The South China Sea (27 page)

More than 30 years ago, the historian of Southeast Asia, Benedict Anderson, offered us an explanation for the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He talked of the creation of ‘imagined communities’ in which newly conscious national citizens began to feel a bond with compatriots they had never met, a bond so strong that they were prepared to kill and die to protect it. He attributed the rise of these imagined communities to economic development and the possibilities of individual self-definition that it created, to the invention of national media and to the solidification of feelings of difference from others speaking different languages and following different customs.

In the early twenty-first century around the coast of the South China Sea a new wave of nationalism is creating new imagined communities. Economic development, new media technologies, new desires for self-expression – the same driving forces behind the anti-colonial nationalisms of the last century – are propelling renewed nationalisms. This time, however, the ‘others’ against which these communities define themselves are not imperialists from far away but neighbours in a region which has been connected since ancient times. Netizens proclaim their willingness to
die for the glory of their country and the fate of a few almost uninhabitable rocks. Across the region millions of people have come to believe that their identity as a human being can only be complete if the imagined community to which they feel they belong appears stronger than its rivals. Nationalism is undoubtedly strong – but how much is it actually driving the disputes? An examination of these expressions of populist passion suggests the picture is more complex.

* * * * * *

Modern Vietnamese nationalism more or less defines itself in opposition to China. Most of the main streets of Vietnamese towns and cities are named after people (real or mythic) who fought against people from what is now called ‘China’: Hai Ba Trung, the Trung sisters who led a rebellion in 40
CE
; Ngo Quyen, whom Vietnamese regard as the first ruler to separate the country from ‘China’, in 938; Ly Thuong Kiet, who fought the Sung in 1076; Tran Hung Dao, who defeated the Mongols in 1284; Le Loi (also known as Le Thai To), who defeated the Ming in 1428; and Nguyen Hue (also known as Quang Trung), who defeated the Qing in 1789. Most of this is anachronistic myth. The first time that two countries with the present borders of Vietnam and China went to war was 1979. The earlier conflicts were between regional rulers, rebels, warlords, protégés and upstarts. The languages they spoke were neither the same as their modern equivalents nor, necessarily, that different from their enemies’. And yet all these great battles are now taken, in Vietnam, as proof of a long and glorious history of successful resistance to the imperialist designs of ‘Trung Quoc’ – the ‘central kingdom’ to the north.

From architecture to cuisine the cultural connections between the two countries are obvious; yet at the grassroots, suspicion of the people still referred to as ‘Tau’ – a derogatory word that could be translated into English as ‘Chink’ – is strong. The prejudice comes from fear. Vietnamese see themselves as more creative and cultured than the Chinese but unable to compete with the impenetrable network of Chinese business interests. This seemingly closed community with its alleged tentacles stretching all around East Asia appears destined to take over the country and the whole region.

A less prejudiced view of Vietnamese history might acknowledge the importance of links with ‘China’ from the time of the first Nusantao, through the arrival of sea traders from Fujian and right up to the first investments by ethnic Chinese from around Southeast Asia in the 1980s as Vietnam started to dismantle Stalinism. The Vietnamese Communist regime owes its existence to the sanctuary and succour it received from China throughout most of the twentieth century. Ideological inspiration, rockets and rice flowed south from Beijing: Chinese supplies built the foundation for Hanoi's victory over Saigon in 1975.

That political debt to Beijing is a key part of the appeal of the ‘anti-China’ message to many Vietnamese: it is implicitly ‘anti-Party’. To demonstrate openly against the Communist Party in central Hanoi would invite a lengthy prison sentence. By criticising China's actions, however, protestors can appear patriotic while indirectly questioning the legitimacy of a Communist Party that came to power through Chinese support and still shares strong ideological and practical links with its bigger brother in Beijing. But many otherwise loyal Party members are also strongly critical of China's influence. For some, it is a matter of patriotism, but playing the ‘China card’ can also be a way of undermining rivals. By criticising China they are criticising those sections of the Party which have the strongest ideological links to Beijing and which also favour tighter social control, continuing dominance of the economy by state-owned enterprises and a more hostile attitude to the West.

