By Chriss W. Street, Breitbart
Sixty prominent members of Vietnam’s Communist Party, including a former ambassador to Beijing, signed a letter on July 29 urging political and economic reforms that would divorce Vietnam from reliance on China, according to a July 30th report by the German Press Agency.
Vietnamese protesters hold placards as they shout slogans during an anti-China protest in front of the Chinese consulate in the financial district of Manila on May 16, 2014. Several hundred Filipino and Vietnamese protesters united in a march in the Philippine capital on May 16, demanding that China stop oil drilling in disputed South China Sea waters. (TED ALJIBE/AFP/Getty Images)
The highly symbolic action is a call to abrogate Vietnam’s long-standing economic and military relationships with China. Such action would open the way to consider discussions with the United States about teaming with American business and potentially joining the U.S.-backed Southeast Asia Treaty Organization military alliance.
The Vietnamese leadership had tended to prioritize a cordial relationship with China, which was North Vietnam’s ally in the long struggle take control of South Vietnam. Vietnam began moving to counterbalance its relationship with China last November. Vietnamese Communist Party General-Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong visited India and signed a number of “memoranda of understanding” that gave India exclusive exploration rights in five of its off-shore hydrocarbon blocks and promised to expand security, defense, and law enforcement ties.
China claims that since 1947 it owns virtually all of the South China Sea that stretches 1,000 miles over many of the world’s busiest sea lanes, from Taiwan to Malaysia. China calls this area the “nine-dash line,” but Vietnam dismissively calls it the “cow’s tongue line.”
In what appears to be a retaliatory response, China from May 9th through early July aggressively violated Vietnam’s territorial waters by sending a fleet of 60 ships to support drilling for oil just 80 miles off of Vietnam’s coast. The Hanoi government dispatched coastal patrol boats to harass the Chinese but did not directly confront the larger Chinese war ships.
The Chinese official state press publically lashed out over what it called Vietnam’s “interference.” A hawkish newspaper editorial called on Beijing to teach Vietnam the “lesson it deserves.” That language closely resembles Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 speech demanding that China teach Hanoi a “lesson.” Less than a year later, China invaded the North and killed 30,000 in a two-year military stalemate called the Sino-Vietnamese War.
The Chinese media’s incendiary language triggered other Vietnamese communist factions that have been demanding changes to Vietnam’s one-party-rule to fund anti-China rioters clad in T-shirts bearing the face of Vietnam’s revered founder Ho Chi Minh and waving the communist hammer and sickle flag.
Read the full story by Chriss W. Street from Breitbart.
