Asia & Pacific
China’s assertiveness pushes Vietnam toward an old foe, the United States
By
Simon Denyer December 28, 2015
CHINA’S BACK YARD | This is part of an occasional series examining China’s efforts to win friends and clients in Asia and to assert a more dominant role across the continent.
Men fish in Dong Da Lake this fall under pillars for a half-finished urban railway. The Chinese-built project is running three years behind schedule and 57 percent over budget. (Quinn Ryan Mattingly/For The Washington Post)
HANOI — To win friends and open new markets for Chinese companies, Beijing is offering its Asian neighbors tens of billions of dollars in loans and investment. But in Vietnam, the effort is falling flat.
China’s aggressive assertion of its maritime territorial claims has alienated many here, and President Xi Jinping’s grand vision of a new Silk Road with China at its center is greeted with scorn and suspicion rather than excitement.
The relationship has turned so bad that Vietnam’s Communist Party is tilting more and more toward an old enemy, the United States. And when Xi paid a state visit to Vietnam last month, you could almost feel the chill.
Xi was feted with a 21-gun salute and granted a rare invitation to address the country’s National Assembly. His 20-minute speech to his “comrades” in Vietnam was full of poetic references to the two nations’ shared destinies, to how brothers can even “break gold” if their hearts are united.
But Xi’s exhortations were met with stony silence and only a smattering of applause at the end. Boredom, indifference and even hostility were written on the faces of his audience.
“The atmosphere was very tense,” said one Vietnamese official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
China wants to help its fellow Asian countries build the infrastructure their economies desperately need, under the banner of re-creating ancient Silk Road trade routes and partly channeled through a new
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Vietnam needs the money but fears a hidden agenda.
“We are quite suspicious because we don’t know the real objective,” said Tran Truong Thuy, an expert at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, a Foreign Ministry think tank. “Behind its Maritime Silk Road, China can advance its sovereignty propaganda.”
[Obama pledges to visit Vietnam during meeting with Communist Party chief]
In the run-up to Xi’s visit, activists staged several small but rare protests against him, watched but not always disbanded by local police. Eight Vietnamese nongovernmental organizations and 1,700 activists
signed an online petition against his trip, while a Facebook campaign gathered thousands more to the cause.
In a subtle snub, Xi’s visit was timed to coincide with a visit by the Japanese defense minister, with
Hanoi inviting a Japanese warship to dock at Vietnam’s strategic Cam Ranh Bay.
The contrast between Xi’s visit and President Bill Clinton’s 2000 trip to Vietnam was stark: Then, tens of thousands of young people waited late into the night to welcome the first U.S. leader to visit since the Vietnam War ended.
For Xi, there were no cheering crowds.
Railway woes
On the streets of Hanoi, a series of concrete pillars and a half-built elevated railway hint at one of the reasons China faces so much public distrust here.
A Chinese-built urban rail project is running three years behind schedule and 57 percent over budget. Several accidents, including scaffolding collapses and falling objects, have killed or injured passersby, while Vietnam’s transport minister has complained that the terms of the Chinese loan forced him to buy Chinese trains.
“Chinese contractors are very bad,” Minister Dinh La Thang said, according to
local media outlets. “I wanted to replace them many times, but I could not because of the loan agreement’s obligations.”
China has a reputation for transferring outdated technology to Vietnam, producing low-quality workmanship, ignoring environmental standards and importing its own workers. Chinese companies often win contracts by bidding at unrealistically low rates, experts said, only to end up charging more.
“How can they bid with such low prices?” asked Tran Viet Thai, another expert at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam. “It is because of corruption and bribes. China can help with some infrastructure projects, but where does the benefit go? It goes into the hands of some corrupt officials.”
Partly as a result, in 2013 Vietnam tightened the rules governing the awarding of public contracts, stipulating, for example, that foreign workers be kept to a minimum.
It has joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank but has kept its distance from the Silk Road plan.
But the most dramatic recent break in the relationship between Beijing and Hanoi came in May 2014, when China towed a $1 billion oil rig close to the Paracel Islands, in South China Sea waters that Vietnam considers part of its exclusive economic zone.
Luu Hoai Thu, a receptionist for the Cat Linh-Ha Dong railway project’s management board, walks by a model rail car that was on display this fall for public introduction and feedback. (Quinn Ryan Mattingly/For The Washington Post)
[China withdraws oil rig from disputed waters but warns it could return]
Coming at a time when relations between the two countries were on an upswing, “the oil rig incident was a shock to Vietnam,” the Vietnamese official said. “Mutual trust has not really recovered.”
Deadly riots broke out in Vietnam in which Chinese and Taiwanese factories were attacked. There was a call for an emergency meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee to discuss forming an alliance with the United States — a radical strategic change for a country whose disdain for military partnerships is a central foreign policy tenet, said Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the University of New South Wales. President Obama’s top adviser for Asia, Evan Medeiros, was even
invited to Vietnam that July to discuss deepening ties.
Rethinking relationships
In the end, China
withdrew the oil rig in July 2014, a month ahead of schedule, and the emergency meeting of the Central Committee was never held. Nevertheless, an improving relationship with the United States received further impetus.
“China’s actions sparked a big internal debate in Vietnam about its strategic orientation,” said Medeiros, now a managing director with the Eurasia Group, an international business consultancy.
In the past 12 months, eight of Vietnam’s 16 Politburo members have visited Washington, while half a dozen Cabinet-level U.S. officials have traveled the other way.
Capping an unprecedented level of engagement, Obama received Vietnamese Communist Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong in the Oval Office in July and is expected to visit Vietnam next year.
In October 2014, the United States
partially relaxed an arms embargo on Vietnam and is helping Hanoi improve its coast guard capabilities to counter China’s growing presence in the South China Sea.
But the clearest indication of rapprochement between Hanoi and Washington has been Vietnam’s inclusion in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a U.S.-led 12-nation regional trade deal that excludes China. That deal, Vietnam hopes, will help reduce its economic dependence on China, with which it runs a large and growing trade deficit.
China’s assertiveness pushes Vietnam toward an old foe, the United States - The Washington Post
Simon Denyer is The Post’s bureau chief in China. He served previously as bureau chief in India and as a Reuters bureau chief in Washington, India and Pakistan.
Bolt-action , Semi-automatic ,........something full-auto should be nice now though :v
