The Fate of Vietnam

CHAPTER III

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. 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 . “ 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 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.  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. “The 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.”

“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.”

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. “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.” 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. 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. 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 . Vietnamese family names and vocabulary and grammar, as well as artistic and literary styles, reflect deep Chinese influences. 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 . 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 union 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.” 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.

“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. 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 cold-hearted, 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.” 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 ofdevelopment, 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 economically 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.)

Whereas in Hanoi you are told repeatedly how Vietnam hopes to become a regional power and pivot state, in Saigon you get an actual demonstration of it. Everything is on a bigger scale than in Hanoi, with wide streets lined with gleaming designer stores, luxury auto dealerships, and steel and glass towers. There are swanky wine bars and upscale eateries that retain that French-influenced, vaguely naughty edginess of the old colonial French city. The Continental Hotel, the setting for much of Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American, and a haunt of foreign correspondents during the American War, is— in spite of its spacious white wedding cake aura and neoclassical columns that whisper elegance and scream the past— simply buried amid the new glitz and new brand-name high-rise hotels.

The American GIs’ Saigon of nearly half a century ago had 2.5 million people and a $ 180 per capita GDP; now with a population of eight million , the per capita GDP is $ 2,900. Saigon has one third of the country’s GDP, though only one ninth of the population. One hundred billion dollars eventually will be spent here on a new city center being planned by a Boston firm, featuring a hundred-story building and five new bridges and tunnels. A Japanese firm is building a six-line metro underground system. Officials at the Institute for Development Studies in Saigon told me that they are emphasizing “sustainable” development: a “green” model within a “global-regional” system. Strict zoning will be introduced, as well as limitations emphasizing “sustainable” development: a “green” model within a “global-regional” system. Strict zoning will be introduced, as well as limitations on the use of motorbikes and private cars in the various new and old city centers. Yet again, Singapore, Inc. is invoked, with talk of an aesthetically sterile “world-class” city, with a new airport and air cargo hub for Southeast Asia, and a bigger capacity seaport.

Hanoi is about geopolitical and military pretensions; Saigon the capitalist prosperity without which such pretensions can never be realized. Greater Saigon must become a clone of Singapore in order for Vietnam to hold its own against China, its historic rival and oppressor. That is the message one gets here.

Of course, Greater Saigon is still a long way from achieving that status. Vietnam is presently in the throes of an economic crisis similar to the one in China: while both communist parties have brought their populations impressive gains in living standards in recent decades, further progress requires deep reforms and political liberalization that will pose greater challenges than ever before.

In the meantime, Vietnam’s communist leaders are trying to rely on their Prussianness, their ruthlessly capitalistic economic policies, and their tight political control to maintain their state’s feisty independence from China. They know that unlike the countries of the Arab Spring, their nation faces an authentic outside adversary (however ideologically akin), which might help temper the political longing of their people. But like India, they are wary of any formal treaty arrangement with the United States. To be sure, if the necessity of a defense treaty with the United States ever arose, it would indicate that the security situation in the South China Sea region is actually much more unstable than at present. In any case, the fate of Vietnam, and its ability not to be Finlandized by China, will say as much about the American capacity to project power in the Pacific in the twenty-first century as Vietnam’s fate did in the twentieth.

Source: Kaplan, Robert D., 2014, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (Kindle Locations 909-1226). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.