From: tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM (Nhan Tran)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Subject: NEWS/VN: China puts oil platform in VN waters - Hanoi accused
Date: 8 Sep 92 14:24:51 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU

09/05

CHINA PUTS OIL PLATFORM IN VIETNAM WATERS - HANOI

    By Kathleen Callo
    HANOI, Sept 5, Reuter - Hanoi accused China on Saturday of setting up an
illegal oil exploration drilling platform in Vietnamese waters and strongly
urged Beijing to withdraw and hold talks on territorial disputes.
    The Continental Shelf Committee of Vietnam's Council of Ministers said the
Chinese platform in the Gulf of Tonkin was only 70 nautical miles from the
northern Vietnamese province of Thai Binh.
    "The Chinese have moved very deeply into the Vietnamese part of the
gulf...this action is being carried out by China inside Vietnamese waters," a
senior official from the committee said.
    "They have carried out both drilling and seismic surveys in that position,"
he said, asking not to be identified.
    The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry protested to China's ambassador in Hanoi,
Zhang Dewei, on Thursday and delivered a more emphatic letter on Friday urging
Chinese drilling and seismic survey ships to leave the area.
    It was Hanoi's strongest protest to Beijing this year following a series of
incidents that Vietnam says shows a new push by China into the South China Sea.
    The Vietnamese Continental Shelf Committee official said China had two
service vessels near the drilling platform, and six other ships that looked like
fishing boats but were connected with the drilling.
    The official pointed out on a map the rectangular area where he said China
was carrying out seismic surveys and drilling.
    The area lies south of and partially overlaps an oil exploration bloc
Vietnam awarded in 1988 to the French company, Total SA.
    Total left that area and moved to a southern Vietnamese off-shore
exploration bloc earlier this year after finding no commercial amounts of oil in
the Gulf of Tonkin.
    The Continental Shelf official said China was now drilling 47 nautical miles
to the west -- or Vietnamese side -- of a north-south sea boundary that was
agreed back in 1887 by China and the French colonial rulers of Indochina.
    China was disregarding the boundary line, the official said.
    The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry told journalists on Friday that southern
Chinese radio stations had begun broadcasting plans in August for the seismic
surveys and drilling.
    The area in which China is said to be active covers off-shore oil
exploration blocs that Vietnam has already mapped out and hopes to award to
foreign companies.
    The drilling platform, which the official said the Chinese had set up on the
seabed, was the latest and most serious step taken by Beijing to assert its
territorial waters claims.
    China and Vietnam, allies in Hanoi's war against the United States, fought a
brief border war in 1979 and clashed in the Spratly Islands in 1988. They
normalised relations last November, but ties remain strained.
    Chinese maps dating back to the 1950s show that Beijing claims virtually the
entire South China Sea. China passed a law in February claiming waters and
several island groups which Vietnam says was meant to pursue Beijing's larger
sea claim.
    In May the Chinese government signed a contract with a small U.S. company,
Crestone Energy Development Corp, to explore for oil between Vietnam's
southeastern coast and the Spratlys.
    The islands are claimed entirely by Vietnam, China and Taiwan, and partly by
the Philippines and Malaysia. All have troops there.
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