Chinese Communist Party(CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping’s grand visit to Vietnam this December brought China and Vietnam into the international limelight again, and highlighted Vietnam’s important role in the Indo-Pacific geopolitics and economics. Earlier this year, Vietnam also welcomed a delegation led by US President Joe Biden.
Hanoi’s quick turnaround in welcoming Xi’s glamorous lineup and promising benefits to both sides is mainly due to the current geopolitical and economic resurgence, where China and the US are competing to enhance relations with Vietnam. Under this opportunity, the US proposed to Vietnam to elevate their bilateral strategic partnership to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” which has become a top priority of Vietnam’s external relations, while China proposed to Vietnam for a Sino-Vietnamese “community of a common destiny.”
At the meeting of the Vietnamese and Chinese leaders, both sides made a commitment to “further deepen and enhance the comprehensive strategic cooperation partnership and build a community of a common destiny of strategic significance,” which the Vietnamese side more accurately positioned as a “shared future in line with the UN Charter and international laws.” Therefore, Vietnam has not “fully and gladly entered the discourse of China’s ‘Common Destiny’” and thus retaining its own right of interpretation.
In order to ensure that Vietnam, which China likens to a “comrade and a brother,” develops together on the track of socialism, Xi’s trip demonstrated Beijing’s new positioning of the relationship between the two countries in the new era. It injected new momentum, pointed out a new direction, and opened up new prospects for cooperation in various fields. The two sides proclaimed to have achieved results in 36 cooperative areas such as party-to-party contacts, defense, sectoral and local cooperation, justice, media, development convergence, trade and investment, digital economy, green development, agricultural access, hydraulics, maritime cooperation etc., even though one has yet to see any concrete supporting information.
It is noteworthy that the joint statement of the two countries has each mentioned specific achievements, which reflected their respective needs. First, in building the “Two Corridors One Circle” framework with the Belt and Road Initiative, the two sides said that they would “accelerate the construction of standard-gauge railway Lao Cai-Hanoi-Hai Phong, step up research on Dong Dang standard-gauge railway line, connecting Hanoi, Mong Cai, Ha Long and Hai Phong, as well as accelerate the building of border infrastructure, including a road bridge across the Red River at the China-Vietnam (Ba Sai and Bat Xat) border. The latter has been an important agenda of the CCP for Vietnam that will facilitate border crossings and connect facilities between the two sides, and Xi’s visit seems to have made a significant breakthrough.
Secondly, by opening up Vietnam’s agricultural exports to China, China seems to have won the Vietnamese’s support for the China’s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) as long as China complies with its standards and procedures. In any case, the biggest challenge in Vietnam-China relations still lies in the South China Sea and the demarcation of the maritime boundaries, as well as the push for substantive progress in negotiating joint sea development and the delimitation of the sea area outside the Gulf of Tonkin, and drafting a code of conduct in the South China Sea that is substantive, effective, and in line with international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. As such, the meeting of the Vietnamese and Chinese leaders is generally perceived to be only a publicity stunt for the two sides.
In short, Xi Jinping’s trip demonstrates that Beijing cannot afford to lose Vietnam in its strategic competition with the US. Vietnam utilizes its geopolitical advantages to strike its own strategic balance between the US and China: soon after Vietnam agrees with the US to elevate the two sides to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” Vietnam then agrees with China to “deepen and elevate the comprehensive strategic cooperation partnership and build a community of a shared future of strategic significance.” Vietnam will face even greater challenges to maintain its autonomy both internally and externally in the future.
(Sun Kuo-hsiang, Professor, Department of International Affairs and Business, Nanhua University)
(Translated to English by Chen Cheng-Yi)
