HOW HE SEES IT Vietnam can't escape China's shadow

By DANIEL SNEIDER
KNIGHT RIDDER
LANG SON, Vietnam -- If you want to get the measure of how large China is looming over the rest of Asia these days, there's no better place to visit than Vietnam. The Vietnamese have been living uneasily in the shadow of their giant neighbor to the north for centuries.
The best window into how these two Asian nations get along is at their border, in the picturesque limestone mountains of Lang Son province. Back in 1979 things weren't too friendly here. This was the main front in a brief but bloody border war sparked by the Chinese.
Less than two years after the war officially ended, Vietnamese officials had escorted me here, eager to show evidence of the depredations of the Chinese. The provincial capital was still heavily damaged from the Chinese army's advance, finally halted at that city. At the borderline, the Vietnamese army jeep I was riding in had to be hidden for fear of drawing Chinese fire from positions seized along the ridgeline above.
Now, returning to the same spots more than two decades later, I found a very different scene. Lang Son is bustling, no sign of its battlefront past, not even a monument. Up on the border, the Chinese are no longer lobbing mortar rounds.
Instead the Chinese are dropping DVD players, bedding and jugs of soy sauce into the hot hands of Vietnamese consumers. Traders lug huge loads in carts through the border crossing, the passage anchored on both ends by sprawling markets. Vietnamese ship fruit to China while the endless output of Chinese factories stacks up in warehouses on the Vietnamese side.
Vietnamese officials claim to be happy with the current state of affairs. "Vietnam-China relations are at a time of fine development," Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien told me in a written response to my questions. He cited the recent settlement of longstanding border problems, annual meetings between Vietnamese and Chinese leaders and booming trade, up 40 percent in the last year alone.
Privately, though, everything is not all kisses and flowers. Vietnamese fume at the growing arrogance displayed by the Chinese. And the Chinese sometimes do little to conceal it.
A Western diplomat in Hanoi tells of Chinese colleagues who openly disdain the Vietnamese as unreliable and inefficient. Vietnamese officials bristle at any suggestion that their economy is modeled on China's market reforms. And the Vietnamese complain, as do others in Southeast Asia, about the trading practices of the Chinese. The lowest quality, cheapest goods are flooding into Vietnam, making it hard for local producers to compete. In Thailand, farmers are up in arms about cheap fruit and garlic dumped into their market.
No alternative
But in numerous conversations I had in Vietnam and earlier in Thailand, the message was that even though they are uncomfortable with China's rise, they have no alternative but to accommodate to it.
"We cannot export ourselves, so we have to live with China," Ton Nu Thi Ninh, the head of the Vietnamese National Assembly's foreign relations committee, told me in Hanoi.
"China is already a regional superpower, and it is in the process of becoming a world power," she explained. In the face of that reality, Vietnam must "be realistic and be prepared."
Opinion in Thailand, a country that has kept its independence by being sensitive to the way the wind is blowing, is similar. "Countries in this region are wary of China in the long run," Dr. Kusuma Snitwongse, a leading Thai security expert, said. "But we don't want to be put in the situation where we have to chose between the U.S. and China."
Talk that was fashionable a few years ago in Washington about creating an alliance to counter China's rise seems hopelessly dated now.
"We've never bought the idea 'Let's line up with the Americans in order to contain the Chinese,"' says Ninh. For Vietnam the lesson of the collapse of the Soviet Union is "don't put all your eggs in one basket," Ninh, a former senior foreign ministry official, explains. "It's a balancing act."
True enough. Only these days the balance is clearly shifted over in the direction of the country that seems to be on the rise -- and it isn't us.
XSneider is foreign affairs columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.