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In Vietnam, Indignation Toward China Is Likely to Linger Unrest Poses a Risky Choice for Vietnam
(about 14 hours later)
HA TINH PROVINCE, Vietnam — The living room of Nguyen Thi Cuc’s house in central Vietnam features pictures and trinkets with traditional Chinese designs and writing. But out the front of her home she flies the Vietnamese flag, and she said her patriotism mattered much more than any vestiges of Chinese cultural bonds. HA TINH PROVINCE, Vietnam — The hundreds of men on motorbikes who roared into Lee Hsueh Ying’s factory compound north of Ho Chi Minh City were bent on revenge against China. Some clung to red-and-gold Vietnamese flags while they careened around overwhelmed security guards. And in a scene repeated elsewhere in the country’s industrial heartland, they destroyed the building, smashing furniture, snatching computers and shouting “Long Live Vietnam.”
These days, many of her compatriots are saying the same about their colossal neighbor. Vietnamese people’s nationalism has been aroused by China’s decision to establish an oil rig in seas claimed by both countries, and the ensuing protests and riots across Vietnam have exposed how much public ire Beijing confronts in a country that by many measures should be among its closest neighbors. Vietnam has a history of resisting the world’s great powers. It threw out the French after almost a century of colonization and then handed the United States a humiliating defeat. That same spirit has emerged in its latest war of wills, this time over China’s attempts to project its growing power closer to Vietnam’s shores.
On Friday, the unrest of recent days appeared to have abated. But the indignation in Vietnam is likely to linger. But the target of this week’s violence — foreign businesses that have become a lifeline of Vietnam’s economy — has left Vietnam’s government with a hard choice. Ignoring the popular anger it has helped stoke could leave it open to critics at home. But taking on its longtime rival, China, in a battle it cannot win could jeopardize its standing with investors that have lifted the economy after decades of war and occupation.
“Vietnam has to get back what belongs to Vietnam,” said Ms. Nguyen, a shopkeeper. “Like when Uncle Ho was still living,” she said, referring to Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist leader officially honored as a national liberator. “Official Vietnamese history is almost all about standing up to China,” said Robert Templer, author of “Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam. “So it is hard for the government to criticize the public when they say they are doing exactly that.”
Joined by ancient traditions, a legacy of revolutionary war and Communist Party rule, Vietnam and China should in many ways be in each other’s embrace. Yet the outburst of tensions has exposed how deeply ties are undercut by nationalist sentiment, and how volatile that sentiment can be when it involves rival territorial claims that resonate with memories of occupation and subjugation. In one sign of that ambivalence, the prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, sent a text to millions of citizens after the violence abated, praising the protesters’ defiance but making clear that his authoritarian government would not tolerate continued unrest.
Carl A. Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who studies Vietnamese politics and foreign policy, said the government’s allowance of unusually candid news coverage of the dispute and of confrontations between Vietnamese and Chinese ships near the oil rig “appeared to tip the scales” in Vietnamese public reaction. “The press was unshackled to report on the demonstrations,” he said in a telephone interview. The anger with China “spread from the elite of intellectuals and cadres to workers,” he said. “This is new. This is populist pressure.” “The prime minister requests and calls on every Vietnamese to boost their patriotism to defend the fatherland’s sacred sovereignty with actions in line with the law,” the text message said, according to news service reports. “Bad elements should not be allowed to instigate extremist actions that harm the interests and image of the country.”
The dispute over the oil rig this week brought violent protests and rioting across many parts of Vietnam, including here in Ha Tinh Province, where at least one Chinese worker died after crowds overran factories and building sites in the Ky Anh district. Underlying that anger is the prickly patriotism shared by many Vietnamese, who see their country as the target of bullying by a far bigger, more powerful neighbor. Here in Ha Tinh, where at least one Chinese laborer was killed, many workers could be seen boarding buses for home, hoping to escape a crackdown. But those who remained behind were adamant that their cause was just, even as some denounced the violence and lamented that protesters had targeted non-Chinese companies in their frenzy.
