Beijing belligerence

Why Vietnam wants us back

June 20, 2011

Thirty-six years after chasing the United States out of Vietnam, the com munist rulers in Hanoi now want us back. The ironies of this bizarre turn of events are many, but the reason is simple: China.

AFP/Getty Images

Red ruckus: Vietnamese sailors trained with a machine gun on Phan Vinh Island last week as tensions with Communist China deepened.

Beijing has been flexing its newfound military muscle and geopolitical ambitions in the face of its neighbors. Together with its global cyberhacking offenses, China is looking less like an emerging superpower and more like an out-of-control bully.

The latest run-in with Vietnam -- once China's ally, now its steadfast foe -- is over oil exploration in the South China Sea, where China claims sole sovereignty and where Vietnam has staged live fire naval exercises to protect its rights. China has responded with three days and nights of its own exercises, although it says it won't "resort to force" to resolve the dispute. Still, Vietnam has issued a strong statement welcoming foreign help -- a veiled but unmistakable invitation to the US and its Navy.

There's an opportunity here for US policy, not just to close the circle on our most divisive war but to find a new, more realistic approach in dealing with the rulers in Beijing. Because there's trouble brewing for the Middle Kingdom -- and not just in its dealings with its neighbors.

Over the last several weeks, a serious wave of unrest has roiled China's cities with outbreaks of violence -- even bomb blasts -- against the Beijing regime.

There's no sign of an organized uprising a la the Arab Spring. But the number of what the authorities call "mass incidents" has risen steadily. As many as 127,000 occurred in 2008. They are going to get worse before they get better -- and not just because Beijing authorities still can't get a handle on suppressing dissent on the Internet.

China's phenomenal economic growth is sputtering. Rising oil prices and growing inflation are erasing many economic gains. If the US economy, a major source for exports, doesn't recover soon, it could threaten China's long, unbroken record of growth -- setting the stage for more trouble there.

Yes, this flies in the face of the media image of China as an all-knowing, all-powerful juggernaut. Even many in the Obama administration seem to think China is so big and powerful that we don't dare cross or offend it -- especially when it holds all that US debt.

But, then, Americans have a habit of overestimating their rivals. During the Cold War, the media and even the CIA believed all the propaganda that the Soviet economy was competitive with ours -- that is, until the 1980s showed that it was just another Third World basket case.

Then came fears that Japan Inc. would buy us out along with Rockefeller Center, until the wheels came off the Japanese growth machine in the 1990s. More than a decade of Obama-style stimulus packages have kept Japan second-class ever since.

China's growth has been real enough, about 6.1 percent in GNP per head per year from 1978 to 2003 -- although it's not so impressive compared to Japan (8.2 percent), South Korea (7.6 percent) and Taiwan (7.1 percent) in similar takeoff periods.

But it has created huge problems for a central government trying to control a population that, having enjoyed greater economic freedom, now wants to run its own lives -- as this latest wave of unrest shows.

Fears of losing control at home have helped to breed China's adventurism and arrogance abroad. Vietnam is just the latest case, and the open plea for US help shouldn't be ignored.

The Obama White House has been comatose on how to deal with China, except when throwing obsequious banquets in its leaders' honor. Yet a strong, no-nonsense stance would be welcomed by just about every foreign capital, including India, Japan, and Western Europe. It's not just the United States that Chinese hackers have been going after. They've turned banks and businesses in Britain upside down, and reportedly penetrated the PCs of both Germany's prime minister and Australia's.

Indeed, in the end, standing up to China may be the best thing for the Chinese themselves.

A strong, assertive America might get Beijing to stop being the bully and focus on reforms at home, before her economy slides and the turmoil spreads. That's something the Chinese don't want, and the rest of us can't afford.

Arthur Herman's "Gandhi and Churchill" was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009.