Kindle Locations 1445-1614

Excerpt

SWORD LAKE

The first time I visited Vietnam was as a tourist, and for a day or two my wife and I went to what seemed to us the obvious sites in Hanoi. We strolled along wide avenues still lined with trees the French had planted when they were the colonial power, and whiled away an afternoon in street-side cafés. Our hotel, the Metropole, was an imposing colonial building with a white façade, green shutters, and wood paneling that had been the focal point of French society in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. It was very proud of the fresh croissants it baked for breakfast. The next day, we went to the “Hanoi Hilton,” the Hoa Lo Prison, where John McCain spent some of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War. It was built originally by the French, but the North Vietnamese used it as one of the main places for detaining captured American servicemen. Now it is a museum, its walls covered with photos of McCain, whose hair turned prematurely white in captivity.

It took a day or so for us to pick up on something that we would have known if we had been a bit more curious before arriving. However much the Vietnamese detested French colonialism, and however many millions had died in the war with the U.S., these had in many ways been but passing episodes in a much longer history of defending the country’s sovereignty. In that longer story , the principal antagonist was China. Half a mile from our hotel was the Hoan Kiem Lake, a shimmering pond filled with water lilies that forms the focal point of the city center. It is also a somewhat mawkish memorial to the struggle against China. The name means “Lake of the Restored Sword,” a reference to the legend that Emperor Le Loi was handed a magic sword which he used to fend off the Chinese invasion during the Ming dynasty in the early fifteenth century. Near the shore on the east side, there is a small island accessible by a red bridge. It houses the Ngoc Son Temple, built a couple of hundred years ago to honor a thirteenth -century general who helped defeat the Chinese Yuan dynasty. A couple of miles away , the Hai Ba Trung neighborhood in central Hanoi is named after two sisters who led a three-year-long rebellion against Chinese rule in the first century A.D. When we mentioned that we lived in China, several people immediately informed us how many times China had invaded Vietnam over the years, even if they sometimes offered different numbers.

In the annals of China’s imperial history, Vietnam is the one that got away. The Han dynasty occupied a large part of what is today’s Vietnam in the second century B.C., and China retained control of the country for most of the next thousand years. Vietnam eventually prized itself free from the Chinese embrace, but that long history has left traces of a sense of entitlement in China. A caption at the Shaanxi History Museum in Xian, one of China’s premier collections of antiquity, reads: “Until 200 years ago, Vietnam was part of China, and even today in the homes of Vietnam people you can see Chinese characters.” Like all such histories, Vietnam’s links with China are full of complexities and discontinuities. Although it was Le Loi’s victory in the fifteenth century over Ming invaders that cemented the independence of Vietnam, the decades that followed his triumph were the high point of Confucian cultural influence in Vietnam. But the Hanoi tourist sites underline the broader point; a significant slice of modern Vietnamese identity is rooted in the struggles to maintain autonomy from China. The anxieties stirred in Vietnam by the rise of China are in one sense the direct opposite of the response in Australia. Whereas Australia fears the end of a historical era it has been comfortable with, Vietnam fears a return to an older historical pattern it wants to avoid.

Vietnam is, therefore, one of the most interesting fault lines along the rise of China. More than any other country in the world, Vietnam has a political system that looks very similar to China’s —an all-powerful party that is still run on Leninist principles but which has dumped Marx and embraced the market in a bid to modernize its economy and society. The Communist Party ties run deep. In his somewhat intimidating way, it was this spirit of fraternal political unity that Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi was trying to appeal to in his diatribe in Hanoi. Vietnam also knows that China’s economy is one of the main potential growth engines that can drive its own prosperity. Huge public investments in the southwest of China are driving new road and rail links down into northern Vietnam, cementing the economic connections even further. A new high-speed train will soon link Hanoi to Nanning, the capital of the border province of Guangxi. Yet Vietnam is the country where China’s great-power posturing is provoking deeper existential angst than almost anywhere else, as a new era of geopolitics collides with some very old Asian histories. Vietnam is thus an important barometer for both the mounting Asian backlash against China and the intricate balance of power that is taking shape in Asia. Hanoi believes it can both integrate its economy with China and seek new friends to help restrain China. Vietnam is working to have it both ways.

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China looms large over every issue in Vietnam. Like China, Vietnam has a substantial claim over the South China Sea, including both the Paracel and Spratly Islands, and Hanoi has watched the expansion of China’s navy with increasing unease. For Vietnam, the territorial disputes in the South China Sea are about much more than just control of some islands. With the exception of Chile, Vietnam is more dominated than any other country by its coastline, which stretches 3,260 kilometers—“ a balcony looking onto the Pacific Ocean,” as some Vietnamese describe its location. Vietnam’s long-term economic plans talk about deriving 50 percent of its GDP from maritime activities, including fishing and exploiting natural resources in areas it claims as its own. The fate of the small group of rocks and islets in the South China Sea cuts to the core of Vietnam’s vision of its own economic future.

