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.
Xi’s
visit, widely billed as a bid to mend frayed bilateral ties,
came at a delicate diplomatic juncture. Nowhere has China’s shift toward hard
power tactics in the South China Sea been more viscerally felt than in Vietnam.
China’s recently revealed man-made island-building — including features with
airstrips that some analysts believe could be used by Chinese bombers
to target Vietnam in a potential conflict — has raised widespread concerns that
Beijing aims to militarize and control the vast maritime area’s sea lanes.
Nationalistic Vietnamese bloggers have shrilly likened the expansionism to
China’s annexations of once-independent Tibet and Xinjiang.
Those
moves have pulled the U.S. more overtly onto Vietnam’s side of the dispute,
albeit in the name of ensuring freedom of navigation. President Barack Obama
raised U.S. objections to any Chinese militarization of the South China Sea
during Xi’s late September visit to Washington. Days before Xi’s arrival in
Hanoi, Washington dispatched a warship to within 12 nautical miles of one of
China’s new artificial islands in the contested Spratly Islands. China
responded by flying a missile-carrying fighter jet on a “training” exercise
near coastal Vietnam.
America’s
naval intervention will further boost Dung’s faction in the run-up to the
congress. Dung’s allies were already well-poised to sweep the party’s four top
positions, namely prime minister, president, National Assembly chairman, and
party secretary general. Dung, a two-term prime minister who has survived a
series of intra-party challenges, is tipped to win the all-powerful secretary
general post, now held by the pro-China Trong. If so, the pro-U.S. Dung would
head a unified quadrumvirate that some analysts speculate would make him the
country’s most powerful party leader since the 1990s.
Dung, who
has never visited Beijing during his nine years as prime minister, has moved
boldly to undercut the pro-China faction’s influence, particularly over the
military. In July, Dung orchestrated the transfer of Defense Minister Thanh’s
top two army commandants responsible for security in Hanoi soon after Thanh was
admitted to a hospital in France with a lung ailment. They were quickly
replaced with soldiers known to be aligned with Dung. In another power play,
Dung orchestrated an audit in September of the Defense Ministry’s extensive
business holdings, including a large military-run enterprise managed by Thanh’s
son, the day after Xi officially accepted Trong’s invitation to visit Vietnam.
Analysts
believe Xi’s party-to-party visit sought to bolster Vietnam’s pro-China faction
through economic overtures. Ahead of Xi’s arrival, China’s Communist Party
Central Committee touted bilateral cooperation in linking Xi’s “Belt and Road
Initiative” East-West trade network with the two sides’ “Two Corridors, One Economic
Cycle” joint scheme initiated in 2008. In a private meeting with Trong, Xi
committed to extend $158 million in loans over the next five years for the
completion of a high-speed railway project. Xi also said China would seek to
reduce its large and rising trade surplus with Vietnam, which hit nearly $25
billion in 2014.
Xi’s
offers coincided with the public release of the text and agreements of the
U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade pact that, if passed
among all 12 signatory countries, will encompass 40 percent of the global
economy. China is conspicuously excluded from the accord. Initial assessments
estimate Vietnam would gain the most from TPP, with exports expected to surge
by 28 percent in the deal’s first decade. It would also act to reduce
Vietnam’s reliance on China as its largest trading partner, an increasingly
sensitive political issue, through greater shipments to the U.S., Japan, and
Australia, among the pact’s other members.
Loans for
infrastructure had a stronger soft power impact at an earlier stage of
Vietnam’s economic development and before Beijing asserted historic claims to
80 percent of the South China Sea. Xi failed to specifically mention the two
sides’ maritime disputes in his National Assembly address, offering only bland
bromides on how bilateral “tests” should be “appropriately” controlled and
managed. The presence of nearby U.S. naval vessels, meanwhile, will check any
temptation in Beijing to use threat of force to influence outcomes at the
upcoming party congress. While Xi’s visit was well-timed to restore China’s
faltering position in Vietnam, tactically he appears to have missed his mark. By
Shawn W. Crispin
No comments:
Post a Comment