Written by David Brown
SUNDAY, 07July 2013
Facing off against China
Follow America and save the country; follow China and save the party. This saying, heard everywhere in Vietnam, distills the geopolitical dilemma facing its ruling Communist Party.
Forty years after the last American troops left Vietnam, the party that won independence and unified the nation has lost much of its legitimacy. No amount of harking back to the virtues of Ho Chi Minh and his comrades can restore its élan nor, it seems, root out systemic corruption. The regime’s biggest liability is its failure to right a faltering economy. But public opinion is also scornful of its inability to defend Vietnam’s interests against China.
From the perspective of the man in the street in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, Beijing has thrown off the cloak of “peaceful rise” and reverted to its historic role of regional bully. Its farcical claim to the marine and mineral resources of the entire South China Sea is only the most prominent example. China’s construction of a cascade of dams on the upper Mekong in Yunnan province and support for a plan to build a further 11 dams downstream in Laos threaten to wipe out the annual flood surge that sustains the fertility of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region.
Chinese enterprises are also pursuing Laos’ mineral and lumber resources, challenging Vietnamese hegemony in its backyard. In Vietnam itself, growing investment by Chinese engineering, construction and mining firms—notably Chinalco’s multi-billion dollar bauxite project in the central highlands—has drawn heavy criticism. Cheap and often shoddy Chinese goods have flooded Vietnam’s markets, crushing local manufacturers.
The man in the street wants to hit back. It doesn’t occur to him that Vietnam’s armed forces are no match for China’s or that Vietnam is highly vulnerable to economic retaliation. Western analysts typically attribute Chinese “assertiveness” to surging popular nationalism and to over-zealous security agencies, but to ordinary Vietnamese it is obvious that Chinese aggression is coordinated in Beijing.
That is nothing new: the grand theme of the nation’s history, everyone learns in school, is dogged and ultimately successful resistance against invaders. And most of the armies sweeping across Vietnam’s borders for the past 2000 years have been Chinese. There is no reason why it should be different this time.
Read more: http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5549&Itemid=237
