China watchers’ eyes are trained on the Taiwan Strait, a body of water just eighty miles wide at its narrowest juncture, which could be the flashpoint of the next great-power war. China’s General Secretary, Xi Jinping, has made his intention to “reunify” mainland China with the island nation, if necessary by force. Belligerent and cantankerous communist China’s aggression further afield in the Senkakus and even the Himalayas makes no secret of Beijing’s willingness to use violence in its quest for the purported Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation. Yet for all the handwringing about Beijing’s bellicosity, few observers are taking note of another plausible theater for future conflict: Vietnam.
This oversight is surprising, as the mutual hostility between the two communist dictatorships runs especially deep. China has 14 land neighbors and eight or so maritime neighbors, but none has had more and bloodier military confrontations with Beijing than Hanoi. The Chinese Communist Party has launched no fewer than six military actions against Vietnam, ranging from a full-scale invasion and naval battles in the 1970s, to sustained and repeated wars of attrition that involved several millions of salvos throughout the entirety of the 1980s.
The collapse of the Soviet Union only provided a short-lived détente. However, tensions flared up once more as the millennium came to a close. By the time Xi Jinping rose to supremacy in 2012, the two old foes had dramatically dialed up their mutual hostility, with the South China Sea becoming the epicenter of China’s maritime aggression.
And more than any country in the region, Vietnam is uniquely determined, prepared, and experienced in resisting, and if necessary, fighting, the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts at hegemony in the South China Sea and Southeast Asia.
This fact is enormously frustrating for the ambitious and expansionist Xi. He does not know exactly what to do with this small, tenacious, and seemingly unconquerable neighbor. A country that bogged down American troops for more than a decade in a war that—until the recent retreat from Afghanistan—saw the United States’ most humiliating retreat, is now unresponsive to China’s bribes and economic seduction. Hanoi was once Washington’s biggest headache, but in many ways, it may soon give Beijing its worst nightmares yet.
First, Vietnam’s government is a communist regime, like that of China. It is well versed in the Marxist-Leninist doctrines that inform the state’s military strategies and war doctrines. The Vietnamese political commissars, within their battle-hardened rank and file, are just as effective in ideologically mobilizing the troops as their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s and the Vietnamese People’s Army have the same playbooks when it comes to political warfare, information warfare, and their operational ethos. Perhaps more than any other nation, Vietnam knows China’s ideological and doctrinal vulnerabilities.
Second, Vietnam’s unambiguous stance against Chinese aggression has made it a hub for coalescing international forces repulsed by the Chinese Communist Party. Major powers have come to Hanoi’s aid in an unspoken alliance against Beijing, significantly reducing Beijing’s sharp power advantage gained in the rapid military buildup of the last two decades.
The United States has dramatically stepped up its strategic and military partnership with Vietnam, lifting its embargos of weapons sales to Hanoi that it had imposed in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In a remarkable turn of events, Vietnam now occupies a crucial place in America’s overall strategy against Chinese global expansion. The country’s new position in the United States’ strategic calculus is a matter of bipartisan political consensus in the otherwise deeply divided nation.
The traditionally pacifist, yet deeply China-phobic, Japan has also made stunning moves courting Vietnam as a bastion of resistance against Chinese expansionism. In his recently-concluded visit to Hanoi, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi used strong language unfamiliar in post-WWII Japan by claiming Vietnam and Japan share “the same destiny” and “harsh reality” while facing the common threat from China. He signed an historic agreement allowing the transfer of Japanese-made weapons and defense technologies to Vietnam. And even non-aligned India has wasted no time cozying up to Hanoi, especially as tensions between New Delhi and Beijing have continued to rise.
The anti-Beijing forces coalescing in Vietnam are not confined to the world’s democracies. Russia, the key weapons supplier for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, is also a traditional ally of Vietnam. Moscow has always ensured that whatever game-changing weapons systems it sells to China, it also sells equally or in larger amounts to Vietnam, perhaps to achieve a balance in any future fights between the two. These weapons sales have included at least six Kilo-class submarines and the much-touted S-400 air-defense system.
And as issues like supply-chain vulnerabilities, forced labor, and corporate espionage have risen to the fore, Vietnam has also become the biggest beneficiary of a wave of global economic and corporate divestment from China. Major international companies are distancing themselves from the increasingly xenophobic Beijing and re-settling in Vietnam, incubating a Hanoi Miracle in economic and industrial growth.
Third, China’s fixation on Vietnam is borne of an intense and ferocious desire to settle the score from the Sino-Vietnamese conflict. Deep in Beijing’s psyche is a sense of unforgiveable betrayal by and deep contempt for Hanoi’s perfidy due to China’s humiliating loss during the Vietnam War to the Soviet Union in the contest for leadership of the communist world.
Bitterly split on who held true to real communism, Beijing and Moscow parted ways during the Sino-Soviet split. When the United States entered the Vietnam War soon after in the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were united in fighting a proxy war in Vietnam against America. Both nations invested in Ho Chi Minh’s crusade, politically, financially, and militarily.
However, Beijing and Moscow differed in their doctrinal dogma in Vietnam. Mao Zedong dictated to his Vietnamese comrades a grand strategy that would entail a “protracted people’s war.” The Soviets preferred a high-tech modern war for Vietnam to match the United States.
Mao failed to understand that the longer his “people’s war” went on in Vietnam, the more the Vietnamese would rely on Moscow, not Beijing, for the more modern, big-ticket weapons systems needed, such as MiG fighters, surface-to-air missiles, and modern armored vehicles. China, at the time much less powerful than the Soviet Union, could not provide this equipment, and Hanoi’s reliance on Moscow only grew. Meanwhile, Mao’s ongoing carnage during the Cultural Revolution engendered deep loathing in Vietnam, which eventually and decisively abandoned Beijing for Moscow in the final years of the Vietnam War.
Beijing was stunned by Hanoi’s ingratitude. In its fight for influence in Southeast Asia, China propped up an anti-Vietnamese puppet regime, the Khmer Rouge, in neighboring Cambodia. When Vietnam overthrew the Maoist, genocidal Khmer Rouge, Beijing was further enraged. It decided to “punish” Hanoi for its betrayal.
Beijing’s punishment came in February 1979, when it launched a ferocious, full-scale blitzkrieg invasion. But the Chinese Communist Party failed to subdue Vietnam, and Hanoi’s hostility toward Beijing only deepened. What followed was a decade of intermittent mutual mass shelling and continued Vietnamese defiance.
The Chinese Communist Party has an historic score to settle with Taiwan, but also with Vietnam. The similarities between the regimes, Vietnam’s long-held defiance, and Hanoi’s unique place in Beijing’s strategic calculus make the southeast Asian nation a plausible target for Beijing’s aggressions.
The stakes today are higher than ever before, and with China’s leadership growing increasingly arrogant and intent on historical revisionism, it would be a mistake to continue to overlook this theater. General Secretary Xi Jinping certainly won’t. He views a victory over his regime’s historic foe as a perquisite for the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.
