PUSHING and shoving near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea has resulted in the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat after it was allegedly rammed by a Chinese vessel.
"It was rammed by a Chinese boat," Vietnam's Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Hai Binh told Bloomberg News.
The dispute now risks disrupting the flow of goods along the world's busiest shipping lane, said Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said on a visit to Manila, which also has its own territorial dispute with China.
China has violated international law and threatens the peace, security and freedom of navigation, said Prime Minister Dung.
China's oil rig in the disputed water sparked violent protests in Vietnam this month and led China to send ships and planes to evacuate workers from the country after three Chinese nationals were killed.
Vietnam sent various ships to disturb oil rig operations, according to Xinhua.
"China has adopted firm measures to prevent Vietnam's disruptive behaviour and lodged a formal diplomatic protest to Vietnam to require it to immediately stop such behaviour," Xinhua said.
President Xi Jinping has been expanding the country's naval reach to back its assertions in the South China Sea that are based on the "nine-dash line" map, first published in 1947.
That map extends hundreds of miles south from China's Hainan Island to equatorial waters off the coast of Borneo. China and Vietnam both claim the Paracels, and Association of Southeast Asian Nations members Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines have claims to other areas of the South China Sea.
China and Vietnam made war in 1979 when Vietnam lost the Paracel Islands. In 1988, Chinese forces took seven atolls in the Spratly Islands, killing 64 Vietnamese troops. In 2007, Chinese forced fired on and killed a man on a fishing boat, said Bloomberg.