Over 20 people reported killed in anti-China protests in Vietnam

Foreign factories were set ablaze and more than 20 people were reported killed in protests in Vietnam amid growing anti-China tensions over the South China Sea dispute.

A Chinese worker was killed and almost 150 other people injured as protesters attacked a Taiwanese-owned steel mill in central Ha Tinh province in the worst collapse in Sino-Vietnamese relations since they fought a border war in 1979.

Thousands of Vietnamese have gone on the rampage this week, setting fire to foreign factories and causing damage to industrial zones in Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces near Ho Chi Minh City.

They are protesting against Chinese oil drilling in a part of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam. Tensions have been ratcheted higher in the resource-rich South China Sea after a Chinese state-owned oil company placed a giant oil rig in an area also claimed by Vietnam. Each country has accused the other of ramming its ships near the disputed Paracel Islands.

The factory was owned by Taiwan’s biggest investor in Vietnam, the Formosa Plastics Group, which said the steel plant, which is currently under construction, was set on fire after fighting between its Vietnamese and Chinese workers. One Chinese worker was killed and 90 others injured, it said in a statement in Taipei.

Local officials characterised the incident as a row between workers, not an attack by local Vietnamese.

“In the process of building blast furnace in Formosa steel factory in Ha Tinh, conflict happened in advance between these two groups. On Wednesday, the conflict turned into fighting as several people wanted to worsen the incident,” the vice chairman of Ha Tinh Provincial People’s Committee Dang Quoc Khanh told media.

A doctor at a hospital nearby said five Vietnamese workers and 16 other people described as Chinese were killed on Wednesday night in rioting, but local media said only one person had been killed.

State backing
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying urged Chinese citizens in Vietnam to be careful and asked the Vietnamese government to protect China's citizens. She also suggested the unrest had state backing.

“The looting and stealing that has taken place at Chinese businesses and to Chinese people has a direct relationship with Vietnam’s winking at and indulging law breakers there,” she said.

There were fiery comments on Weibo, the Chinese version of the banned Twitter.

“The Chinese government is too soft on these thugs,” wrote one commentator, Wei Jian.

The Global Times newspaper, which is published by the Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, said the violent demonstrations had been "obviously indulged by Hanoi".

“The situation was still out of control a day later. There was no collective condemnation of the violence by local media,” it said.

“Arrogance makes Hanoi misjudge the situation in the Asia-Pacific. The geopolitics of the South China Sea will not be easily changed by its harassment. It’s time that Hanoi sober up, or those looters will finally make the whole country suffer. Hanoi’s over-tolerance must not test China’s patience beyond the limit,” it said.

“Vietnam will eventually have to digest the unlimited expansion of its internal nationalism and it will choke on it.”