Why Are They Burning Down Factories in Vietnam?

[Purveyor]

By Joshua Keating

Hundreds of people have been arrested in what the New York Times calls the “worst public unrest in recent Vietnamese history,” as crowds ransacked more than a dozen foreign-owned factories in an industrial park near Ho Chi Minh City.

The riots were initially a protest against the mainland Chinese government, though a majority of the factories damaged were actually owned by Taiwanese or South Korean companies. To some extent they seem also to have been motivated by anger over working conditions and a lack of representation inVietnam’s authoritarian government.

China and Vietnam have been locked in a tense feud since the beginning of the month, when a Chinese oil rig was parked in the disputed Paracel Islands, which are claimed by both countries. The rig’s presence has led to clashes and collisions at sea and increasingly angry protests by the Vietnamese government.

As wages have risen in China in recent years, there’s been a shift of labor-intensive manufacturing to countries like Vietnam where wages are significantly lower. While China’s economic boom was once built on providing cheap manufacturing for Western companies, Chinese manufacturers have increasingly been moving their operations to Southeast Asian countries including Vietnam. Wages have been rising amid the country’s economic boom, but at about $100 a month, the average unskilled Vietnamese makes about a third of what a similar worker makes in China.

Chinese investors poured $2.3 billion into the country last year and despite political tensions, China remains Vietnam’s largest trading partner.

more...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/05/14/riots_in_vietnam_labor_unrest_nationalism_or_both.html

[Lee-Lee]

1. Africa is next for Chinese labor movement

As other Asian countries grow more expensive to operate in they will move to exploiting labor in Africa.

There is a reason there is so much Chinese investment there that the west hardly notices.

[Vogon_Glory]

2. The feud is older than that

The feud is older than that. The Vietnamese have long resented the Chinese, who once dominated their country before the French took it over. There was conflict after World War II when the Kuomintang tried to assert control. The conflict was surpressed during the French-Indochinese War and again during the US Vietnam War, but the tension remained.

The old South Vietnamese gov't once had a skirmish over the Spratley Islands and the DRVN fought a mini-war with the Chinese after the US left.

[former9thward]

3. I have made two trips to Vietnam.

And I found the people there really hate the Chinese. When I was there in 1992 there was a museum in Saigon named "The Museum of Chinese and United States War Atrocities." Inside the museum were exhibits of what you would expect. On my last visit in 2010 the museum had been renamed. It is now "The Museum of Chinese War Atrocities." Anything relating to the U.S. had been eliminated.