Many of Hanoi’s prospective partners are beginning to share some of its apprehensions about China. When Beijing recently occupied a reef off the coast of the Philip-pines–800 miles from the nearest point in China–Manila and the other members of ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Brunei) surprised the Chinese by protesting as a group. No one wants trouble in the South China Sea, the pathway for 80 percent of Japan’s imported oil and a strategic link between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. “We have to be careful that ASEAN does not turn into an anti-China club,” says a Singapore official. But China seems to covet the oil and other mineral deposits that may lie beneath the seabed off the Spratly Islands. Vietnam accuses Beijing of acting like a regional bully. “The Chinese feel they can do anything they want: take an island in the Spratlys, test nuclear weapons, sell missile technology,” charges a Vietnamese official in Hanoi. “There seems to be no limit.”
Recognizing Vietnam may be awkward for a U.S. president who opposed the war there and avoided serving in it. Already Bill Clinton was taking fire from Republican leaders for “cozying up” to dictatorships in Vietnam and Cuba, as Speaker Newt Gingrich put it. But Clinton insists the Vietnam-ese have been more forthcoming than ever in the search for Americans still listed as missing in action and says diplomatic relations will benefit U.S. business. He dearly wants to get recognition out of the way well before the 1996 presidential campaign. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who will attend the ASEAN meeting in Brunei, hopes to include Hanoi on his Asian itinerary.
At odds with China itself on issues ranging from human rights to the status of Taiwan, the United States hopes to keep Beijing peacefully engaged with its neighbors. “God forbid we may have to turn with others to a policy of containment,” Winston Lord, the assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs, told Congress recently. “I would hope not.” But containment of China is precisely what the Vietnamese hope to get from their new relationships with ASEAN and Washington. An official in Hanoi argues that ff Beijing “misbehaves,” it should “lose its access to important ASEAN markets.” And in private, the Vietnamese hint the U.S. Navy might be allowed to reoccupy its former base at Cam Ranh Bay, in order to “make the Chinese more responsible,” says one official.
The Chinese suspect a plot to hem them in. “They say quite explicitly that the U.S. is involved in a containment policy,” says James Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China. Policymakers in Beijing “tend to see the world as increasingly chaotic, with assertive nationalism and fierce economic competition,” writes Wang Jisi of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “In their eyes, world politics continues to involve a zero-sum game, and in the inevitable hierarchy, the more powerful nations dominate the weak.”
The ASEAN holds a powerful trump card for its dealings with both Vietnam and China: trade. With regional economies booming, everyone wants to keep the goodtimes rolling. Even the Vietnamese are tired of fighting. Since the late 1980s, Hanoi has demobilized hundreds of thousands of soldiers from what was once one of the world’s largest standing armies. These days, soldiers who remain in uniform are more likely to be seen driving dump trucks at construction sites than tanks on maneuvers.
Just as important, Vietnam at last is finding a place for itself in Asia. Its largest trading partner is no longer France or Russia, but Japan. Its largest foreign investor is Taiwan. Hanoi romanced its Asian neighbors for six years before winning its membership in ASEAN, and a Foreign Ministry official is not far wrong when he boasts that “we are now accepted by our neighbors as a major regional partner and player.” In the circumstances, nobody in the new Vietnam wants to provoke yet another confrontation with Beijing. “We are too small and fragile to take on China,” says Nguyen Xuan Oanh, a Saigon businessman.
The ASEAN’s strategy is to make confrontation just as unprofitable for China. Most Southeast Asian leaders believe China really wants what they want: stability in which to develop and grow rich. Beijing’s ambitions in the South China Sea don’t overly alarm some regional leaders. China’s is-land-hopping is like a big dog “lifting his leg to mark the tree,” Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew told an interviewer, “so that smaller dogs will know that a big dog has been there and take note of that.” By standing up to Beijing, at least rhetorically, the ASEAN has shown it can bark back. It hopes the lure of prosperity–containment in a velvet glove–will keep China and Vietnam from their old, violent ways.
