CHAPTER III
The Fate of Vietnam
The effect of Hanoi is cerebral: what the Vietnamese capital catches in freeze frame is the process of history itself. I do not mean history merely as some fatalistic, geographically determined drum roll of successive dynasties and depredations, but also history as the summation of brave individual acts and nerve-racking calculations. The maps, dioramas, and massive gray stelae in the History Museum commemorate anxious Vietnamese resistances against the Chinese Song, Ming, and Qing empires in the eleventh, fifteenth, and eighteenth centuries: for although Vietnam was integrated into China until the tenth century, its separate political identity from the Middle Kingdom ever since has been something of a miracle that no theory of the past can adequately explain.
More stelae, erected in the late fifteenth century in the Temple of Literature, poignantly rescue the names and contributions of eighty-two medieval scholars from oblivion. In fact, there is a particular intensity about the Vietnamese historical imagination. The depth and clutter of the Ngoc Son Temple (which commemorates the defeat of the thirteenth century Yuan Chinese), with its copper-faced Buddha embraced by incense, gold leaf, and crimson wood, and surrounded, in turn, by a leafy pea-soup lake, constitutes spiritual preparation for the more austere mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh himself. Ho, one of the great minor men of the twentieth century, and one of history’s great pragmatists, fused Marxism, Confucianism, and nationalism into a weapon against the Chinese, the French, and the Americans, laying the groundwork for Vietnam’s successful resistances against three world empires. Buddha-like gilded statues of Ho punctuate many an official meeting room in this capital. His mausoleum gives out onto distempered, century-old European buildings and churches, once the political nerve center of French Indochina, an iffy enterprise that Paris had bravely, tenaciously tried to prolong following World War II, forcing a war against the Vietnamese that culminated in that signal humiliation for the French: the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
French Indochina had also comprised Laos and Cambodia, but just as Hanoi was the region’s political capital, Saigon was its commercial capital. Vietnam dominated Indochina, in other words, with Thai and Khmer forces, to name a few, periodically cooperating with China to resist Vietnamese power. In fact, while the United States fought to preserve an independent South Vietnam against the communist North, it was the unified Vietnam that emerged under communist control with America’s defeat that would prove a far greater threat to China than it would to the United States.1 Such is the record of Vietnamese dynamism in the region.
Beyond these old French edifices come the latest, epic struggles against historical fate: Hanoi’s screaming, pulsating business district, with its hordes of privately owned motorbikes—the drivers texting on cell phones in traffic jams—and cutting-edge new facades invading an otherwise cruddy-drab jumble of storefronts. This is pre-chain store capitalism, with cafés everywhere—each different in mood and design from the other—offering some of the best coffee in the world, yet no sign of Starbucks. Hanoi, despite all the history, is no outdoor museum like the great cities of Europe. It is still in the ungainly process of becoming, closer still to the disheveled chaos of India than to the alienating sterility of Singapore. Vietnamese are now prying their way into the first world, for the sake of themselves and their families obviously, but also in order to preserve their independence against an equally dynamic China.
Hanoi, as it has been since antiquity, remains a city of nervous political calculations: the wages these days of a potential middle-level power—the thirteenth most populous country in the world—with a long coastline at the crossroads of major maritime routes and close to offshore energy deposits. Vietnam is Southeast Asia’s “principal protagonist” in the South China Sea dispute, asserting sovereignty over both the Paracel and Spratly islands, “based on historical usage dating back to at least the 17th century,” write scholars Clive Schofield and Ian Storey.2 “If China can break off Vietnam they’ve won the South China Sea,” a top U.S. official told me. “Malaysia is lying low, Brunei has solved its problem with China, Indonesia has no well-defined foreign policy on the subject, the Philippines has few cards to play despite that country’s ingenious boisterousness and incendiary statements, Singapore is capable but lacks size.”
It’s all up to Vietnam, in other words.
