From Timothy Karr’s MediaCitizen blog:
Citizens of China and Vietnam are doing something heretofore unheard of. They’re hashing out territorial differences via a China People’s Daily web forum. The debate was sparked by the killing last month of nine Vietnamese fishermen (the Chinese call them “pirates”), who were shot by Chinese police in the Gulf of Tonkin (China calls it the “Northern Gulf”). In dispute is the tract of water where the killings occurred. The two not-so-friendly socialist brethren have overlapping historical claims to this sea — and to the oil deposits that lie beneath. And despite decades of tightly-scripted diplomacy to resolve the territorial dispute, neither is willing to concede an inch.
