China and the power game
Nayan Chanda International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2005
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut Within days of the last Marine helicopter lifting
off from the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, one could see a new
regional power balance taking shape.
It was a very different order from the one that the Kennedy
administration had feared when it committed troops to Vietnam more than a
decade earlier. Instead of triggering the fall of Southeast Asian dominoes into
China's lap, Vietnam was emerging as a barrier against the very influence that
Washington had fought - Beijing's.
A few days after watching North Vietnamese tanks crash through the gate
of the presidential palace, I met a North Vietnamese colonel in a music store.
Hoping to gauge the North's political leanings, I had asked him if they read
the Peking Review in Hanoi.
"Yes," he said, nodding approvingly, "it's very good paper, good to roll
cigarettes."
Nor did North Vietnamese troops entering Saigon show any affection for
China. Mao portraits and flags hoisted in China town as a welcoming gesture to
the Communists were swiftly ordered taken down.
The sound coming from the Chinese capital was not one of applause for
Vietnamese comrades-in-arms. The People's Daily headlined the threat from
Soviet hegemonists, relegating the communist victory in South Vietnam to a
secondary place.
This was the anticlimactic denouement of an American involvement in
Vietnam that had been premised on stopping the Chinese.
Instead, as the North Vietnamese Army took control of Saigon, they made
no attempt to interdict the evacuation, treating the U.S. helicopter evacuation
as a temporary withdrawal. They refrained from raising their flags at the U.S.
Embassy, sparing the United States the humiliation of its ignominious
departure.
Meanwhile, in the north stood giant China, locked in a struggle with the
Soviets and deeply suspicious of a pesky Vietnam that had fought repeatedly
against Chinese attempts at domination. Thus, despite its success in driving
out America, Vietnam continued to view the U.S. presence as a guarantee for its
independence.
If there was ever any doubt about the wisdom of considering the
Vietnamese as China's puppets, it was removed four years later when China sent
troops across the border to "teach Vietnam a lesson." Deng Xiaoping had given
advance warning of the "lesson" to President Jimmy Carter and received tacit
American support for his actions.
Of course, by then, Vietnam, facing Chinese hostility and bloody border
raids by Beijing's ally, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, had signed a friendship
treaty with the Soviet Union. Vietnam invited the Soviet Navy to Cam Ranh Bay,
and, with Soviet aid, ousted the Khmer Rouge from power.
In another era or another context, the Vietnamese might have been
applauded for bringing about regime change in Cambodia and liberating their
neighbors from a genocidal nightmare. What instead followed the ouster of Pol
Pot from Cambodia was nearly two decades of isolation and punishment of
Vietnam. By July 1995, when the Americans finally returned to restore
diplomatic relations with Vietnam, Asia's geopolitical picture had again
changed dramatically.
An economically vibrant and militarily resurgent China was well on its
way to claiming leadership in Asia. Drawn together by the mutual need for a
balanced situation in Asia, Hanoi and Washington had quietly begun taking baby
steps in military cooperation.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld welcomed his Vietnamese counterpart
Pham Van Tra to the Pentagon in 2003, when the two reached an agreement
allowing U.S. Navy warships to call at Vietnamese ports. U.S.-Vietnam relations
came full circle in November 2003, when - exactly 38 years after the first
American marines landed in Danang - the U.S. frigate Vandegrift made a port
call in Vietnam. It has since been followed by other warships.
A dispute over the positioning of the American and Vietnamese flags was
resolved when the Vietnamese dropped their demand for the visiting ship to fly
Vietnam's red and gold flag above the Stars and Stripes. As the Vandegrift
steamed into Saigon port, both flags flapped gently in the breeze, hanging side
by side.
(Nayan Chanda, editor of YaleGlobal Online, covered the fall of Saigon
for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of ''Brother Enemy: The
War After the War.'' )
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