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.