Asia's Cauldron

by Robert D. Kaplan

  “But we cannot accept the cow’s tongue—China’s dashed line in the South China Sea. China says the area is in dispute. We say no. The cow’s tongue violates the claims of five countries.”

  Chien then showed me a series of maps on his computer, and recounted a long history. “When the Ming emperors occupied Vietnam for a time in the fifteenth century they didn’t occupy the Paracels and Spratlys. If these island groups belonged to China, why didn’t the Ming emperors include them in their maps? In the early twentieth century,” he went on, “why did the maps of the Qing emperors ignore the Paracels and Spratlys if they belonged to China?” In 1933, France sent troops to the Paracels and Spratlys, he told me, implying that the islands, because they were part of French Indochina, now belong to Vietnam. He added that in 1956 and again in 1988, China used “military force” to capture rocks in the Paracels. Finally, he displayed a slide of the Santa Maria del Monte church in Italy, which holds a geographical manuscript from 1850, with one and a half pages explaining how the Paracels belong to Vietnam. His obsession with such details had a purpose, for another map in his PowerPoint showed much of the South China Sea, including the Paracels and Spratlys, divided into tiny square blocks that signified oil concessions that Vietnam might in the future award to international companies.

  Said a foreign ministry official: “When it comes to the South China Sea, China’s attitude is very worrisome, it is constantly in the minds of our people.” Rear Admiral Nguyen Viet Nhien, the deputy commander of the Vietnamese People’s Navy, called the cow’s tongue “unreasonable.” Meeting at naval headquarters in the port of Haiphong—heavily bombed by the United States between 1965 and 1972—Admiral Nhien provided me with another dogged Vietnamese performance. Beside him was a large bust of Ho Chi Minh and a massive map showing all the competing claims in the “East Sea” as he repeatedly referred to it. For forty-five minutes he went on, noting every Chinese military action in the Paracels and Spratlys: in particular the 1974 takeover of the western part of the Paracels from a tottering Saigon government. The cow’s tongue, he admitted, was less a Chinese legal claim than a “historic dream” of Beijing’s, which, in addition to being a subject of debate itself within Beijing power circles, might eventually be ceded in whole or in part in future negotiations. Nevertheless, the Chinese, by building a blue-water navy and commanding East Asia’s economy as they do, might still come to dominate the South China Sea as the United States came to dominate the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. Senior Colonel Dzung Kim Le explained that the very expansion of the Chinese economy—however slowed—will lead to a more pronounced naval presence in the South China Sea, coupled with the desire to exploit energy resources there. By declaring an intention to hold its ground in the face of this emerging development, Vietnam is calling forth a nationalism—in all its unyielding intensity—that was last on display during the period of land wars decades ago.

  Vietnamese told me again and again that the South China Sea signifies more than just a system of territorial disputes: it is the crossroads of global maritime commerce, vital to the energy needs of South Korea and Japan, and the place where China could one day check the power of the United States in Asia. Vietnam truly lies at the historic and cultural heart of what Obama administration policymakers increasingly label the “Indo-Pacific”—India plus East Asia.

  Nothing better illustrates the Vietnamese desire to be a major player in the region than their purchase of six state-of-the-art Kilo-class submarines from Russia. A Western defense expert told me that the sale makes no logical sense. “There is going to be real sticker-shock for the Vietnamese when they find out just how much it costs merely to maintain these subs.” More important, the Vietnamese will have to train crews to use them, a generational undertaking. “To counter Chinese subs, they would have been better off concentrating on antisubmarine warfare and littoral defense.” Clearly, the Vietnamese bought these submarines as prestige items, to demonstrate that we’re serious. According to this defense expert, the Vietnamese are “freaked out” by the construction of a Chinese underground nuclear submarine base on Hainan Island in the Gulf of Tonkin.

  The multibillion-dollar deal with Russia for the submarines includes a $200 million refurbishment of Cam Ranh Bay, one of the finest deep-water anchorages in Southeast Asia, astride the South China Sea maritime routes, and a major base of operations for the U.S. military during the American War. The Vietnamese have stated that their aim is to make Cam Ranh Bay available for use to foreign navies. Ian Storey, a fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, says that an unspoken Vietnamese desire is that the Cam Ranh Bay overhaul will “strengthen defense ties with America and facilitate the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia as a counter to China’s rising power.” Cam Ranh Bay plays perfectly into the Pentagon’s places not bases strategy, whereby American ships and planes can regularly visit foreign military outposts for repairs and resupply without the need for formal, politically sensitive basing arrangements. U.S. naval platforms—aircraft carriers, destroyers, and resupply and hospital ships—are already visiting Vietnamese ports on a periodic basis. Ngo Quang Xuan, the Foreign Affairs Committee vice chairman, was blunt: “U.S. presence is needed for a free maritime climate in the South China Sea.”

