Chinese authorities are holding two Vietnamese boats and 21 crew members who were detained while fishing near the disputed Paracel Islands, an official said yesterday.
They were picked up on March 3 and have been held in custody since then, Pham Thi Huong of the People’s Committee of Ly Son Island in Vietnam’s Quang Ngai Province said.
“The captain spoke to his family and told them the Chinese are demanding 70,000 yuan [US$11,000] for their release,” she said, adding it was not clear whether this amount was for one or both boats.
Officials advised the family not to pay and have asked Hanoi to press for their release, she said.
The incident is the latest in a string of diplomatic skirmishes between the neighbors over islands in the South China Sea.
Late last month, Vietnam accused China of stopping 11 Vietnamese fishermen from approaching the Paracel Islands to avoid strong winds.
Last week, Hanoi’s foreign ministry said China had “seriously violated” Vietnam’s sovereignty by allowing a Chinese oil company to open bidding for oil exploration near the Paracel Islands.
Beijing says it has sovereignty over essentially all of the South China Sea, a key global trading route.
The Paracels — or Hoang Sa Islands in Vietnamese — have been controlled by China since 1974, but are claimed by Vietnam, as well as Taiwan.
The two countries also have competing claims over the Spratly islands — a potentially oil-rich archipelago.
Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines also claim all or part of the Spratlys.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema