Skip to main content

Chinese President Xi makes state visit to Vietnam



HANOI: Vietnam gave Chinese President Xi Jinping the red carpet treatment Sunday at the start of a state visit, as the two communist neighbors try to broaden their economic ties and work on resolving territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
Xi and Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, reviewed an honor guard and headed for talks behind closed doors. It was Xi’s first overseas trip since consolidating his power at a party congress last month.
Xi and US President Donald Trump, among others, just finished an Asia-Pacific economic summit in the Vietnamese coastal city of Danang.
Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang said that his country wants to end disputes in the South China Sea through peaceful means.
“It’s our policy to settle disputes in the East Sea through peaceful negotiations and with respect for diplomatic and legal process in accordance with international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,” he said, referring to the South China Sea.
Quang made the comments Sunday during a joint news conference with Trump. Trump had offered during a meeting earlier Sunday with Quang to serve as a mediator on the South China Sea disputes.
Vietnam and China, along with four other governments, claim all or parts of the South China Sea, which is believed to sit atop rich natural resources and occupies one of the world’s busiest sea lanes.
China in recent years has built artificial islands and increased its militarization there, drawing criticism from Washington, which argues that the US has a national interest in freedom of navigation in sea lanes critical for world trade.
Vietnam has become the most vocal opponent of China’s moves after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte softened his country’s stance on China.
Tran Viet Thai of the Vietnam Diplomatic Academy said Xi’s visit is important to build mutual trust.
“The visit marks a new step forward in Vietnam-China relations,” he said. “Hopefully the relations will continue to stabilize, because the two sides currently share great interests in broadening their cooperation and maintaining stability.”
Bilateral relations plunged to their lowest level in years when China in 2014 parked a giant oil rig in an area claimed by Vietnam. The incident sparked deadly anti-China protests for several weeks.
The two communist neighbors have in recent months experienced spats over the South China Sea. In July, Vietnam had to suspend an oil and gas exploration project conducted by Spain’s Repsol company, under apparent pressure from China.
In September, Vietnam protested live-fire drills by China near the Paracel islands.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

US trio win Nobel for finding Einstein’s gravitational waves

STOCKHOLM/LONDON:  Three US scientists won the 2017 Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday for opening up a new era of astronomy by detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space and time foreseen by Albert Einstein a century ago. The work of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne crowned half a century of experimental efforts by scientists and engineers.Measuring gravitational waves offers a new way to observe the cosmos, helping scientists explore the nature of mysterious objects including black holes and neutron stars. It may also provide insight into the universe’s very earliest moments. The first detection of the waves created a scientific sensation when it was announced early last year and the teams involved in the discovery had been widely seen as favourites for Tuesday’s prize. “We now witness the dawn of a new field: gravitational wave astronomy,” Nils Martensson, acting chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told reporters. “This will teach us about the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liquid cats, crocodile bets and didgeridoos win Ig Nobel science prizes

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS:  Scientists taking on the deep questions of whether cats are liquid or solid, how holding a crocodile influences gambling and whether playing the didgeridoo can help cure snoring were honored Thursday at the Ig Nobel Prize spoof awards. The prizes are the brainchild of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and are intended not to honor the best or worst in science, but rather to highlight research that encourages people to think in unusual ways. “We hope that this will get people back into the habits they probably had when they were kids of paying attention to odd things and holding out for a moment and deciding whether they are good or bad only after they have a chance to think,” Abrahams said in a phone interview. Some of the honorees tend towards the spurious: French researcher Marc-Antoine Fardin’s 2014 study “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” was inspired by internet photos of cats tucked into glasses, buckets...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mexicans dig through collapsed buildings as quake kills 217

MEXICO CITY:  Police, firefighters and ordinary Mexicans dug frantically through the rubble of collapsed schools, homes and apartment buildings early Wednesday, looking for survivors of Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in decades as the number of confirmed fatalities stood at 217. Adding poignancy and a touch of the surreal, Tuesday’s magnitude-7.1 quake struck on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands. Just hours earlier, people around Mexico had held earthquake drills to mark the date. One of the most desperate rescue efforts was at a primary and secondary school in southern Mexico City, where a wing of the three-story building collapsed into a massive pancake of concrete slabs. Journalists saw rescuers pull at least two small bodies from the rubble, covered in sheets. Volunteer rescue worker Dr. Pedro Serrano managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble that had been Escuela Enrique Rebsamen. He made it into a classroom...
Post a Comment
Read more