  A de facto American-Vietnamese strategic partnership was, in effect, announced as far back as July 2010 at an ASEAN Regional Forum meeting in Hanoi, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the United States has a “national interest” in the South China Sea, that the United States is ready to participate in multilateral efforts to resolve South China Sea territorial disputes, and that maritime claims should be based on land features: that is, on the extension of continental shelves, a concept violated by China’s historic dashed line or cow’s tongue. Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi called Clinton’s remarks “virtually an attack on China.” American officials basically shrugged off Yang’s comments. There was probably no better indication of just how close Washington had moved toward Vietnam than the initialing three months earlier of a civilian nuclear power deal that will theoretically allow American firms to help build atomic energy plants here.

  The fact is, no country is as threatened by China’s rise as much as Vietnam. Take the Vietnamese approach to ASEAN. Though the Vietnamese would like ASEAN to be stronger, in order to be a counterweight to China, they are realistic, they told me. They know that the very puissance of nationalism in Asia—as opposed to postnationalism for so many decades in Europe—inhibits the integration of ASEAN’s member states. “ASEAN is not even a customs union—which makes it a very low level trading bloc,” one official explained. In the plush, red-cushioned elegance of the Foreign Ministry, with its glittering tea sets and oriental-French decor, I was repeatedly counseled on Chinese grand strategy, which is, according to the Vietnamese, to postpone all multilateral discussions with ASEAN of South China Sea disputes while Beijing gets stronger militarily, and, in the meantime, to extract concessions from individual Southeast Asian nations through bilateral negotiations—divide and conquer, in other words. China’s navy, Vietnamese defense officials told me, is already larger than those of all the ASEAN countries combined.

  But Vietnam is by no means estranged from China and in the arms of the United States. Vietnam is too dependent on (and interconnected with) China for that. As Australian expert Carlyle Thayer explains, Vietnamese-Chinese military ties have developed alongside Vietnamese-American ones.14 While the United States is Vietnam’s largest export market, Vietnam imports more goods from China than from any other country—cotton, machines, fertilizer, pesticide, electronics, leather, a host of other consumer items, you name it. The economy here simply couldn’t function without China, even as China, by flooding Vietnam with cheap products, impedes the growth of local manufacturing. Furthermore, Vietnamese officials are impressed with the geographical asymmetry of their situation: as they say, a distant water can’t put out a nearby fire. China’s proximity and the fact that the
United States is half a world away means that the Vietnamese have to put up with an indignity such as the environmental destruction that comes with Chinese bauxite mining of Vietnam’s lush Central Highlands, a project that like others around the country employs Chinese workers rather than Vietnamese ones. “We can’t relocate, statistically we’re one province of China,” Nguyen Tam Chien, a former deputy foreign minister, told me.

  Because of the failure of the Soviet Union to help Vietnam in 1979, the Vietnamese will never again fully trust a faraway power. Beyond geography, the Vietnamese at a certain fundamental level distrust the United States. One official told me simply that the United States is in decline, a condition made worse, he claimed, by Washington’s fixation with the Middle East rather than with the rise of China in East Asia. Though such an analysis is self-serving, it may nevertheless be true; or, rather, partly true. Then there is the fear of the United States selling out Vietnam for the sake of a warmer relationship with China: Xuan, the vice chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, specifically mentioned Nixon’s opening to China as providing the geostrategic context for China’s invasion of Vietnam. “It can happen again,” shaking his head in frustration. Contradictorily, the Vietnamese want the United States to be more of a coldhearted, realist actor in international affairs just like themselves. “The elephant in the room during our discussions with the Americans is democracy and human rights,” one official of the communist government told me. The Vietnamese live in fear that because of Congress, the media, and various pressure groups in Washington, the Americans may one day sell them out the way they have for periods of time other coup-prone and autocratic countries: Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Nepal, for example. The Vietnamese look at the former unwillingness of Washington to balance against China for decades in Burma because of Rangoon’s human rights record and bristle. “The highest value should be on national solidarity and independence. It is the nation, not the individual, that makes you free,” Le Chi Dzung, a Foreign Ministry deputy director general, told me, trying to explain his country’s political philosophy.

  In fact, the survival of communist rule in the face of Vietnam’s rampant capitalism is partly explained by the party’s nationalist credentials, having governed the country during wars against the French, Americans, and Chinese. Moreover, as was the case with Tito in Yugoslavia and Enver Hoxha in Albania, Ho Chi Minh was a homegrown leader not imposed on the country by an invading army, unlike so many other communist rulers. Moreover, the Vietnamese communists have always played up the similarities between Ho Chi Minh Thought and Confucianism, with its respect for the family and authority. “Nationalism builds out from Confucianism,” Le Chi Dzung of the Foreign Ministry says. Neil Jamieson writes of “that common Vietnamese quality of ‘absolutism,’ ” an assumption of “some underlying, determinative moral order in the world.”15 This, in turn, is related to the idea of chinh nghia, which might be loosely translated as one’s social obligation, to one’s family and larger solidarity group.

  Yet another reason why communism persists here is precisely because its very substance is slipping away, and thus an uprising is for the time being unnecessary; though, of course, there is a price to be paid for insufficient reform. Vietnam is in a situation similar to that of China: governed by a Communist Party that has all but given up communism, and has an implicit social contract with the population, in which the party guarantees higher or sustained income levels while the citizens agree not to protest too loudly. (Vietnam cannot ultimately be estranged from China, for they are both embarked on the same unique experiment: delivering capitalist riches to countries ruled by communist parties.)