Vietnam’s arrival at this juncture was gradual. Ngo Quang Xuan, vice chairman of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee, told me that the critical year for contemporary Vietnam was not 1975, when South Vietnam was overrun by the communist North; but 1995, when relations were normalized with the United States and when Vietnam joined ASEAN, and entered into a “framework” agreement with the European Union. “We joined the world, in other words.” He admitted that prior to these decisions, “we had many hard discussions among ourselves.” For the truth is, that despite their successive victories over the French and the Americans, the Vietnamese communists, as their officials explained to me in a series of conversations over several weeks, felt continually humbled by events thereafter.
Consider: Vietnam had invaded Cambodia in 1978, liberating that country from the genocidal madness of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. Though the invasion was an act of cold-blooded realism—as the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge represented a strategic threat to Vietnam—it had a vast and profoundly positive humanitarian effect. Nevertheless, for this pivotal act of mercy pro-Soviet Vietnam was embargoed by a pro-Chinese coalition that included the United States, which ever since President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 had tilted toward Beijing. In 1979, China itself invaded Vietnam, in order to keep Vietnam from marching through Cambodia to Thailand. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had failed to come to the aid of its client state in Hanoi. Vietnam was now diplomatically isolated, stuck in a debilitating quagmire in Cambodia, and burdened by backbreaking poverty, largely as a result of its own militarism. Visiting Hanoi in the 1970s, Singapore’s then prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, writes that he found the Vietnamese leaders “insufferable,” priding themselves as the “Prussians” of Southeast Asia.3 But the arrogance, as Vietnamese leaders told me, didn’t last. With severe food shortages and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989–1991, Vietnam was finally forced to pull its troops out of Cambodia. Vietnam was now utterly friendless—the victory over the Americans a distant memory. “The feeling of victory in that war was always muted because there was never a peace dividend,” a Vietnamese diplomat explained.
“The Vietnamese don’t have amnesia regarding the war against the United States in the 1960s and 1970s,” a Western diplomat told me. “Rather, a certain generation of Americans is stuck in a time warp.” The Vietnamese have not forgotten that 20 percent of their country is uninhabitable because of unexploded American ordnance; or, because of the effect of the defoliant Agent Orange, nothing will ever grow on significant parts of the landscape. It is just that three quarters of all Vietnamese were born after the “American War,” as they call it—to distinguish it from all the others they have fought before and since. And an even larger percentage have no usable memory of it.
The students and young officials I met at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, an arm of the Foreign Ministry, are further removed chronologically from the American War than baby boomers are from World War II. In a town hall-style meeting with me they were, in fact, critical at times of the United States: but for reasons that had nothing to do with the war. They were upset that America had not intervened against China in the 1990s when Beijing challenged the Philippines’ ownership of Mischief Reef, part of the Spratly Islands group in the South China Sea; and that America had not engaged economically and diplomatically more with Burma prior to 2011, so as to prevent that country from becoming a satellite of Beijing. Summarized one student: “U.S. power is necessary for the security of the world.” Indeed, one student and official after another at the Diplomatic Academy used the term “balancing power [vis-à-vis China]” to describe the United States. “Th
e Chinese are too strong, too assertive,” one female analyst said, “that is why a Pax Sinica is very threatening to us.”
Both Vietnam and the United States “share an interest in preventing China … from dominating seaborne trade routes and enforcing territorial claims through coercion,” writes Professor Carlyle A. Thayer of the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. “Vietnam sees the U.S. presence as a hedge against China’s rising military power.”4
“The Vietnamese,” writes David Lamb, who covered the war in the 1960s and returned in the 1990s as the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Hanoi, simply “liked Americans.… They had lost 3 million citizens [one out of ten killed or wounded], been pummeled with 15 million tons of munitions—twice the tonnage dropped on all of Europe and Asia during World War II—and lived through a war that created 7 million refugees in South Vietnam and destroyed the industry and infrastructure of North Vietnam. Yet,” he goes on, “they had put the war behind them in a way that many Americans hadn’t. Their hospitals weren’t full of veterans with postcombat trauma, and they had no national mourning memorials like the Vietnam Wall in Washington. They didn’t write books about the war. Veterans didn’t gather over beers to talk about it. Schoolchildren studied it as only a brief page in their country’s 2,500-year history.”5
Indeed, the cynicism and exasperation with which quite a few Europeans and members of the American Left perennially view the United States is utterly absent in Vietnam. Encapsulating the general attitude here, Nguyen Duc Hung, a former ambassador to Canada, told me: “just as Vietnamese spread south over the centuries to define themselves as a nation, the Americans spread westward—and it wasn’t for gold in California, it was for freedom.”
