The Contest of the Century (17 page)

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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.

T
HERE ARE SO
many powerful nineteenth-century echoes in China’s rise that it is easy to miss the most important exception. When the U.S. and Germany were establishing themselves as great powers, they had the luxury of a relatively benign regional environment. For the U.S. in the 1890s, the European empires which had once dominated its hemisphere, Spain and Portugal, were weak or crumbling, while its neighbors, Canada and Mexico, presented little security threat. “The Americans are a very lucky people,” Bismarck liked to joke. “They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors and to the east and west by fish.” Germany had to deal with a much more complicated set of neighbors, but it also enjoyed the good fortune that its rise was accompanied by decaying empires on its frontiers, from the Austro-Hungarians next door to the Ottomans to the southeast, or the Russian monarchy to the east. China faces a completely different backdrop, a region that is full of successful and ambitious states who also believe this is their time. From South Korea round to Indonesia and then to India, China is encircled, which places significant limits on its ability to get its own way. Japan, even after two decades of stagnation, is still the third-largest economy in the world, and has arguably the most capable navy after that of the U.S. China is not rising in isolation, but into a region of proud nation-states that want to stake their own claims in the modern world.