Vietnam leaders taken to task on China

[xchrom]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MG21Ae01.html

It was inevitable that the recent ruckus over territorial claims in the South China Sea would spill over into Vietnam's internal politics. How to manage the relationship with China is the second touchiest issue in national life (the first is whether having more than one legal party would be a good thing or not).

After nearly two months of apparent national unanimity on the China threat, things came to a head July 16 when police broke up a smallish demonstration in the vicinity of the Chinese Embassy. The Vietnamese regime had tolerated - some say tacitly encouraged - such manifestations since early June.

The confrontation on the streets of Hanoi came just a few days after a group of eminent intellectuals took the leadership


vigorously to task for, they said, failing to see that "the more Vietnam tries to cooperate, the more aggressively China behaves".

The ruling Communist Party and government characteristically show high sensitivity to criticism that they are overly accommodating to the emerging superpower across Vietnam's northern border. Such criticism last boiled over in 2008, after the government awarded a Chinese state firm the right to exploit huge bauxite deposits in the nation's central highlands region.

[RZM]

1. This kind of thing goes back a looooooong way

National identity is a very interesting area of study. Identities often emerge from a mix of genuine ties and concerted effort to construct them. Often, identities are also defined as not only for what a people are, but also what they are not. There are plenty of examples. The emergence of a US identity was in part a rejection of Europe. Finns decided they were neither Swedes nor Russians, and Vietnam might be the granddaddy of them all in that respect. Part of the Vietnamese identity has always been linked with the assertion that 'we're not Chinese.'