Nevertheless, whereas America has been marginal to the Vietnamese past, China has been crucial. The very term Indochina is accurate to the extent that Indian influence is apparent throughout the rest of Southeast Asia, whereas Chinese influence is concentrated for the most part in northern Vietnam. It would take the “prolonged chaos” of the late Tang Dynasty and the subsequent semi-chaotic interlude of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms of the tenth century in China to allow for an independent Vietnamese state to take shape.6 “The overwhelming emphasis of official Vietnamese history is on resistance, almost always against China,” writes Robert Templer in a pathbreaking book about contemporary Vietnam, Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam. “The fear of domination has been constant and has crossed every ideological gap, it has created the brittle sense of anxiety and defensiveness about Vietnamese identity.”7 Vietnamese fear of China is profound precisely because Vietnam cannot escape from the embrace of its gargantuan northern neighbor, whose population is fifteen times that of Vietnam. Vietnamese know that geography dictates the terms of their relationship with China: they may win the battle, but then they are always off to Beijing to pay tribute. It is a situation alien to a virtual island nation like America.
Explains another Vietnamese diplomat: “China invaded Vietnam seventeen times. The U.S. invaded Mexico only once, and look at how sensitive the Mexicans are about that. We grow up with textbooks full of stories of national heroes who fought China.” Or as a western expert of Vietnam put it: “Think of how touchy Canadians are about America, now imagine if America had repeatedly sent troops into Canada.”
The Vietnamese historical hostility to China is, in part, artificially constructed: modern-day Vietnamese emphasize the resistances against medieval and early modern Chinese domination, while downplaying the many centuries of “close emulation” of China and the good relations with it, in order to serve the needs of a strong state identity.8 Nevertheless, there is little denying the passion with which Vietnamese voice their concern about their neighbor to the north.
Vietnamese identity is unique in that it has been formed “through and in opposition to” Chinese influence, in the words of a BBC report. Vietnam itself began as a southern outpost of Sinic culture. It was forcibly incorporated into China’s Han Empire in 111 BC. From that time forward it was occupied by China or under its yoke in tributary status for nearly a millennium, until, as I’ve said, it finally freed itself near the twilight of China’s Tang dynasty in ad 939. Thereafter, Vietnamese dynasties like the Ly, Tran, and Le were great precisely because of their resistance to Chinese control from the north, repelling as they did waves of numerically superior armies, notes the former George Mason University scholar Neil L. Jamieson in Understanding Vietnam.9 The Vietnamese did not always succeed: there was a Ming occupation between 1407 and 1427, evidence of how the late-medieval Chinese never resigned themselves to Vietnamese independence. What clarified the nineteenth century Qing dynasty’s acceptance of an independent Vietnam was the French mapmakers’ insistence on delineating their own territory of Indochina from that of China.
“Chinese contributions to Vietnam cover all aspects of culture, society, and government, from chopsticks wielded by peasants to writing brushes wielded by scholars and officials,” writes Cornell University area expert Keith Weller Taylor in The Birth of Vietnam.10 Vietnamese family names and vocabulary and grammar, as well as artistic and literary styles, reflect deep Chinese influences.11 Indeed, Vietnamese literature was “impregnated” with the classical Confucian heritage of China. Chinese used to be the language of Vietnamese scholarship just as Latin used to be in Europe: this, despite the fact that along with Chinese, the Vietnamese language has Mon-Khmer and Thai origins. Through it all, Vietnamese peasant culture retained its uniqueness to a greater extent than did the culture of the Vietnamese elite. Among the elite, explains the University of Michigan Southeast Asia expert Victor Lieberman, Chinese administrative norms were “internalized to the point that their alien origins became irrelevant.” What helped reinforce the fierce desire of all Vietnamese to be separate from China was their contact with the Chams and Khmers to the south, who were themselves influenced by non-Chinese civilizations, particularly that of India. Precisely because of their intense similarity with the Chinese, the Vietnamese are burdened—as I’ve said—by the narcissism of small differences, and this makes events from the past more vivid to them.
