The South China Sea has long been regarded as a major source of tension and instability in Pacific Asia. To clarify the position of claimants is a research task for creating the confidence building measures and promoting efforts to manage the possible conflicts in the region. The purpose of this article is to address the Vietnamese position on the sovereignty disputes over the Paracels and Spratlys, and maritime zones in the South China Sea. The Vietnamese position will be examined from three aspects: (1) the sovereignty of the Paracels and the Spratlys; (2) the maritime zones around these islands; and (3) the settlement of disputes in the South China Sea.

Under Chinese law system, the maritime law is a special branch of the civil law. For this reason, the maritime litigation shall be governed correspondently by the civil prodecure law. However, since the maritime litigation has its own special prodecure which is different from that of general procedure, there must be some special regulations to be a supplement to the civil procedure law. In this paper, a study is made on such regulations which are "The Regulations Relating to the arrest of Ships Before Litigation" and "The Regulations Concerning the Auction of Ships Which Have Been Arrested by Maritime Court for Clearing off the Debts" The aim of this paper is to describe the basic principles established in the regulations mentioned above in order to make the people who are unfamiliar with Chinese maritime legislation to be understood about Chinese special procedure adopted in maritime litigation.maritime litigation.