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Hanoi. Dozens of Vietnamese protested outside the Chinese embassy in Hanoi for the second weekend in a row on Sunday as a maritime dispute raised tensions between the two communist neighbors.

About 50 people with Vietnamese flags sang patriotic songs and held signs proclaiming Vietnamese sovereignty over two South China Sea archipelagos that are at the center of a long-running dispute with Beijing.

In southern Ho Chi Minh City, about 250 people held a similar rally, but police sealed off the Chinese consulate area with barricades to prevent protesters from approaching, a witness said.

Although authoritarian Vietnam tolerates small land rights rallies, advocates of other political causes risk arrest, making demonstrations unusual.

Security officers detained at least one person in Ho Chi Minh City, the witness said. In Hanoi, there were no apparent arrests, although police ordered one foreign newspaper reporter to leave the area.

Demonstrators in the capital, who dispersed after 30 minutes, were vastly outnumbered by riot police and other uniformed and plain-clothed security officers.

Vietnam and China are at loggerheads over sovereignty of the potentially oil-rich Paracel and Spratly archipelagos and surrounding waters.

Tensions are at their highest level in years after Hanoi late last month accused Chinese marine surveillance vessels of cutting the exploration cables of an oil survey ship inside its exclusive economic zone.

Some protesters said they had returned to demonstrate again after Vietnam on Thursday alleged a Chinese fishing boat rammed the cables of another ship in the 200-nautical mile zone.

Beijing countered with a warning to Vietnam, insisting it halt all activities that it claimed violated Chinese sovereignty.

“We protest for peace,” said Quoc Dat, 30. However, he warned that if the Chinese “get into my country, they will lose”.

In Ho Chi Minh City, where most of the demonstrators dispersed after about 90 minutes, one person’s sign protested China’s “invasion” while another called for a boycott of Chinese products, a witness said.

On Friday, the United States said it was “troubled” by the tensions between the Asian countries and called for a “peaceful” resolution to the crisis.

Diplomatic tensions have also risen this year between China and the Philippines, another claimant to the Spratly islands, where Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also say they have a stake.

“If China is successful in invading the East Sea, they invade the world,” said Pham Gia Minh, 55, a foreign business consultant watching the Hanoi demonstration. He used the Vietnamese term for the South China Sea.

The protests came ahead of live-fire naval drills by Vietnam, which are planned for tonight off the country’s central coast. Hanoi says the drills are part of routine annual training.

Carl Thayer, a veteran analyst of Vietnam and the South China Sea, said last week that the anti-China protest served the government’s interest “up to a point.”

The demonstrations could escalate into a bilateral issue, though, possibly sparking Chinese protests against Vietnam and further aggravating relations with Vietnam’s giant neighbor, he said.

The Vietnamese bitterly recall 1,000 years of Chinese occupation and, more recently, a 1979 border war. More than 70 Vietnamese sailors were killed in 1988 when the two sides had a battle off the Spratlys.

AFP