Vietnam Mobs Set Fire to Foreign Factories in Anti-China Riots

Reuters

14 May 2014

Thousands of Vietnamese set fire to foreign factories and rampaged in industrial zones in the south of the country in an angry reaction to Chinese oil drilling in a part of the SouthChina Sea claimed by Vietnam, officials said on Wednesday.

The brunt of Tuesday’s violence, one of the worst breakdowns in Sino-Vietnamese relations since the neighbours fought a brief border war in 1979, appears to have been borne by Taiwanese firms in the zones in Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces that were mistaken for Chinese-owned companies.

A police official in Binh Duong province, speaking by telephone, said about 200 people had been arrested.

… However, Richard Bitzinger, a military analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the airstrip was unlikely to be a strategic game-changer in the South China Sea because of the difficulty in building a workable runway on the atoll.

“It would be a nice tool to have in the box of options to project power, but it is probably going to be far too small to have a huge impact,” Bitzinger said.

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