by Jonah Shepp
After anti-China protests in Hanoi escalated into rioting and arson last week, Per Liljas reports on the aftermath of Beijing’s latest provocation in the South China Sea:
Two Chinese passenger ships arrived early on Monday at the central-Vietnamese port of Vung Ang to evacuate Chinese nationals, who are fearing for their safety after anti-Chinese riots last week saw foreign businesses attacked, two Chinese killed and about 140 people injured. More than 3,000 Chinese have already been helped to leave the country following protests that flared up across Vietnam over a Chinese oil rig that is drilling in waters claimed by both sides. Beijing has announced a 4.8-km exclusion zone around the rig, and Hanoi claims that there are 119 Chinese vessels in the area, including warships.
Public protests are a rarity in communist Vietnam. The security forces have been deployed in Ho Chi Minh City to quell new waves of demonstrations, and mobile carriers have sent repeated texts to subscribers with a message from Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung asking people to stay away from further protests. However, small groups of peaceful protesters continued to gather on Sunday, and neither side has shown any real sign of backing down over the territorial conflict, which has revived a long-standing enmity between Beijing and Hanoi.
Zooming out, Sean Mirski analyzes the Chinese leadership’s strategic calculations:
Beijing seeks to control the South China Sea in order to manage national security threats and advance its economic objectives. The Sea represents a strategic vulnerability for China, both as a historical invasion route and as a modern threat to its energy security and export-oriented economy. Controlling the South China Sea would also offer many tangible benefits. The Sea teems with bountiful fishing stocks, a mainstay of many regional economies. Beneath the ocean floor, even more valuable assets wait. Although experts differ about the size of the potential bonanza, they all agree that there is enough petroleum and natural gas to make any bordering state covetous.
These strategic imperatives are reinforced by China’s domestic politics. … So even if China’s leaders were inclined to surrender Chinese claims in the South China Sea, they would be deterred from doing so by the inevitable domestic backlash. Instead of compromising, Beijing feels increasingly pressured by a nationalist public to act assertively in its relations with the other claimants.
Vikram Singh thinks China’s aggressiveness could backfire:
Beijing’s actions carry significant risk, and mask a tension between China’s short and long-term goals. Sailors or airmen in tense standoffs could miscalculate and spark an incident that demands military escalation. Countries like Vietnam could also decide to take a stand and choose to fight rather than give in to Chinese pressure. Yet that decision would be calamitous: the last time China and Vietnam went to war, in 1979, about 60,000 people were killed. China would not benefit from such conflict in Asia, especially if it took the blame for derailing Asia’s long run of peace and progress.
Even if it avoids war, China can overplay this hand to such a degree that Southeast Asian nations defy history and join together to resist domination by a resurgent Middle Kingdom. The 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are far from forming an alliance and have no tradition of such banding together, but ASEAN has grown stronger and is welcoming a greater U.S. role in the region, in part because of China’s assertiveness.
Zack Beauchamp assesses the likelihood of a full-blown conflict as fairly low:
The case for the possibility of war is simple: it’s happened before. In the late 70s, Vietnam aligned itself with the Soviet part of the Communist bloc rather than the Chinese one (the two had, at the time, parted political ways). China wanted to punish Vietnam for the deviationism, and they fought a somewhat pointless, but fairly bloody, war in 1979.
That’s not likely to repeat itself today. For one thing, China is exponentially more powerful than Vietnam, and so Vietnam knows risking a conflict is risking a crushing defeat. For another, China contributes a lot of money to Vietnam’s economy, particularly through tourism. Vietnam wouldn’t want to risk losing that. Finally, as [Jonathan] London notes, Vietnam’s core leadership — its general party secretary, president, and leader of the National Assembly — have a well-known pro-China tack. “Their loyalty,” London writes, “is to the enduring illusion that Beijing is a partner.”
The Dish 