Vietnam has a deep mistrust of China

Press, 3 November 1981, Page 16

Vietnam has a deep mistrust of China

By

BRIAN EADS

tn Hanoi

Travelling north, out of the Red River delta, through the mountains of Vietnam’s border provinces, is like climbing into an early Sung Dynasty scroll painting. The jagged peaks, coated here and there with clumps of sparse vegetation, have the same rugged simplicity and stark beauty captured by Chinese painters a thousand years ago. It is not a comparison the Vietnamese would welcome. To them this is the front line in the latest of an apparently interminable succession of wars. Indeed, the conflicts with France and the United States were but brief interruptions in the central national issue'for the last 4000 years: battling China.

“China has dominated Vietnam twice,” the Foreign Minister, Mr Nguyen Co Thach, told me in an interview. “Once for 1000 years, once for 30 years. They have invaded Vietnam 12 times. The longest period of peace between Vietnam and China has been 350 years.” In Lang Son, 14 kilometres south of the abandoned “Friendship Pass” border post, the local party chief catalogued Chinese “aggression.” Like Mr Thach in Hanoi, he now realised that Chinese “betrayal" had begun, at the Geneva Conference in 1954, he said.

At present the border conflict that has continued since the Chinese invasion 32 months ago stops short of full-scale war — but only just. According to military sources in Hanoi, Vietnam has 160,000 front-line troops along the Chinese border. 90,000 more between

the border provinces and Hanoi, and additional militia and reservists to be mobilised in the event of war. The Chinese strategy, officials say, is to keep Vietnam off balance, to squeeze it and bleed its resources. “But,” said Mr Thach, “Vietnam is not It is less than the whole truth. The suspension of Chinese and Western aid that came with Hanoi’s intervention in Cambodia further disrupted a national economy which, in both north and south, has subsisted on foreign aid for 35 years. Factories lie idle or work short-time for want of spare parts, raw materials and fuel. Last year rice rotted in warehouses while cases of malnutrition multiplied. Allowing for the vagaries of the weather, the failure to ensure the supply of sufficient rice was a blow to the Government's prestige. The joke in Ho Chi Minn City, formerly Saigon, is that when Hanoi urged people, to tighten their belts the reply went back: “Please send us some belts.” For all the hardship and failures to deliver a prosperous peace, the notion that Vietnam can be bludgeoned into submission, then revived and seduced with economic co-operation and aid, does not stand up to scrutiny in the dappled sunlight of Hanoi’s broad tree-lined boulevards. Soviet bloc aid,, central to Vietnam’s survival, is put at $2OOO million a year. But the intimate relationship with Moscow is rooted more deeply in a shared perception of ideology and the ultimateinsurance policy against Chinese might than in economics.

At present, benign weather, and a wide-ranging reappraisal of agricultural policy, with greater rewards for enterprise, promise self-sufficiency in foodstuffs for Vietnam this year. Eighty per cent of the population live in the countryside, and this year has seen a perceptible improvement, in their standard of living, even if only the chance to build a brick house. Ironically, those hurting most are the honest cadres in the cities seeking to cope with an inflation rate of up to 70 per cent, with a cloth ration a little more than two metres a year; and a monthly income of perhaps $l6.

Vietnam, said Mr Nguyen Co Thach, would welcome improved relations with its nonCommunist neighbours and the West. Moscow was recently denied oil-prospecting rights in certain choice areas of the country’s continental shelf, leaving the door open for Western companies and their superior , technology. The price being asked — total Vietnamese withdrawal from Kampuchea — will not be paid. “Our forces in Kampuchea are linked to the threat from China,” said Mr Thach. The task Hanoi appears to have set itself on the diplomatic battlefield is to drive a wedge between China and the non-Communist South-East Asian countries, with Vietnam cast as the invincible buffer between them and an untrustworthy, expansionist Peking. In Indonesia and Malaysia, they have won many adherents already. — Copyright, London Observer Service.