In 1968 the Vietnamese Communist Party leadership fought a vicious internal battle that was retrospectively framed as an argument over whether the country should lean towards China or the Soviet Union. Dozens of senior figures were purged or imprisoned. But the geopolitical fight was a cover for other arguments: about war strategy, the pace of socialist changes and a host of domestic issues. Ever since then, ‘China’ has been a live issue in all the major debates about the future of Vietnam – a cypher through which other battles are fought. Even before Hanoi had parked its tanks on the lawn of the presidential palace in Saigon, the Communist Party leaderships in Beijing and Hanoi had begun to fall out. In Chinese eyes, the Vietnamese were ungrateful brats who failed in their duties of filial loyalty to their benevolent parent. For the Vietnamese leadership, which had just liberated the country from foreign aggression, Chinese attitudes
smacked of imperial hauteur. They had no wish to become a vassal state. Relations deteriorated so badly that, in February 1979, China (with political and intelligence support from the US) decided to ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’ and invaded. Their troops got a mauling but several Vietnamese border towns were smashed. The two leaderships weren't reconciled until 1991.

These battles within battles are still being fought today – something that became brutally obvious just a few days after the attempted march down Trang Tien Street, when a rambling hour-long recording of what was supposed to be a secret speech found its way onto YouTube. The hapless star of this recording was Colonel Tran Dang Thanh, an instructor on the South China Sea issue at the Political Academy of the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence. The occasion was a gathering of Communist Party members who were senior administrators at universities in Hanoi (it's hard to become a senior anything in Vietnam without being a Party member). Colonel Thanh had a blunt message: there have been too many demonstrations and they must stop. ‘The Party expects you to manage your kids. If we find that students from your school are taking part in demonstrations, you can be sure there will be a black mark on your record,’ he admonished the deans and professors.
²

The transcript provided a unique insight into the inner thinking of those parts of the Vietnamese security establishment that normally keep well away from the media. He began with a warning: if the Communist regime goes down, he told the professors, so will your living standards. ‘Defending our nation and socialist ideology covers a lot of things and among these is the very practical fact that we are protecting our own pensions and the pensions of those that will come after us.’ After this appeal to basic self-interest he outlined a straightforward case for not antagonising China – there are 1.3 billion of ‘them’, he noted, and only 90 million of ‘us’. While we must never forget that they've invaded us over and over, he went on, ‘we must not seem ungrateful’ for China's great sacrifices for Vietnam in more recent times. He blamed China's recent actions on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping's ‘burning desire’ for mastery of the South China Sea, on China's need for maritime defence and on the lure of oil and gas. Vietnam's task now, he said, was to preserve the country's independence but also preserve peace and stability. The only way to do that, he argued,
was to avoid confrontation and preserve feelings of solidarity between the people of Vietnam and China.

For a leadership most concerned about creating a million new jobs a year to satisfy the rising aspirations of a growing population, the sovereignty disputes are a maddening distraction. The Party goes to great lengths to avoid provoking antagonism with Beijing. A few weeks after Colonel Thanh's lecture, on 6 January 2013, a national hero was reburied in his home province of Thanh Hoa, just south of Hanoi. The national press covered the story in detail but, strangely, none of them was able to say just how the martyr had died; his killers were described simply as ‘hooligans’ – nationality unknown. Le Dinh Chinh was actually killed by Chinese border guards on 25 August 1978 as post-war tensions between the two countries were starting to escalate. Vietnam was in the process of expelling tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese, resulting in confrontations at a border crossing inaptly named ‘Friendship Gate’. Fights broke out between militias armed with sticks and knives. Four Chinese and two Vietnamese were killed, including 18-year-old Le Dinh Chinh.

Over the following decade, with relations between the two countries veering between bad and worse, Le Dinh Chinh was made into a folk hero in Vietnam. Four months after the clash, the state publishing house issued a book eulogising his heroic life and patriotic death. Schools and streets were named after him and children were encouraged to emulate his example. But as relations between Hanoi and Beijing improved after 1990, the story of Le Dinh Chinh became less useful for popular mobilisation and gradually more embarrassing for the Hanoi government. The nationality of his killers was erased from official memory.

