9 - Conclusion: The Lessons of Doi Moi for Vietnam's China Policy

Summary

In March 2014, a news article in Dat Viet reported that Chinese textile producer Yulun Jiangsu received a licence to invest US$68 million into a textile plant in Nam Dinh province, 50 km south of Hanoi (Thu Phuong 2014). The article cited provincial authorities as saying that an unnamed investor from Hong Kong was also planning to set up a 1,000-hectare textile processing complex in Nghia Hung District of the same province. It went on to quote experts as explaining that the new wave of Chinese investment into the country's textile industry was due to Chinese investors’ expectation to take advantage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement that Vietnam and other partners, including the United States but not China, were going to conclude. These experts also voiced their concern that such developments could lead to the domination and manipulation of the country's economy by Chinese companies. One of the experts even referred to concerns raised by netizens that the concentration of Chinese labourers working for a multi-billion steel project by Taiwanese company Formosa in Vung Ang Economic Zone of the central province of Ha Tinh might make Vietnam vulnerable in the event of a Chinese attack. The expert emphasized that the large presence of Chinese nationals in the area therefore generated more challenges than just social and economic ones (Thu Phuong 2014).

In the same month, a flurry of news stories commemorating the naval clash on 14 March 1988 between Vietnam and China in the Spratlys also appeared in most major Vietnamese news websites. Almost one month before that, a wide range of news articles and stories commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Vietnam– China border war, which broke out on 17 February 1979, were also published in numerous newspapers and websites, including statesanctioned ones. These moves came as a surprise as the 1979 border war as well as the 1988 naval clash had always been considered “sensitive issues” by Vietnamese authorities. They were even hardly mentioned in official textbooks and the media were previously restricted from covering the issues. The Vietnamese government's decision to relax the censorship on these two events in 2014 therefore, to a certain extent, reflects a shift in its attitude towards these two issues.