“They are occupying our sea, and then maybe someday they will occupy our land, too,” said Ms. Hang, who lives not far from the industrial zone where the Chinese worker died. She declined to give her full name. Some likened China’s decision to deploy an oil rig off Vietnam’s coast to an invasion. And many said strident press coverage of Chinese ships training water cannons on Vietnamese vessels near the rig had fed their anger.
“As a heroic country with a long tradition of fighting foreign invaders, the Vietnamese are very patriotic,” she said. “We don’t really care if China is strong or weak, we will do our best to defend our territory.” “We’re a strong, patriotic people,” said one middle-aged worker whose factory suspended production.
It was a defiant position echoed in dozens of interviews over recent days. Vietnam may want China’s investment, but many citizens also expected their government to stand up to Beijing over competing maritime claims, even if the economy bore a cost. In a row of shops not far from where the Chinese worker died, Nguyen Van Minh, a gangly worker, condemned the recent violence but defended the passionate reaction of many Vietnamese. The latest struggle with China started early this month, when China moved the drilling rig 140 miles off Vietnam, acting on its claim that those waters are Chinese domain, along with about 80 percent of the South China Sea. Such assertions and other claims in the East China Sea have raised fears throughout the region, where many countries contend that portions of the strategic and resource-rich waters are theirs.
“The Vietnamese people are not afraid, but we should remain calm,” he said. “If all peaceful measures fail to solve the problem, then of course I think war could happen.” In Vietnam, with its history of occupation, the move was seen as nothing short of a challenge to the country’s sovereignty, inflaming its prickly patriotism.
The risk of military confrontation remains extremely remote, although jostling between ships from the two nations has raised the risk of unplanned incidents. But China and Vietnam have gone to war before, and those memories form a backdrop to the current tensions. The government, which critics say has a record of using such sentiments when politically convenient, let loose the press to cover the controversy, and television featured tirades against China. Then officials took the unusual step of allowing the press to cover peaceful protests.
Anti-Chinese sentiments have a long history in Vietnam, and a thread of Vietnamese identity from dynastic times onward is rooted in the idea of resistance to invaders, including those from China. Vietnamese state propaganda has encouraged some of the animus against the Chinese, even though the Communist Parties of the two countries maintain ties. The first protests in city centers were peaceful and generated colorful photos of seas of flag-waving Vietnamese. But analysts say the government was unprepared for what followed, as workers near Ho Chi Minh City and then here in Ha Tinh began turning on foreign-owned factories. Scores of buildings were razed or badly damaged, burned by the marauding crowds.
China and Vietnam fought a brief border war in 1979 that left thousands dead on each side. That remains etched in the memories of middle-aged Vietnamese. Earlier this year, however, Vietnamese newspapers broke with longstanding reticence about a military clash in 1974, when China seized control from South Vietnam of the disputed Paracel Islands, called Hoang Sa by the Vietnamese. The government arrested more than 400 people and issued anxious statements about the loss of business. But the authoritarian government may have an easier time stopping the protests than quelling the anger that coalesced around the rig. China itself has learned a similar lesson in recent years, when protests against Japan over a maritime dispute and other controversies that were initially tolerated spiraled into attacks on Japanese factories and offices.
These days neither the Chinese nor Vietnamese government likes to discuss the 1979 war, but for a decade after it, the Vietnamese Communist Party carried out a propaganda campaign against China that “featured extremely harsh, racist language and imagery,” said Peter B. Zinoman, a professor of Vietnamese history at the University of California, Berkeley, who is currently in Hanoi. Managing nationalist sentiments in this case may be especially difficult because Vietnam’s relationship with China is so complex. The Chinese helped Vietnamese revolutionaries fighting the French, and Beijing has often served as a model for socialist policies. But China has also often been viewed as an aggressor, with its last war with Vietnam starting as recently as 1979.
