Vietnamese set China firms afire

Hanoi: Anti-China protesters set more than a dozen factories on fire in Vietnam, state media said  on Wednesday, in an escalating backlash against Beijing’s deployment of an oil rig in contested waters.

Workers looted goods and attacked offices in a rare outburst of public unrest on Tuesday in the authoritarian communist nation, which allowed mass anti-China rallies around Vietnam at the weekend.

The protesters targeted manufacturing companies that are owned or managed by Chinese as well as Chinese workers in Binh Duong province, the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park said in a statement. There were no reports of casualties.

Tens of thousands of workers poured onto the streets on Tuesday and a small number of them began looting and attacking security guads and factory management before setting fire to at least 15 factories, the state-run VNExpress website reported.

Videos and images posted on dissident blogs showed thousands of workers, many waving the Vietnamese flag, destroying factory gates and pouring into compounds and causing widespread destruction of property.  A number of Taiwanese, Japanese and  Korean businesses also shut their plants for the day.