US lawmakers and activists have repeatedly urged Clinton to speak more forcefully about human rights as President Barack Obama's administration tries to nurture an emerging friendship with Vietnam and smooth out ties with China.

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that Clinton, who arrived Friday in Vietnam for a regional summit, was raising a range of issues with her hosts including human rights.

"There have been some recent instances where journalists, bloggers, other activists have been arrested. This is contrary to Vietnam's own commitment to internationally accepted standards of human rights, including the freedom of speech," Crowley told reporters.

Clinton plans later to head to China's Hainan island for talks to prepare for President Hu Jintao's visit to the United States next year.

Crowley would not say if Clinton would raise human rights in Hainan but said that such concerns were sure to come up during Hu's visit.

"We have and will continue to express to China our concern about the restrictive treatment of civil society actors and political dissidents in China," Crowley said.

"We have indicated our support for the award of the Nobel Prize, and I'm sure this will come up in these discussions," Crowley said.

The Nobel committee earlier this month awarded the Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, the co-author of the Charter 08 petition calling for democratic reforms in the communist nation.

Crowley said that Michael Posner, the assistant secretary of state in charge of human rights, was visiting China this week. He declined to elaborate on his schedule but said he was discussing labor issues.

Clinton raised Liu's case in a speech Thursday in Hawaii, saying: "We are saddened that Asia remains the only place in the world where three iconic Nobel laureates -- Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, and Liu Xiaobo -- are either under house arrest, in prison or in exile."

The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, fled into exile in India in 1959 as China crushed an abortive uprising against its rule in the Himalayan territory.

Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic opposition in Myanmar, has spent 15 years under house arrest since winning 1990 elections. The military regime in Myanmar, also known as Burma, plans new elections on November 7 which opposition groups and Western governments have criticized as a sham.

Clinton upset activists early in her tenure by saying that human rights would not "interfere" with areas of US-China cooperation, such as trying to revive the global economy or fighting climate change.

In a joint letter, eight pressure groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said Clinton now had a "unique opportunity" to raise concerns in the wake of Liu's Nobel and ahead of Hu's visit.

"Rather than smoothing the path for cooperation, the United States undermines its interests and compromises its ability to secure progress on other issues when it subordinates human rights concerns," the letter said.

"The Chinese side notes the soft-pedaling of human rights principles and perceives it as weakness," it said.

Leonard Leo, chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, said that China's "repression" of religious practice "breeds distrust among its neighbors, hurts its international image, and damages US-China relations."

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