I'm starting to think this blog should be entitled, India, Vietnam and the World.
A CRACKDOWN ON CYBERSPACE’S NATIONALISTS:
There was a time in Vietnam when only the arrests of pro-democracy activists or important figures of the Catholic Church dominated the headlines. Now a new, more unlikely group has joined the serried ranks of those persecuted by Vietnam’s authoritarian regime. Over the past few months a growing number of nationalists critical of Hanoi’s perceived softness towards Beijing have been bearing the brunt of the latest state-led crackdown on journalists and bloggers. With more than 21 million internet users in a country of 87 million inhabitants and an estimated 3 to 4 million blogs, the Vietnamese state is finding it increasingly arduous to police the internet, which has become a major medium of expression for those critical of its policies. Over the past year and a half China has been at the centre of a number of fierce online discussions, and has attracted the ire of Vietnam’s army of online patriots, whether it be due to its upped naval assertiveness around the disputed Spratly and Paracel Islands, or to the controversial decision by Nguyen Tam Dung’s government in 2007 to allow the Chinese company Chinalco to exploit Vietnam’s Central Highlands’ massive reserves of bauxite ore. This decision has given way over the past year to a barrage of criticisms from all sorts of individuals and groups, from the revered war hero General Vo Nguyen Giap to leaders of the Buddhist and Catholic religious communities. Attention has been drawn to China’s disastrous track record in terms of environmental degradation, and to the fact that Chinalco, like many other Chinese multinationals, imports everything “from its workers to the toilet seats they use”, thus rendering little service to local communities. Most interestingly, the announcement that US aluminum giant Alcon was also planning to mine two sites in the Dak Nong province of the Central Highlands garnered hardly any attention. Amongst other issues of concern raised by Vietnamese bloggers was the continued heavy damming by China of the Mekong River, which is the lifeblood of large swathes of Vietnam’s south but which originates in China.
Whereas in the past, the Party actively encouraged grassroots nationalism, it would seem now that for segments of the Vietnamese leadership, the blogosphere’s increasingly strident Sinophobia has become more of a diplomatic liability than a strength to draw upon. The recent clampdown appears to be spearheaded by a shadowy military intelligence organization called GD II (General Department II), or, in Vietnamese, Tong Cuc II.
General Department II, reportedly first founded in the early 1980s, is now run by arch-conservative and China sympathizer Vice Defense Minister Nguyen Chi Vinh, and has become the favoured weapon of the Conservative faction in its struggle for power prior to the XIth Party Congress, due to take place in 2011.
POLITICAL JOCKEYING AMONGST THE PARTY LEADERSHIP PRIOR TO THE XIth CONGRESS:
The XIth Congress is of major importance as it will determine key leadership positions and the political power structure for years to come. In the absence of genuine ideological disputes, Hanoi’s China policy seems to have now become the principal dividing line in-between the liberal and conservative factions. GD II’s repression of nationalist bloggers, say most experts, can be interpreted as a demonstration of power by the conservatives, who, with the recent elevation of their leader To Ruy Ha to the Politburo, appear to be gaining a certain ascendancy. It is of course, extremely difficult for anyone outside of the Party leadership to predict the course that Vietnam’s byzantine and opaque factional in-fighting will take. It is well known however, that Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s liberal economic policies have irked a fair number of the more traditional-minded Party members, who fear that economic liberalization will gradually lead to a desire for greater political freedom, thus putting the Party’s hold over society in jeopardy. Although Tan Dung can still draw on the younger, less ideological members of the party that are resolutely in favour of his outwards looking economic reforms, Vietnam’s recent financial woes have also made it ever more reliant on its northern neighbour for investments. Indeed, there are persistent but as yet unconfirmed rumours that this spring, as Vietnam teetered on the brink of a currency crisis and fiscal collapse, it resorted to asking China for a financial bailout package. This growing dependence on Beijing has thus been savvily instrumentalized by the conservative fringe to their political advantage. Already ugly rumours, presumably launched by GD II, have started to surface, accusing Prime Minister Dung of embezzlement in the government-tendered Chinalco bauxite project. This would not be the first time that GD II has been used by the China faction to interfere in party politics before a national Congress. Indeed, this recent swell of rumours bears strong resemblances with the smear campaign that GD II was also suspected of triggering before the 10th national Congress, in 2006, known as the ‘T-4 Scandal’, which accused several current and prior Communist leaders of being on the CIA’s payroll. Amongst those accused was the General Vo Nguyen Giap, who had already drawn attention to GD II’s troublesome habit of political meddling in 2004 after it was discovered that a wire-tapping section of the organization had been used to spy on political rivals. The rising influence of GD II is a troubling development, and has fostered fears among some members of the Party leadership that if military intelligence services are not reined in sooner or later, Vietnam could be heading towards a configuration similar to that of Pakistan, where segments of the ISI, Pakistan’s notoriously powerful military intelligence agency, have formed alternative power structures that follow their own private agendas. For the time being, however, and despite a law on National Security adopted by the National Assembly in 2004 defining the responsibilities and limitations of security agencies, GD II does not seem to have been successfully restrained.