“Spread in the state media and in the schools, these stories of betrayal and treachery became well known and weirdly internalized among people who did not have any direct experience of them,” he said. These days neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese government likes to discuss that war, which was prompted by Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and claimed thousands of lives. But for years after the hostilities, the Vietnamese Communist Party carried out a propaganda campaign against China that “featured extremely harsh, racist language and imagery,” according to Peter B. Zinoman, a professor of Vietnamese history at the University of California, Berkeley, who is currently in Hanoi.
The current wave of public anger could hurt international investors’ enthusiasm for Vietnam. Earlier this week, the factories targeted by crowds of rampaging workers and residents in the industrial suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City were not only Chinese. Many were from Taiwan, even South Korea — apparently the victims of indiscriminate anger that did not distinguish between East Asians. Many of today’s adults were raised on that current of invective, even as the Vietnamese and Chinese Communist Parties patched up their differences and the governments sought to expand cross-border trade.
Until now, Vietnam has been the biggest beneficiary of two of the biggest foreign investment trends in Asia: soaring wages in China and growing worries among businesses in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea about putting all their investments in China. A long list of companies have poured investment into Vietnam, from Yue Yuen of Taiwan, the world’s largest shoemaker, to Intel, which saw Vietnam as an emerging center of electronics manufacturing. China’s economic and military rise has added to the conflicted feelings among many Vietnamese. Chinese investors and contractors have been part of a welcome flood of foreign investment in recent years. But critics of the Vietnamese government have maintained that some of those investments benefited party cadres in Vietnam while doing little to help the broader population.
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, foreign direct investment in factories, office buildings and other projects in Vietnam has more than tripled since 2006, to $8.4 billion last year. Still, China’s decision to move the rig into position trespassed into one area that the government and its critics can agree on, analysts say.
Like others in Southeast Asia, many Vietnamese are uneasy over the economic rise of China and the threat they believe that China poses to domestic companies and labor. Vietnamese often complain of cheap Chinese goods that are ubiquitous in shops and markets across their country. Earlier this year, Vietnamese newspapers broke with longstanding reticence about reporting on a military clash in 1974, when China seized control from South Vietnam of the southern Paracel Islands. The news had been avoided in part because of sensitivities of lionizing the South Vietnamese, but the recent news coverage included heroic portrayals of the struggle.
“The Chinese companies are the worst to work for, because they never pay any overtime,” said a young laborer in the industrial belt of Ha Tinh. He would give only his surname, Lam. By the time China moved the rig, anti-Chinese feelings were already at a slow boil.
Some analysts of Vietnam have argued that anger among ordinary people toward China could spill over into general frustrations with the Vietnamese government and Communist Party, something that Vietnamese probably would not articulate in public or to the domestic or foreign news media because of a fear of reprisal. Vietnamese anger with China has “spread from the elite of intellectuals and cadres to workers,” said Carl A. Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who studies Vietnamese politics. “This is new. This is populist pressure.”
The oil rig “provoked protests because it is a permissible issue over which to protest,” said Robert Templer, author of “Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam.” Analysts say the fact that the explosion of violence targeted businesses was evidence that the motivations went much deeper than nationalism, saying workers tapped into a well of resentment against low wages and against their own government.
“I think the anger that lies underneath this has just as much to do with corruption and incompetence in the government in Hanoi than in any resentment of China,” he said. “It all adds up to a lot of anger and very few ways to channel that.” “I think the anger that lies underneath this has just as much to do with corruption and incompetence in the government in Hanoi than in any resentment of China,” said Mr. Templer, the expert on Vietnam. “It all adds up to a lot of anger and very few ways to channel that.”
But when pressed to say whether resentment against China was a vehicle for venting about homegrown ills, many Vietnamese adamantly disagreed, even in private, and said the anger was heartfelt. But a number of workers insisted that their reasoning was simpler.
“Our complaint isn’t about wages, it’s about China,” said Ho Van Hang, a middle-aged worker who was among a group of men waiting for a bus to take them home after their factory suspended production because of the rioting and looting. “Our complaint isn’t about wages,” Ho Van Hang said. “It’s about China.”