Leaders in Vietnam run the constant risk of being accused of selling out to China. After Chinese ships cut the cables of the two Vietnamese oil-survey ships in mid-2011, large anti-Chinese demonstrations broke out in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Afraid of being accused of appeasement, the Vietnamese authorities allowed the protests to continue every Sunday for twelve weeks— an eternity for protest movements in a one-party state. The protesters wore T-shirts and caps with the symbol for “No-U”— in reference to the Chinese map for the South China Sea. Others sported the slogan “Say No to the Ox-Tongue Line.” Once the protests were eventually shut down by the authorities, some formed a “No-U” football club to play on Sundays.

The fissures of anti-China nationalism cut right across the Vietnamese establishment. In 2011, twenty prominent figures in Vietnamese society— terming themselves “patriotic personalities”— submitted a letter to the Vietnamese Politburo suggesting that Hanoi had been “too soft” on China. Their number included Major General Nguyen Trong Vinh, who had been the country’s ambassador to China. Trong Vinh has also been a public critic of a controversial Chinese mining project in the Central Highlands region, which has proved to be a lightning rod for fears about Chinese economic domination. Trong Vinh was joined in that protest by an even more illustrious figure, General Vo Nguyen Giap, whose role as chief military planner in the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and in the war against the U.S. makes him one of the nation’s most celebrated military figures. Vietnam’s leadership also has its pro-China faction, and some of the most senior leaders in the country are considered more sympathetic to Beijing. Yet, in both the Vietnamese Communist Party and in the military, analysts say that younger members tend to support closer ties with the U.S. Anti-Chinese sentiment is even stronger among Vietnam’s large overseas diaspora, especially the population in the U.S. In some ways, one of the nightmare scenarios for the Vietnamese leaders would be for these different forces to be brought together by a dispute with China— popular nationalism, the anti-Chinese faction among the elite, and a significant section of the diaspora. A serious crisis with China could deal a potentially fatal challenge to the legitimacy of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Vietnam’s response to China’s behavior should come as no surprise: it, too, is turning to the seas. Hanoi does not have the resources to mount a significant navy, even though the defense budget is rising sharply, but it can buy the sort of hardware that might allow it to conduct its own “asymmetric” challenge to China. In 2009, Vietnam placed an order for six Kilo-class submarines from Russia— a type dubbed a “black hole” by the U.S. Navy because special rubber tiles allow them to evade detection by sonar. The submarines will help Vietnam to monitor the movements of Chinese vessels in contested areas and to deter any Chinese attempt to grab islands currently occupied by Vietnam. To get a sense of just how seriously Vietnam takes the military challenge from China, it is worth considering that the order for the submarines was placed during the heart of the financial crisis, when the country’s export industry was being decimated. And for a country of Vietnam’s size, such a number of submarines does not come cheap— the $ 3.2-billion price tag is equivalent to a year of the entire defense budget.

In the summer of 2010, a U.S. Navy destroyer called the USS John S. McCain docked at the Vietnamese port of Danang. The vessel is named after both the father and grandfather of Senator McCain, both of whom were four-star admirals: the eldest McCain captained aircraft carriers in the Pacific War , and his son was commander of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. Vietnam has not only been investing in its navy, it has also been assiduously making friends with other important naval powers, none more so than the U.S. The visit by the USS McCain capped one of the more remarkable turnarounds in Asian politics in recent years. Large tracts of land in Vietnam are still unusable because of unexploded bombs dropped by American planes. Yet, just over three decades after the Americans abandoned their embassy in Saigon, Vietnam has turned to the U.S. for support. The contacts began tentatively in the late 1990s but have gathered pace as concerns about China have risen. In 2009, Vietnam took one important step when several of its senior officers flew out to spend some time on the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier , to view its operations in the South China Sea. The appearance of the USS McCain marked the first time the two countries have conducted joint naval activities , in this case a training exercise and a search-and-rescue drill. (They also swapped tips about cooking on board a naval vessel.) If the substance seems a bit trivial, the message to China was not: it was a powerful statement that Vietnam sees the U.S. naval presence in the region as both legitimate and important. “China complains that the U.S. is stirring up trouble,” a senior Vietnamese diplomat told me, “but we think the increased U.S. presence in the region is important to help stabilize the situation.”