Vietnamese military victories over China in the north, like that of Emperor Le Loi’s near Hanoi in 1426, and against the Chams and Khmers in the south in 1471 and 1778, all worked to forge a distinct national identity, helped by the fact that, up through modern times, China rarely let Vietnam alone. In 1946, the Chinese colluded with the French to have the former’s occupation forces in northern Vietnam replaced by the latter’s. In 1979, as we know, four years after the United States quit Vietnam, 100,000 Chinese troops invaded. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping “never lost his visceral hatred of the Vietnamese,” writes Robert Templer, and, therefore, devised a policy of “bleeding Hanoi white,” by entangling Vietnam in a guerrilla war in Cambodia.12 Now, because of conflicting Vietnamese and Chinese claims to the South China Sea, China’s naval intrusion on the Gulf of Tonkin, and China’s covetous attitude toward Vietnam’s 1,900-mile seaboard straddling the sea lines of communication that link the Indian and Western Pacific oceans, this has all become operative history; whereas Vietnam’s war with America simply isn’t: except for one detail, though. Because the Vietnamese defeated the United States in a war, they see themselves as the superior party in the bilateral relationship: they have no chips on their shoulder, no axes to grind, no face to lose regarding a future de facto military alliance with America. Vietnamese harbor relatively few sensitivities about the American War precisely because they won it.
The American War, like the Chinese invasion that followed, and Vietnam’s own invasion of Cambodia that had led to the Chinese invasion in the first place, are all part of a similar history that seems long past. It is a history of ground wars that stemmed, in part, from Western decolonization. Now that land border questions are settled, nationalist competition in much of Asia has extended to the maritime domain; namely to the South China Sea. In fact, Vietnam has a creation myth in which the country was founded by a uni
on between the Dragon Lord Lac Long Quan and the fairy Au Co. Together they produced one hundred sons, fifty migrating with the mother to the mountains and the other fifty migrating with the father to the sea. It is the father’s legacy that now seems central to Vietnam’s destiny, following decades of rule by the mother.
“Land border issues are no longer important to us compared to the South China Sea,” says Nguyen Duy Chien, vice chairman of the National Boundary Commission. Chien provided me with a typical Vietnamese performance that recalled Lee Kuan Yew’s 1970s impression of the Vietnamese leadership as deadly serious and “Confucianist.”13 We met in a bare and humble office. Chien wore a drab suit. The meeting started and concluded exactly on time and he filled the hour with a relentlessly detailed PowerPoint presentation that attacked the Chinese position from every conceivable point of view.
Chien began with a summary of the land border situation: two hundred areas of dispute with China had been settled during eight years of negotiation in the 1990s, with demarcation work completed in 2008. “Compared with 314 border markers on the frontier with Qing China [at the turn of the twentieth century], there are now 1,971. The problem is not on land, it’s maritime.” One third of Vietnam’s population lives along the coast, he told me, and the marine sector comprises 50 percent of Vietnam’s GDP. Vietnam claims a line two hundred miles straight out over its continental shelf into the South China Sea (which Vietnamese call the “East Sea,” as they dispute the word “China” in the name). This complies with the economic exclusion zones defined in the Convention on the Law of the Sea. But as Chien admitted, it “overlaps” with maritime areas claimed by China and Malaysia, and with those of Cambodia and Thailand in the adjacent Gulf of Thailand. Though the Gulf of Tonkin is geographically a thorny area, in which the northern Vietnamese coastline is blocked from the open sea by China’s Hainan Island, Chien explained that Vietnam and China have settled the issue by dividing the energy-rich gulf in half, though the mouth of the gulf still has to be demarcated.
Asia's Cauldron Page 7
