India may need the finesse of Vietnam in dealing with China [-Now you know why VN has to hold Hun Sen inside its sphere of influence]

Nguyen Tan Dung

BEHIND THE PEACEFUL RISE - India may need the finesse of Vietnam in dealing with China

Saturday , January 12 , 2008
Sunanda K. Datta-ray
The Telegraph (Calcutta, India)

Pranab Mukherjee’s warning that nothing dramatic should be expected from Manmohan Singh’s visit to China recalled a passage in a paper that was lying on a café table in the central Vietnam town of Hoi An just before Christmas. It was Thanh Nien, which I learnt later was the flagship publication of the Vietnam Youth Federation and sells two million copies. Like India, Vietnam has lost territory to China; but whereas India seldom refers to it, Vietnam does so elliptically.

This was one of those allusions, a moving tribute to soldiers who had defended Vietnam against the French, Americans and “then (in) the border conflicts after 1975” (without mentioning China). Looking out across a rough ocean and unable to see the Paracel-Spratly islands, the writer, Thanh Thao, mused, “Maybe at that exact moment our soldiers on the archipelago were also staring at the ocean, hoping somehow they could see the mainland. On the two islands where daily life can be harsh and dangerous beyond our imagination, these soldiers, I believe, live by love. Love for their hometown. For their parents. And their country.” He urged readers on the Vietnamese National Army’s anniversary to “take a moment to remember these soldiers who are guarding one of the most important areas of this country”.

Assuming my ignorance of regional geopolitics, our young Vietnamese guide opened an atlas to show me the Paracels, less than 400 kilometres from the coastal town of Da Nang, where his parents lived. Though his no doubt officially printed map showed the archipelago as Vietnam’s, China seized it in 1974. China has also physically asserted its claim to the Spratlys which Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei also claim in whole or in part, leading to violent clashes with Vietnamese and Filipino forces.

In Hanoi the week before, I had heard of several hundred young Vietnamese marching round the Chinese embassy with banners proclaiming “Down with China!” and “Long live Vietnam!” The demonstrations were supposedly spontaneous, but, as the ambassador from another south-east Asian country with whom we had lunch shrugged, “What’s spontaneous here?” There were similar demonstrations outside China’s consulate in Ho Chi Minh City, as I learnt a few days later. I say “heard” and “learnt” because not a word appeared in the English-language papers I saw. A young girl who works in the English-language section of the Voice of Vietnam radio station, with whom we travelled to the ancient Hindu ruins at My Son, knew all about the protests. She told me the demonstrators had demanded a complete ban on Chinese imports. But her radio station had kept quiet about them.

China’s private sources of information became evident in 1962 when Beijing promptly protested because someone from Calcutta’s Chinatown was manhandled in a bus. Here, too, media silence did not prevent the Chinese foreign ministry’s spokesman, Qin Gang, from reaffirming China's sovereignty over the islands and surrounding seas to condemn the protests. “Things happened in Vietnam recently which damaged the relationship between the two countries,” he said. “We hope the Vietnam government takes effective measures to control the situation in order to avoid damaging the relationship.”

All this followed reports of China’s legislature ratifying plans for an administrative region called Sansha with headquarters in Hainan island to manage three archipelagos, including the Paracels and Spratlys. “They are making the Paracels part of Hainan,” our guide exploded. “They want Hainanese to colonize it!” Why did the islands matter so much, I asked, and his hand covered the waters between them and Vietnam’s coast, as he replied with the single word, “Oil.” Others mentioned commercial fishing. National izzat matters even more. There have been reports of Vietnam being humiliatingly forced to renege on exploration contracts in disputed areas because China decided to award the same patch of seabed to another multinational corporation.

“They said they had to teach us a lesson,” our guide said indignantly, unaware that China’s President, Liu Shao-chi, had used those exact words to justify the 1962 war. Vietnam, too, shares a long and unsettled border with China, and our guide spoke of the 1979 invasion while Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in China. He claimed that though the Chinese said they had pulled back a few weeks later, fighting continued till 1986. “I know,” he insisted, “because my brother was in the army.”

The invasion was “punishment” for Vietnamese defiance. The particular form of defiance must have seemed especially audacious, for in December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, which had been a tributary of the Celestial Empire, and whose King Norodom Sihanouk maintained the closest links with the Chinese. It was unbearable that a former colony — Vietnam was under Chinese rule for nearly 1,000 years — should be allowed to impose its own nominee (Heng Samrin) as ruler of a country that China still regarded as part of Nanyang, its “southern ocean”.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, last month’s tension between Vietnam and China brought to the surface a number of old stories about Chinese cunning. One was of China suddenly offering to pay exorbitant prices for cats’ tails, tempting hundreds of Vietnamese to catch thousands of strays and chop off their tails. The result was a sharp increase in the rodent population because the maimed cats couldn’t catch rats or mice. As the vermin ravaged crops, China sold Vietnam a cheap pesticide that worked only too well. Hundreds of thousands of rats died but so did chicken that fed on the carcasses, while villagers who ate the chicken also perished.

I was told the story because cultivators were erecting a plastic fence around paddy fields between Hanoi and Halong Bay. “It’s Chinese plastic,” they said. When Vietnam refused to buy any more deadly Chinese pesticide, China sold them plastic sheets in bulk for fences that would be too high and slippery for rodents to climb or jump. Their numbers had multiplied since cats lost their tails. Another story was of greedy Vietnamese making a fortune when China tempted them with high prices for cinnamon roots, but having to pay dearly when their rootless cinnamon trees withered away. Many such tales highlighted Chinese guile as well as the ease with which the simple Vietnamese are taken for a ride.

So, it is not surprising that the Vietnamese Communist Party’s official organ, Nhan Dan Daily, sees last July’s India-Vietnam agreement as one of the most important events of 2007. The paper noted under the heading, “Vietnam-India strategic partnership”, that “ On July 6, 2007 in New Delhi, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a joint declaration on strategic partnership in order to raise bilateral ties to new heights. The strategic partnership between Vietnam and India encompasses bilateral relations in the political, economic, security, defence, cultural, scientific and technological dimensions and steers their cooperation in regional and multilateral fora.”

Understandably, the most important global happening for Nhan Dan Daily was Vietnam’s election as a non-permanent member of the United Nations security council. Understandably, too, the second most important item was the 40 th anniversary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the adoption of an ASEAN charter. The India-Vietnam agreement followed. It’s the fourth event that reveals the suave diplomacy of a people who have worsted the French, Americans and Chinese in what seems like an endless struggle for survival, and are even now speaking of a possible Fourth Indochina War. For Vietnam places in the fourth place “the success of (the) 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China” which reviewed “30 years of reform and (put) forward a comprehensive direction for the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which bases on a harmonious society and scientific development.”

That’s smooth given the bitterness of centuries of enmity. It’s the sort of finesse India, too, needs in dealing with China’s “peaceful rise”.

sunanda.dattaray@gmail.com