Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, was the first world leader to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping after the Chinese Communist Party’s historic 20th Congress last month. The meeting saw the two leaders pledge greater cooperation between the socialist states.
Xi told Trong China would work to build a stable supply chain with its “comrade and brother” Vietnam, including encouraging Chinese tech companies to invest in Vietnam and promoting cooperation in healthcare, the digital economy, and efforts to combat climate change. Many of these would take place via the Two Corridors, One Belt (TCOB), part of the Belt and Road Initiative focused specifically on China and Vietnam.
“China is willing to accelerate linking development strategies with the Vietnamese side, promote connectivity between the two countries and jointly build a stable industrial chain supply chain system,” Xi said.
Trong pledged to remain unaligned in global affairs, telling Xi the Southeast Asian state would never allow a foreign military base on its soil or join an alliance against another country.
“Vietnam … has made the development of friendship and cooperation with China the top priority in our foreign policy,” Trong told Xi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
The US has worked to divide China from its neighbors, especially in Southeast Asia and the Pacific region, as part of a strategy to “contain” Chinese “expansion,” which Washington characterizes as being done at the expense of other states. The Pentagon’s recently released National Defense Strategy calls for working with groups like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to build a “networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains” - Washington shorthand for pushing nations to become hostile to China.
In the South China Sea, that has meant supporting other nations’ territorial claims against China’s, and characterizing ASEAN-China talks on writing a code of conduct for the waterway as Beijing bullying smaller nations. Washington has postured as willing to support ASEAN nations against Beijing, and one influential policy think tank even encouraged Washington to sabotage the ASEAN-China talks, then work with ASEAN to impose a new anti-Chinese document on Beijing.
By contrast, Xi and Trong agreed that “the Chinese and Vietnamese communist parties must … make every effort to promote socialist modernisation, never letting anyone interfere with our advancement and never letting any force shake the institutional foundation of our development,” as Xi put it.
The two nations were once bitter enemies, with Vietnam siding with the Soviet Union after the USSR and China went their separate ways in the early 1960s. At the nadir of their relations, Vietnam invaded Chinese ally Cambodia in 1978 and deposed its nominally socialist government, and China launched a brief but bloody invasion of Vietnam the following year.
However, after the USSR was dissolved and the Eastern European socialist governments were overthrown, China and Vietnam quickly drew closer together, re-establishing normal relations in 1991 and issued a joint statement on cooperation in 2000, when they settled their land border disputes. Last year, China was Vietnam’s largest trading partner, with $165 billion in bilateral trade between them that year - a 24% increase over the previous year, according to Hanoi’s statistics.
However, some disputes remain, especially over an archipelago in the South China Sea known in China as the Xisha Islands, in Vietnam as the Hoang Sa Archipelago, and to other nations by the English-language name Paracel Islands. The unsettled maritime dispute has led to clashes between their fishing and oil exploration vessels.
Xi is also due to receive several other world leaders later this week, including German Chancellor Olaf Schotz, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan.