China, Vietnam set 2008 for border agreement
BEIJING - China and its southern neighbour Vietnam have agreed to finish demarking their border by 2008, a state newspaper said on Wednesday, a contentious area that has been the cause of military conflict.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, meeting Vietnam's Communist Party chief Nong Duc Manh in Beijing, said China was also willing to discuss a disputed maritime area where the two countries' navies have clashed in the past.
"Vietnam and China agreed ... to handle the border issue properly and on the basis of friendly consultation so that the demarcation can be completed in 2008," the China Daily said.
"China is ready to work with the Vietnamese side to speed up surveying and determining the land boundary, and steadily push for the demarcation of sea territory outside the Beibu Gulf and negotiations on the common development of the area," it added.
Beibu Gulf is the Chinese name for the Gulf of Tonkin, an area of sea between northern Vietnam, southern China and the Chinese island province of Hainan.
China supported the Vietnamese Communists in their decades-long war against South Vietnam and its U.S. sponsors.
But Vietnam has traditionally been wary of its larger Asian neighbour, and in 1979 the two countries fought a brief border war after Vietnam occupied Cambodia and overthrew the murderous Khmer Rouge regime that favoured Beijing.
Beijing and Hanoi normalised relations in 1991.
The two countries continue to quarrel over the Spratly Islands, a string of rocky outcrops in the South China Sea also claimed by Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Another set of islets further north of the Spratly group, the Paracel Islands, were seized by China in 1974 and have been occupied by them ever since despite Vietnamese protests.
Reuters - August 23, 2006.
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