“Chinese fishermen are mighty! There are still heroes among the people!” wrote a person with the online handle Hou Ning on his Sina Weibo account. According to Vietnamese accounts, the 10 fishermen aboard the boat that sank on Monday were all rescued.



Other social media sites also showed support for the action of the Chinese boat, such as on the popular Phoenix, or ifeng, bulletin board. “This finally shows some backbone,” wrote a commenter in Hubei Province, garnering more than 6,600 thumbs-up signs.

The top-ranking comment on ifeng.com, with nearly 13,000 thumbs-up, from someone in Beijing with the handle Smog in the Imperial Capital, suggested that the Chinese were only doing to the Vietnamese what others have done to the Chinese.

“South Korea detains Chinese fishermen. Japan detains Chinese fishermen,” the person wrote. “Russia attacks them with cannons. A Chinese fishing boat rams and sinks a Vietnamese fishing boat, hahahahahahaha.”

China and Vietnam fought a brief but bloody war in 1979 that Vietnam won. But many Chinese regard Vietnam as a minor southern nation that, they say, was once a Chinese province.

Many commentators approvingly forwarded a statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry that Vietnam’s credibility in the international community was “very low.”

But one comment posted on Sina Weibo was sharply critical of the Foreign Ministry statement, saying relations between states should be conducted with greater courtesy. That comment was censored, according to Freeweibo, an overseas-hosted website that gathers such censored comments.

Speaking of the statement by Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang on Monday, a person named Duan Wanjin, who said he was a lawyer and whose account had a “V” for verified, indicating he had been approved by Sina Weibo, said the Chinese government was behaving in a way unbecoming of a great power.

“Territorial disputes are something that should be talked about, and one shouldn’t humiliate another country,” he wrote in the censored comment. “A country’s whose pattern” of foreign relations “is too small will find it hard to rise, unless China has decided it wants to make its relations with Vietnam like those between the United States and North Korea.”

“Today the Foreign Ministry is flooded with clowns who only want to ingratiate themselves with the leaders. There isn’t the slightest bit of Confucian culture exerting any uplifting influence of refinement. It’s just all ruffians. The gateway to the country is in a sad state.”

But many other commentators approved of scorning Vietnam: “I think the best way to frighten Vietnam is to attack Japan. Kill the monkey to scare the chicken,” wrote a person with the online handle The Ninth Number on My Identity Card Is Eight.

The phrase neatly turns around a Chinese saying that one should “kill the chicken to scare the monkey” — that is, frighten one’s real enemy by attacking a lesser one. The reversal both threatens and humiliates Vietnam, by suggesting it is a lesser nation.

The central notion of a master-servant relationship between China and Vietnam also featured elsewhere: “Originally Vietnam was a prefecture of China, today you are independent. Take good care of yourself and that’s enough, how dare you act rashly!”

Also on Tuesday, the state news agency Xinhua reported that direct flights that had begun on May 18 from Tianjin, a major city near Beijing, to Danang, a coastal destination in Vietnam, had been indefinitely suspended “because of the influence of the situation on the ground.”

The Vietnamese authorities had offered Chinese citizens a visa on landing in Danang to facilitate tourism, said the report, which described Danang as “not inferior to the Maldives,” a major Chinese holiday destination.

Referring to the boat incident, the latest development in a growing territorial conflict over the South China Sea, Haoshuai De Ba from Sichuan Province wrote on ifeng.com’s bulletin board: “A new phase is beginning… get ready for it….”

More than a thousand people gave that the thumbs-up.