Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui

For years Nguyen Huu Son has guided Chinese tourists around Vietnam's popular coastal city Danang, but a bitter maritime dispute between Hanoi and Beijing means he is now out of work.

China's top diplomat will visit Vietnam on Wednesday in a sign the two countries want to ease tensions over China's deployment of an oil rig in the disputed South China Sea, but experts said there were many obstacles to healing the ruptured relationship.

China is becoming more active in refuting Vietnam’s portrayal of the oil rig crisis.

China has denounced Vietnam and the Philippines for playing soccer and volleyball on a disputed island in the South China Sea, calling it "a clumsy farce" and demanded both countries stop causing trouble.

International media coverage of the confrontation between China and Vietnam over Beijing’s placement of a mega oil rig in waters claimed by Vietnam has dried up with the passage of time. But daily confrontations continue.

About 200 protesters staged an anti-China protest in Hong Kong yesterday over a sovereignty dispute involving Vietnam in the South China Sea - the first of its kind so close to the mainland.

Vietnam may prove harder to push around than some of China’s other maritime neighbors in contested waters. Vietnamese and Chinese ships recently rammed each other and fired water cannons to contest China’s bringing in a giant oil rig off the barren sandspits called the Paracel Archipelago that both claim in the South China Sea. It was not the first such confrontation.

An elderly woman burnt herself to death early Friday morning at the entrance gate of Ho Chi Minh City Reunification Palace to protest China’s encroachment of Vietnamese waters in the East Vietnam Sea.

HANOI—Vietnamese security forces intercepted 21 illegal migrants attempting to cross from China by sea just hours after a clash with another group of migrants left seven people dead, state media reported on Sunday.

Thousands of Chinese have been found working without a permit in Vietnam.

China’s impulsiveness to launch a militarily flawed massive invasion of Vietnam in1979 was impelled by a greater Chinese geopolitical blueprint of checkmating the perceived former Soviet Union’s strategic intrusiveness in South East Asia courtesy Vietnam, and also thereby ingratiating itself geopolitically with the United States that China was available to play the role of a quasi-strategic ally of the United States in the region to counterbalance the former Soviet Union.

The last couple of years have witnessed growing animosity between China and the Philippines, while China's relations with Vietnam, another major claimant to the South China Sea islands, remain relatively peaceful.

Government agencies and experts have warned that Chinese enterprises buy mining licenses to serve their plan to control the Vietnamese mineral industries.

BEIJING—Enforcement of China's new regulation requiring foreign fishermen to obtain Beijing's consent before operating in the disputed South China Sea will focus on waters close to China that are also claimed by Vietnam, an official said, potentially setting China on a collision course with Hanoi.

Chinese goods are flooding almost all small markets and even shopping centers across Vietnam, which import not only machinery and equipment from China, but also miscellaneous goods such as rubber bands, lucky envelopes, and erasers.