A report by Human Rights Watch says Vietnam’s government has intensified repression against activists and dissidents over the past year.  The U.S.-based group is calling for the immediate release of political prisoners in Vietnam. The call came as senior U.S. congressmen on a visit to Southeast Asia stepped up pressure on Vietnam's government to improve its rights record, saying it is a condition for expanded bilateral military ties with the United States.

The Human Rights Watch global report, released Sunday, says Vietnam had carried out a “systematic crackdown” that in 2011 led to the prosecution of over 30 activists, who were charged under what the report calls “vaguely-worded articles” in Vietnam’s penal code and sentenced to prison.

The report says bloggers, writers, human rights defenders, land rights activists, religious and other groups were targeted by Vietnamese authorities and faced harassment, intimidation, arrest, torture and imprisonment.

HANOI (Reuters) - U.S. sanctions on Myanmar could begin to come down if by-elections scheduled for April 1 in the former British colony are fair and open, U.S. Senator John McCain said on Thursday.

After half a century of authoritarian rule Myanmar has taken a series of dramatic steps in recent months to open up, the latest of which was the release last week of some 300 political prisoners.

The United States decided to upgrade diplomatic ties with Myanmar as a result, and President Barack Obama called the move a "substantial step" in democratic reform but stopped short of lifting economic sanctions.

Senator Joe Lieberman, speaking in Vietnam ahead of a visit to Myanmar with McCain and two other senators, said if the by-elections were "fair and open and legitimate" Myanmar could expect "some response from the United States in terms of the status quo between our countries as it exists now."

WASHINGTON — The United States on Thursday renewed calls on Vietnam to improve its human rights record, saying it needed to do more to win support in Washington to expand cooperation.

Kurt Campbell, the top US diplomat for East Asia and advocate of warmer relations with the former war foe, said lawmakers have persistently voiced concern about Hanoi's treatment of dissidents, minorities and religious people.

"What has prevented the kind of rapid development in bilateral ties that some have hope for are continuing human rights issues inside the country," Campbell, an assistant secretary of state, told the Stimson Center think-tank.

It all sounds a little too fanciful. The idea of Burma as a regional role model for the treatment and release of political prisoners requires just too much of a leap in faith in the reforms that have swept that country, even after the release and pardon of more than 600 remaining dissidents.

But the government of Thein Sein could be setting a trend and perhaps unwittingly promoting regional dialogue. As Burma again grabbed the international spotlight with its latest releases and self-described reconciliation policies, Laos and Vietnam also announced they had freed dissidents.

The numbers were much smaller. Vientiane set seven Christians free, while Hanoi said it had released French-Vietnamese Pham Minh Hoang, who will still remain under house arrest for three years for trying to overthrow the government. He wrote 33 articles criticizing his country.

By Charles Dumas & Diana Choyleva

China’s fast growth and sheer size have produced a meteoric rise to over 13 percent of world GDP in 2010 measured at comparable dollar prices. But during the last 18 years of China’s supersonic expansion, Beijing has chosen to attach its economy to the United States. It fixed the yuan rate to the dollar in 1994 to stabilize an economy that had just seen inflation accelerate to 30 percent. At the time, that rate reflected China’s competitiveness. Over the period 1995 to 2004, China saw ten years of falling export prices, as idle rural labor was brought into the cities and profitably employed at low wages.  The United States’ modestly positive inflation moved bilateral competitiveness sharply in China’s favor.

At comparable purchasing power, China’s GDP moved from 21 percent of the United States in 1993 to 75 percent in 2011. The dollar zone created by Beijing’s exchange rate policy is no longer a tiny Chinese “moon” attached to a huge U.S. “earth”, but a near-equal pair of seriously mismatched economies. The global market values the combined entity at roughly the “right rate,” but the result has been sustained overvaluation of the U.S. arising from the deliberate continuation of Chinese undervaluation.

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar will free many prominent political activists on Friday in an amnesty for 651 inmates, prison officials said, as one of the world's most reclusive states continues to open up after half a century of authoritarian rule.

The United States and Europe have said freeing political prisoners is crucial to even considering lifting economic sanctions that have isolated the former British colony, also known as Burma, and, over the years, pushed it closer to China.

Among those to be freed are Min Ko Naing, a leader of a pro-democracy uprising in 1988 in which thousands of protesters were killed, and Shin Gambira, a well-known Buddhist monk who led 2007 street protests, prison officials said.