HANOI — Vietnam’s full-on war with the United States lasted a decade. Its tensions with its northern neighbor, China, have persisted for thousands of years — from a millennium of direct Chinese rule and a bloody border war in 1979 to more recent confrontations in the South China Sea.
If geography is destiny, then the fate of Vietnam is to be an expert in bargaining with Beijing and balancing between superpowers.
So with the rest of the world struggling to reckon with China’s assertive moves in the Pacific, the Vietnamese, hosts of this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, are offering guidance.
“I would like to give advice to the whole world, and especially to the United States, that you must be careful with China,’’ said Major General Le Van Cuong, the retired director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security.
Like any good Communist soldier, Cuong pays attention to the details of leaders’ abstruse speeches, and he noted that President Xi Jinping of China had referred to his homeland’s status as a “great’’ or “strong power’’ 26 times in a lengthy address last month.
“Xi Jinping’s ambitions are dangerous for the whole world,’’ Cuong said. “China uses its money to buy off many leaders, but none of the countries that are its close allies, like North Korea, Pakistan, or Cambodia, has done well. Countries that are close to America have done much better. We must ask: Why is this?’’
Now, President Trump’s decision to take the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, which would have given 11 other economies an alternative to a Chinese-led economic order, has left the Vietnamese feeling vulnerable.
“As Vietnamese, we are always trying to find a way to balance China’s power,’’ said Nguyen Ngoc Anh, a professor at the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi. “For us, TPP isn’t just an economic issue. It’s also about geopolitics and social issues.’’
Anh noted that local liberals had cheered the trade pact because it would have forced Vietnam to adhere to international labor and government accountability standards that Hanoi might otherwise not meet.
With the 11 other members of the pact agreeing to proceed without the United States, Washington’s withdrawal — not to mention Trump’s “America first’’ speech at the APEC meeting Friday — leaves some nations wondering if their best option may be Chinese-backed trade pacts and financing deals that have fewer guarantees for workers and less transparency.
“We are both communist countries, but people like me in Vietnam don’t want to develop the same way that China has,’’ said Anh, who studied economics in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. “We want to follow the Western-oriented way.’’
Trump praised Vietnam’s progress in brief remarks before a state dinner Saturday, calling the nation ‘‘one of the great miracles of the world.’’
While the United States is the largest market for Vietnamese exports, Vietnam’s biggest trading partner is China. Yet Vietnam runs a significant trade deficit with its populous neighbor, and Vietnamese economists worry that China doesn’t play fairly.
“China is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t observe international law in many areas,’’ said Le Dang Doanh, an influential economist who has advised members of the Vietnamese Politburo on trade.
The Vietnamese watched in alarm last year when Beijing reacted to an international tribunal’s dismissal of China’s expansive claims over the South China Sea by ignoring — and even mocking — the judgment. Vietnam and four other governments have claims of their own on the resource-rich waterway that conflict with China’s.
It is hard to overstate the level of Vietnamese antipathy toward China. In a country where public protest is rare and risky, some of the few large-scale demonstrations in Vietnam in recent years have been against the Chinese.
But this national aversion puts Vietnam’s leadership in a bind. It cannot ignore China’s growing economic magnetism. For many members of APEC, China now ranks as their number one trading partner.
In return for investment and project financing — roads, railways, dams, airports, and colossal government buildings — leaders of regional economies are increasingly doing Beijing’s bidding. Cambodia and Laos have given support for Beijing’s South China Sea claims. Thailand has complied with Beijing’s demand that it return Chinese dissidents who once counted on it as a haven.
Even the Philippines has appeared to yield, despite the fact it lodged the successful South China Sea lawsuit at The Hague. Days before Trump’s visit to Manila on Sunday, it disclosed that President Rodrigo Duterte had ordered a halt to construction on a disputed sandbar in the South China Sea, a move widely regarded as intended to placate Beijing.
Vietnam, more than any other country, has grown practiced at divining when not to challenge the two Pacific powers — both of which it fought within the last half-century.
In the 1970s and 1980s, China seized spits of land in the South China Sea that Vietnam had controlled or that were unoccupied but claimed by Hanoi.
Yet perhaps sensing a US reluctance to confront China in the South China Sea, Vietnam has declined to take China to international court, as the Philippines did, even as the Chinese have turned disputed reefs and sandbars into militarized islands.
