Vietnam seeking to chart its path
VIETNAM’S full-on war with the United States lasted a decade. Its tensions with its northern neighbour, China, have persisted for thousands of years – from a millennium of direct Chinese rule and a bloody border war in 1979 to more recent confrontations in the South China Sea.
If geography is destiny, then the fate of Vietnam is to be an expert in bargaining with Beijing and balancing between superpowers.
So with the rest of the world struggling to reckon with China’s assertive moves in the Pacific, the Vietnamese, hosts of this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, are offering guidance.
“I would like to give advice to the whole world, and especially to the United States, that you must be careful with China,” said Major General
LeVan Cuong, the retired director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security.
Like any good communist soldier, Cuong pays attention to the details of leaders’ abstruse speeches, and he noted that President Xi Jinping of China had referred to his homeland’s status as a “great” or “strong power” 26 times in a lengthy address last month.
“Xi Jinping’s ambitions are dangerous for the whole world,” Cuong said. “China uses its money to buy off many leaders, but none of the countries that are its close allies, like North Korea, Pakistan or Cambodia, have done well. Countries that are close to America have done much better. We must ask: Why is this?”
As with other Southeast Asian nations acutely aware that they are positioned in China’s backyard,Vietnam is worried about US inattention.
In the name of halting communism, the US once sent troops to Indochina and propped up dictators elsewhere in Asia. But the US-devised landscape also created a stable environment in which regional economies expanded.
Now, President Donald Trump’s decision to take the US out of the TransPacific Partnership trade pact, which would have given 11 other economies an alternative to a Chinese-led economic order, has left the Vietnamese feeling vulnerable.
“As Vietnamese, we are always trying to find a way to balance China’s power,” said Nguyen Ngoc Anh, a professor at the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi. “For us, TPP isn’t just an economic issue. It’s also about geopolitics and social issues.”
Anh noted that local liberals had cheered the trade pact because it would have forced Vietnam to adhere to international labour and government accountability standards.
With the 11 other members of the pact still hashing out if they can proceed without the United States,Washington’s withdrawal – not to mention Trump’s “America First” speech at the APEC meeting on Friday – leaves some nations wondering if their best option may be Chinese-backed trade pacts and financing deals that have fewer guarantees for workers and less official transparency.
“We are both communist countries, but people like me in Vietnam don’t want to develop the same way that China has,” said Anh, who studied economics in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. “We want to follow the Westernoriented way.”
While the US is the largest market for Vietnamese exports, Vietnam’s biggest trading partner is China. Yet Vietnam runs a significant trade deficit with its neighbour, andVietnamese economists worry that China doesn’t play fairly.
“China is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t observe international law in many areas,” said Le Dang Doanh, an influential economist who has advised members of the Vietnamese Politburo on trade.
TheVietnamese watched in alarm last year when Beijing reacted to an international tribunal’s dismissal of China’s expansive claims over the South China Sea by ignoring – and even mocking – the judgment. Vietnam and four other governments have claims of their own on the resource-rich waterway that conflict with China’s.
It is hard to overstate the level of Vietnamese antipathy towards China. In a country where public protest is rare and risky, some of the few large-scale demonstrations in Vietnam in recent years have been against the Chinese.
But this national aversion puts Vietnam’s leadership in a bind. It cannot ignore China’s economic magnetism. For many members of APEC, China now ranks as their No1 trading partner.
In return for investment and project financing – roads, railways, dams, airports and colossal government buildings – leaders of regional economies are increasingly doing Beijing’s bidding.
Cambodia and Laos have given crucial support for Beijing’s South China Sea claims. Thailand has complied with Beijing’s demand that it return Chinese dissidents who once counted on it as a haven.
Even the Philippines has appeared to yield, despite the fact it lodged the successful South China Sea lawsuit at The Hague. Days before Trump’s visit to Manila this Sunday, it disclosed that President Rodrigo Duterte had ordered a halt to construction on a disputed sandbar in the South China Sea, a move widely regarded as intended to placate Beijing.
Vietnam, more than any other country, has grown practised at divining when not to challenge the two Pacific powers – both of which it fought within the last half-century.
In the 1970s and 1980s, China seized spits of land in the South China Sea that Vietnam had controlled or that were unoccupied but claimed by Hanoi.
Yet perhaps sensing a US reluctance to confront China in the South China Sea,Vietnam has declined to take China to international court, as the Philippines did, even as the Chinese have turned disputed reefs and sandbars into militarised islands.
Chinese pressure continues, despite the United States’ supplying the Vietnamese Coast Guard with a cutter and new patrol boats.
This year, a Spanish company with prospecting rights from Vietnam suspended drilling in an oil block off the coast of Vietnam. Beijing claims part of the waters as its own.
In 2014, the Chinese parked a stateowned oil rig off Danang, where Trump attended the APEC summit meeting Friday, in a forceful incursion into what Hanoi considers its territorial waters.
“Living next to China, which has ambitions to become the most powerful country in the world, is not easy,” said Vo Van Tao, a popular political blogger. “To lower the heat, Vietnam needs to withdraw from areas that belong to Vietnam.”
Grand strategy is beyond the worldview of Vietnamese like Do Van Duc. In 1979, he was stationed on the border with China, as part of an anti-aircraft artillery unit, when hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers from China flooded south.
The Vietnamese, while outmanned, put up an unexpectedly robust defense. Within a month, the Chinese, professing that they had taught theVietnamese a lesson for interfering in regional geopolitics, withdrew.
During the war with China, Duc was only 17 years old, but he came to understand one thing then that today, as a security guard living in Hanoi, he said he still clings to.
“We cannot trust the Chinese,” he said. “They are our ancient enemy, and that will not change.”