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Top Vietnamese lawmaker in China after president’s surprise ouster
HO CHI MINH CITY — Vuong Dinh Hue, Vietnam’s top legislator and a presidential contender, is making a lengthy trip to China, projecting stability between the world’s two biggest communist countries after Hanoi upgraded ties with the U.S. and ousted two presidents in the course of a year.
National Assembly Chair Hue’s six-day visit ending Friday will include talks on trade, party relations, tourism, and the “community of common destiny,” a concept linked to regional security that China convinced Vietnam to adopt during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Hanoi in December. That month Vietnam rose to the rank of No. 2 market for Chinese exports after the U.S., according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, with many of those goods fueling a Vietnamese supply chain alternative to China.
The Beijing trip is fresh off the heels of last month’s shock dismissal of Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong for unspecified wrongdoing amid a years-long corruption clampdown. Hue is one of a handful of officials qualified to replace him, though observers don’t deem him the most likely successor.
“There’s concern on the Chinese side in particular that the U.S. is trying to contain China,” Jack Butcher, part-time lecturer at the University of Adelaide, told Nikkei Asia. “The last thing China wants is a country like Vietnam, that shares borders with it, getting too close to the U.S.”
He and many others describe Vietnam’s overtures to China as a way to balance ties with the U.S., which upgraded relations with Hanoi when President Joe Biden visited in September.
Vietnam and China’s conflicting claims in the South China Sea are a perennial source of friction. Hanoi’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Pham Thu Hang said last month the contradictory claims “violate Vietnam’s sovereignty” when asked about China’s clashes with another claimant, the Philippines. Manila vowed a response to a water cannon attack by China, which injured Philippine sailors in the territory in March.
Vietnam ranks highest among Southeast Asians worried about Chinese influence, the latest ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute poll shows.
“There cannot be opportunities without challenges,” Chinese Ambassador in Hanoi Xiong Bo said in an interview with the state-owned Vietnam News Agency to preview Hue’s trip. But “through the efforts of both sides, some challenges can be effectively managed.”
With these challenges, policy hawks in the U.S. and Australia too often think Vietnam will turn to them for balance against China, Butcher said, a strategy he considers “overplayed.”
“It’s very important that we draw attention to the fact that Vietnam is in the community of common destiny,” he said in an interview.
Hue is meeting key party and state leaders in the Chinese capital, local officials, and the Vietnamese diaspora, the government said, and will talk about “international and regional situations of mutual concern.” He is scheduled to sign a cooperation agreement between the two countries’ legislatures, as well as discuss party building and the campaign against corruption, VNA reported. Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong has pursued the campaign in parallel with Beijing’s crackdown.
Source: Nikkei Asia