It's quite normal for the dead to be reburied in Vietnam. A few years after burial, the bones are disinterred, cleaned and reburied in an ossuary with appropriate ceremonies. It's very rare, however, for a reburial to take place 35 years later. With the newspapers clearly instructed not to include the word ‘China’ in accounts of his death, rumours and conspiracy theories began to circulate online about why Le Dinh Chinh was being reburied. They were amplified by a story that had begun circulating 18 months earlier about the defacing of a war memorial near Khanh Khe in the border province of Lang Son. The memorial, a large block of stone, carried an
inscription dedicated to the soldiers of 337 Division who ‘firmly stopped the Chinese invasion’ in 1979.

In August 2011, bloggers circulated a picture of the memorial in which the words ‘Chinese invasion’ appeared to have been chiselled off. But the picture was heavily cropped. The full image showed the stone sitting in the middle of a civil engineering project – a new road and bridge were being constructed around it. It's quite possible that the memorial could have been damaged during the construction works. But since the authorities would make no official comment, it was confidently asserted online that a craven Vietnamese government, beholden to Beijing, had ordered the vandalism.

The reburial of Le Dinh Chinh, hundreds of kilometres south of his original grave site near the border, led one of the country's best-known bloggers, a former security agent called Nguyen Huu Vinh who uses the nom-de-plume Anh Ba Sam, to allege that the state was gradually removing all potential symbols of Vietnamese nationalist protest away from the border area. This may, in fact, be the case. Or it may not. The problem for the Vietnamese authorities is that, when it comes to relations with China, few people believe them any more. Their orders to newspapers and professors to prevent discussion of the issue have only increased the spread of conspiracy theories. Nefarious motives are attributed to everything they say and do regardless of their intent.

The Party, although sophisticated and intelligent in many ways, appears unable to respond to these challenges except in its time-honoured fashion. It has passed new laws to control blogging (though just as ineffective as the old ones) and cracked down on activists who make common cause with overseas-based anti-Communist organisations. There have been dozens of ‘show trials’ over the past few years. The security establishment seems happy to weather the inevitable international criticism – using the trials
pour encourager les autres
. Some argue that ‘pro-China’ forces in the Party are actually quite happy with this criticism since it deters Western governments from becoming too close to Vietnam and helps them to keep the country under their control.

As the world saw clearly in May 2014, when protests against a Chinese oil-drilling expedition near the Paracel Islands turned to rioting, there are certainly nationalistic, anti-China passions in Vietnam that cause
difficulties for the Communist Party leadership. They are not, however, forcing it towards confrontation with China. Rather, they are forcing the Party into confrontation with a segment of its own population. The Party fears the protests because of their implicit anti-Party message and the possibility that they could escalate into something that might threaten its rule. Its priority is stability in both domestic and international affairs rather than freedom of expression. But those in favour of free expression and personal liberty at home are also those most vocally in favour of confrontation abroad. One side favours peace, the other freedom. Neither offers both.

* * * * * *

Another city, but this time two noisy crowds and opposing agendas. In the early morning of Monday, 16 April 2012, a ‘lightning rally’ hits Manila's seafront promenade, Roxas Boulevard, named after the first president of an independent Philippines. Around 70 supporters of the League of Filipino Students rush at the wall of the United States embassy. The compound is stoutly built on land reclaimed from Manila Bay, the piece of water where in 1898 the United States became a world power by defeating the Spanish Navy. The activists find the policeman supposed to be on duty outside fast asleep in his patrol car and, amazed by their luck, set to work on the symbols of imperialism. They hurl red and blue paint bombs at the wall, spray slogans on the stucco and perform the traditional rite of burning the American flag. A few militants jump the railings and work on the embassy's bronze signage. By the time the riot police show up, the building has been renamed the ‘.m.as.. of the .ni.ed S.ates of .merica’. The protestors flee into the side streets unhindered by the forces of law and order – presumably to argue over the maximum Scrabble score they could achieve with their eight stolen letters. The sleeping policeman doesn't wake up until it's all over; he drives away, apparently unaware that anything has happened at all.
³
He and his superintendent are later charged with misconduct.