VIETNAM’S SEEMINGLY SCHIZOID CHINA POLICY:
This recent bout of labyrinthine politicking has only added to the complexity of Vietnam’s relationship towards China, which to the outsider can sometimes appear unfathomable, if not downright schizoid in nature.
Indeed, the same year that GD II’s grunts were swooping down on nationalist bloggers, the VPA finalized a 1.8 billion dollar deal with Russia for six state of the art Kilo Class submarines. With an annual defense budget estimated by Jane’s Intelligence Review to be at barely 3.6 billion dollars, the purchase of the flotilla is a substantial investment, and is a clear sign to Beijing that Hanoi is intent on developing an effective sea denial strategy in order to protect its maritime territorial claims. Veteran Vietnam watcher Carlyle Thayer has defined Vietnam’s China policy in the following terms; “Vietnam is not pursuing a balance of power strategy in relation to China’s rise. Nor is Vietnam bandwagoning with China in an effort to ward off possible coercion or to gain economic advantage.” Vietnam’s leadership, he claims, are “pursuing a mix of engagement, omni-enmeshment and hedging strategies towards China”.
While this may seem at first glance to be both impossibly multi-faceted and strategically nonsensical, one could argue that this ambivalence towards China, which oscillates in-between deference and defiance, is hardly a recent development. It is in fact historically ingrained in Vietnam’s strategic perception of its neighbour.
PARALLELS AND LESSONS DRAWN FROM HISTORY:
In his book entitled China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry, published in 2006, American Professor Brantly Womack states that “The Sino-Vietnamese relationship presents an interesting case of a long-term asymmetric relationship that has moved through a full gamut of possible variations.” Indeed, Vietnamese identity is unique in that it has formed itself both through and in opposition to Chinese influence. After Vietnam was forcibly incorporated into the Han Empire in 111 BC, it was occupied by China for almost a thousand years, until it finally achieved its independence at the sunset of the Tang Dynasty in 939 AD. For the next 900 years, Vietnam enjoyed an almost uninterrupted period of self-rule, accepting grudgingly to enter into a tributary relationship with China, but successfully repelling waves of numerically superior invading armies during the Yuan and Ming dynasty eras.
Inevitably, during the thousand years of Chinese rule, Vietnam was influenced by its occupiers. Chinese agricultural practices and military methods of organization were adopted and much of the Vietnamese language’s political, literary and military vocabulary to this day comes from Chinese. While the process of Sinicization or Hanwa was intensive among the Vietnamese aristocracy and elites (even after the departure of the Chinese, the Chinese civil service examination system remained the official method of selection of government officials, and young Vietnamese aristocrats were schooled in Confucian classics), the peasantry remained wedded to its traditional ways, and unlike the nobility, refused to abandon Buddhism in favour of Confucianism.
One could almost draw a parallel with current events unfolding in Vietnam : segments of the new aristocracy (i.e. the party elite) are tilting towards China, whereas the common people, represented by the country’s ever more numerous bloggers and cyberactivists are the staunch defenders of Vietnamese national identity and interests.
When it comes to evaluating the cultural imprint left on Vietnam’s diplomacy with China, it has been claimed that the Sino-Vietnamese relationship is rooted in the Confucian concept of pupil-teacher, and that if tensions have occasionally flared in-between the two states over the past forty years it is due to the fact that as Vietnam consolidated itself as a modern nation after the Indo-China war, it has sought to replace the traditionally demeaning tutelary relationship with a more equal one. This was no easy task, as Brantly Womack explains; “With such a neighbour, Vietnam is caught in a standing dilemma. It needs peace with China more than China needs peace with it, but if it allows China to push it around, to move the boundary stone, it loses its national substance and autonomy.”
It is this seemingly imponderable dilemma that Vietnam’s leadership will therefore have to overcome in the following years. One thing is certain however; by cracking down on its nationalist bloggers and journalists, the Party runs the risk of exacerbating the historical divide in-between the Vietnamese peasantry and elites with regard to China, and in so doing, of depriving itself from what Ho Chi Minh once called Vietnam’s most potent “secret weapon”- its people’s fierce patriotism.
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