  Think of it, here is a society that has gone from ration books to enjoying one of the largest rice surpluses in the world in a quarter of a century. Vietnam recently graduated in statistical terms to a lower-middle-income country with a per capita GDP of $1,100. Instead of a single personality to hate with his picture on billboards, as was the case in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, there is a faceless triumvirate of leaders—the party chairman, the state president, and the prime minister—that has delivered an average of 7 percent growth in the GDP annually between 2002 and 2012. Even in the teeth of the Great Recession in 2009, the local economy grew by 5.5 percent. “This is one of the most impressive records of poverty alleviation in world history,” says a Western diplomat. “They have gone from bicycles to motorcycles.” That to them may be democracy. And even if it isn’t, one can say that the autocracies of Vietnam and China have not robbed people of their dignity the way those of the Middle East have. “The leaders of the Middle East stayed in office too long and maintained states of emergency for decades, that is not the case here,” a former high-ranking Vietnamese political leader told me. “But the problems of corruption, huge income gaps, and high youth unemployment we share with countries of the Middle East.” What spooks the Communist Party here is less the specter of the Arab Spring than that of the student uprising in 1989 in China, a time when inflation was as high in China as it was in Vietnam until recently, and corruption and nepotism were perceived by the population to be beyond control: again, the case with Vietnam. And yet, party officials also worry about political reform leading them down the path of pre-1975 South Vietnam, whose weak, faction-ridden governments were integral to that state’s collapse; or to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China, with its feeble central authority that led to foreign domination. Thus, Vietnamese officials openly admire Singapore: a predominantly single-party company state that emanates discipline and clean government, something Vietnam’s corruption-ridden regime is still a long way from.

  The Singapore model was made explicit for me at the Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Park, twenty miles outside Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as it is still called by everyone outside of government officialdom. I beheld a futuristic world of perfectly maintained and manicured right-angle streets where, in a security-controlled environment, 240 manufacturing firms from Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, Europe, and the United States were producing luxury golf clubs, microchips, pharmaceuticals, high-end footwear, aerospace electronics, and so on. In the next stage of development, luxury condominiums were planned on-site for the foreign workers who will live and work here. An American plant manager at the park told me that his company chose Vietnam for its high-tech operation through a process of elimination: “We needed low labor costs. We had no desire to locate in Eastern Europe or Africa [which didn’t have the Asian work ethic]. In China wages are already starting to rise. Indonesia and Malaysia are Muslim, and that scares us away. Thailand has lately become unstable. So Vietnam loomed for us: it’s like China was two decades ago, on the verge of a boom.” He added: “We give our employees in Vietnam standardized intelligence tests. They score higher than our employees in the U.S.”

  There are three other Vietnam-Singapore Industrial Parks in the country, whose aim is to bring the corporate, squeaky-clean, environmentally green, and controlled Singapore model of development to Vietnam. They are among four hundred industrial parks located throughout Vietnam, from north to south, that all to greater and lesser extents promote the same values of Western-style development and efficiency. The existing megacities of Saigon and the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor cannot be wholly reborn, their problems cannot be wholly alleviated: the future is new cities that will relieve demographic pressure on the old ones. True modernity means developing the countryside so that fewer people will want to migrate to cities in the first place. These industrial parks, with Singapore as the role model, are what will help change the Vietnamese countryside. Because their whole purpose is to be self-contained, they bring infrastructure, such as electricity and water, along with them, as well as one-stop shopping for foreign firms seeking government permits.

  Whereas Vietnam was politically unified when the North Vietnamese communists overran Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City in 1975, only now, through industrial parks and other means of development, is Vietnam becoming economicall
y and culturally unified, through a global standard of production that is connecting Hanoi and Saigon. Because this latest stage of development involves direct input from other Asian tiger economies, Vietnam is becoming increasingly integrated with the rest of the region and thus becoming comfortable with the partial erosion of sovereignty that a future, more robust ASEAN may represent.

  “Vietnamese nationalism is aggressive only towards China, an historical enemy, but not towards any other state in the region,” Dang Thanh Tam, one of Saigon’s leading entrepreneurs, told me. Tam, sitting at an empty desk while operating two smart phones almost simultaneously, embodies the new Saigon, which, because it ceased being a political capital in 1975, has henceforth devoted itself completely to business. Whereas Hanoi is Vietnam’s Ankara, Saigon is Vietnam’s Istanbul. Tam’s Saigon Invest Group represents well over a billion dollars in capital invested in industrial parks, telecommunications, manufacturing, and mining. He has started twenty-five industrial parks all along the country’s north-south corridor. “The future,” he told me, “is decentralization combined with a more responsive government, and along with a birthrate that stays high in relation to the graying populations of China, Japan, and South Korea.”

  He continued. “Transparency and accountability are the keys to making Vietnam a middle-level power,” the maritime equivalent of Turkey and Brazil, he indicated. “And that, above all, means a dramatic improvement in the legal code.” (Indeed, for Vietnam to overcome the economic doldrums that the country has found itself in lately—following decades of growth—dramatic reform on all levels is required.)