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| Coast Guard Ships of Vietnam (left) & China (Right) crossing paths in the South China Sea |
By Shawn W. Crispin
The limits of the president’s well-timed trip to restore Beijing’s position.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed Vietnam’s National Assembly on Friday, he predictably emphasized the two sides’ long-time economic and ideological ties. Beyond the diplomatic niceties, however, Xi’s strategically timed address and tour — the first by a Chinese president in a decade — tacitly aimed to influence Vietnam’s political process, including the outcome of a National Congress to be held in early 2016 where top Communist Party leadership appointments and polices will be determined for the next five years.
Xi’s arrival was preempted by rare anti-China protests in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which were initially condoned then harshly suppressed. Nationalistic banners called for China’s exit from the South China Sea, where the two sides have hotly contested overlapping territorial claims. Tee-shirts worn by protesters featured Xi’s face with a symbolic “X” marked across his forehead, while on-line activists circulated a petition on Facebook calling on the government to rescind its invitation. Other “No Xi” events, including a meeting of an anti-China football club, were less clearly state-influenced and brutally upended by authorities.
The erratic response underscores the divide between pro-China and pro-U.S. factions inside Vietnam’s opaque one-party politics. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s reformist and increasingly pro-U.S. faction has been ascendant in the lead-up to the congress, buoyed by his tough stand vis-à-vis China amid escalating territorial disputes. A pro-China faction, co-led by Party Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong and Defense Minister Phung Quang Thanh, has seen its fortunes sag since its perceived appeasement in handling China’s placement of a massive oil exploration rig in Vietnamese claimed waters in mid-2014.
The incident sparked anti-China riots that ransacked foreign-invested factories, killed at least three Chinese nationals, and forced Beijing to evacuate thousands of its fearful nationals. At the time, Dung took a strong nationalistic line, calling forcefully on Beijing to remove the rig and respect Vietnamese sovereignty. Thanh’s cautious diplomacy, on the other hand, avoided a full-blown confrontation, but the violence nonetheless drove bilateral relations to a nadir not witnessed since the two sides fought a brief but bloody border war in 1979.
Read the full story at The Diplomat