China routinely denounces any exercise of U.S. military power in the region as evidence of a “Cold War mentality” and of a strategy to “contain” China, just as it once did with the Soviet Union . Washington’s new friendship with Vietnam is further evidence to many Chinese that Washington is determined to maintain its hegemony. But China’s anger misses the two most important points about Vietnam’s rapprochement with the U.S.— both why it is taking place and the actual nature of their military cooperation. The uncomfortable truth for China is that collaboration with the U.S. is not being pushed on Vietnam; it is being solicited. Beijing also ignores the enormous subtlety with which Vietnam deals with China. Rather than shun its neighbor, Hanoi goes out of its way to try and engage Beijing, a delicate dance in which deterrence is mixed carefully with dialogue. Vietnam’s suffocating history with China is, of course, an extreme example, but the pattern also fits many other countries in the region. Asia is now a continent of confident nation-states who cherish the autonomy they have won in the postcolonial era, and who want to make the most of the opportunities that globalization is bringing, including the rise of China. But they want to navigate this new era on their own terms, not as someone’s “little brother.” For Hanoi, setting aside wartime resentments of the U.S. is a price worth paying so it can establish its own path. This is not containment: Vietnam sees the U.S. presence as a way of getting its relationship with China on the right footing.

Hanoi takes elaborate care not to provoke China too far. Whenever Vietnam conducts some sort of exercise with the U.S. military, it usually does something similar with the Chinese shortly before or after. Vietnam and China have a defense hotline that they can use during periods of tension. The two Communist parties have also established a joint steering committee that allows officials from both countries to meet regularly and discuss ways to defuse problems. The party-to-party ties allow for a frankness of conversation that few other countries can achieve with China. Delegations of earnest experts in socialism and Marxism shuttle between the two capitals, glad for the rare chance to exchange ideas in another country. Even with the high level of anti-Chinese sentiment in the country, Vietnam exudes a certain confidence in its ability to cope with a rising China, the sort of self-assurance that comes from experience. In 2012, when China and the Philippines were locked in a tense standoff over the Scarborough Shoal, another disputed section of the South China Sea, a Vietnamese official commented to me, with a slightly world -weary air, “We have been coping with the Chinese for two thousand years. We know exactly how to deal with them.” The comments were partly aimed at the Philippines, which was viewed in many quarters as having provoked a fight with Beijing it could not win, but it was also partly aimed at the U.S. This is the great paradox of modern Vietnam. Hanoi is the government that has the most sophisticated channels to talk with Beijing, but its combustible politics and deep-seated historical resentment make Vietnam the country one can most easily imagine fighting a war with China.

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This complexity places considerable limits on the U.S. Into such waters, Washington should proceed carefully, fully aware of the way its rapprochement with Vietnam might be viewed in China. One of the surest ways for the U.S. to turn a budding rivalry with China into sullen hostility would be to make a big push to expand military ties rapidly with Vietnam. If the U.S. were to start stationing substantial military assets there, for instance, China would begin to think of this as a potential staging point for aggression against its territory. “Vietnam is to China what Cuba is to us,” as one former senior U.S. official puts it. “When the Soviets flipped Cuba, we decided that it had profound national security implications. It almost caused the end of the world.”

Pushing too hard would also alienate Hanoi. “We do not want to be owned by anyone,” the Vietnamese diplomat told me. Closer ties with the U.S. give Vietnam a wedge to avoid being sucked further into a Chinese orbit, but Hanoi has no interest in becoming a new U.S. client state in the region. It wants enough, but not too much U.S. help. Hanoi is still hugely sensitive about allowing a U.S. military presence in the country: the American soldiers taking part in searches for missing personnel from the Vietnam War have to wear civilian clothes when they are outside of U.S. diplomatic compounds. Only once they are inside are they allowed to change back into uniform. Hanoi is also very particular about the use of the Cam Ranh naval base, a natural deep-water harbor near the strategic chokeholds of the South China Sea. Vietnam allows foreign logistics and survey ships to visit the port, but not battleships. Leon Panetta, the former U.S. defense secretary , went to Cam Ranh in 2012 in a high-profile visit that seemed like a major advance in military ties between the two countries. But the U.S. vessel he visited in the harbor was the USNS Richard E. Byrd, a cargo ship. For Vietnam, these little details matter a great deal.

Vietnam’s relations with China may be unique in their historical complexity and intensity, but they set out the bigger patterns that are starting to shape Asian politics. Behind Vietnam’s fervent diplomacy is a fierce desire to avoid being pulled into a Chinese sphere of influence. Yet the Vietnamese regard the U.S. purely as a balancing power, not as an ally, or as a nation they want to see dominate the region, or as a partner in containing China. For both Vietnam and Australia, the endgame is not to circumvent China and its booming economy, but to find ways to deal with China on their own terms. Military cooperation with the U.S. is not a new exercise in containment; it is a way of feeling comfortable about getting closer to China.

Dyer, Geoff A. (2014-02-04). The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China--and How America Can Win (Kindle Locations 1691-1818). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.