Vietnam ratifies pact with China on land border HANOI - Vietnam's national assembly Friday ratified a treaty signed in December on the land border with China, where the two countries fought a brief but bloody war in 1979. Assembly chairman Nong Duc Manh said the treaty, ratified on a motion by President Tran Duc Luong, would "contribute to stability in terms of respecting the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the two sides." China's National People's Congress Standing Committee had ratified it in April. The treaty comes eight years after the two communist countries normalized their long estranged relations, especially bitter since China launched a punitive attack on Vietnam in February-March 1979 over the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia the previous year. China and Vietnam have been seeking the demarcation of 1,130 kilometers (700 miles) of land border where, according to Hanoi, Chinese troops moved some 100 boundary posts during the 1979 war. The exercise has run into difficulties as Vietnamese and Chinese communities have lived side by side for decades in the border region and regularly cross the frontier in pursuit of trade. Beijing and Hanoi are also seeking to resolve their disputes over the maritime border in the Gulf of Tonkin. In addition, they have a long-running dispute over the ownership of the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea. AFP - June 9, 2000.