State councillor to visit Vietnam for annual meeting on bilateral cooperation, but both sides stay silent amid fears of a backlash from public
Kristine Kwok
kristine.kwok@scmp.com
Officers of the Vietnamese Marine Guard talk as they monitor a Chinese coastguard vessel in the South China Sea. Photo: Reuters
Chinese State Councillor Yang Jiechi will be in Hanoi this week for an annual dialogue on bilateral cooperation amid maritime tensions between the neighbours that look set to overshadow the event, a Vietnamese scholar and a source close to the foreign ministry in Hanoi say.
Yang's visit will be the highest-level meeting between the governments since China's deployment of an oil rig in disputed waters off Vietnam's coast on May 1 triggered sea confrontations that almost scuppered bilateral ties.
But in a departure from the usual practice of publicising the event well in advance, both foreign ministries have yet to make any announcement. The source, and scholars, said this underscored the trickiness of the meeting's timing; the governments had to address the issues while avoiding a possible backlash from their publics.
Yang will be in Hanoi for the latest round of meetings of the China-Vietnam Steering Committee on Cooperation and is expected to hold talks with Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, according to Dr Tran Truong Thuy, director of the Institute for East Sea Studies at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam.
Video shows Vietnamese boat ramming Chinese ships
"This is a regular meeting on cooperation, but the main topic this time will be focused on issues in the South China Sea," Thuy said. The source close to Vietnam's foreign ministry said the meeting would be on Tuesday.
Yang and Minh exchanged sharp words over the telephone on May 6 as the crisis began. Minh denounced China's deployment of the rig in the South China Sea and the accompanying vessels as illegal, while Yang said Vietnam's "harassment of Chinese companies' normal activities" had "severely violated China's sovereignty".
Since that conversation, ties between the ideological allies have been on a slide. Vessels from both sides have repeatedly collided with each other and large-scale anti-China protests broke out in several Vietnamese cities. Hanoi has also threatened to take its South China Sea dispute with Beijing to an international court.
Beijing is reported to have either rejected or ignored Hanoi's repeated requests for dialogue between higher-ranking officials than Yang and Minh. Thuy said it was not yet clear if Yang would meet officials more senior than Minh during this trip.
Established in 2006, the China-Vietnam Steering Committee is supposed to meet annually to discuss key bilateral issues and cooperation projects. Last year, the meeting was held in Beijing, where Yang led a delegation from various ministries and provincial governments to hold talks with Minh's predecessor, Nguyen Thien Nhan.
But previous tensions in the South China Sea have disrupted the dialogue. The meeting was postponed in 2007 when tensions spiked after Chinese naval patrol vessels fired on a Vietnamese fishing boat and killed a crewman, said Zhang Mingliang , a Southeast Asian affairs expert at Jinan University in Guangzhou.
While the two governments agreed to carry on with the high-level meeting despite recent tensions, Zhang said neither side appeared ready for the talks as no effective solution to the dispute was in sight.
"This is not very good timing for such a high-level meeting, but they don't want to cancel it because they have to address the problems," Zhang said.
Neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese foreign ministries would confirm Yang's trip to Vietnam despite repeated requests from the Sunday Morning Post. Zhang said Chinese authorities previously announced the meetings at least a week in advance.
The Vietnamese source said Hanoi would only release news of the meeting when Yang was in Vietnam. The source said this was probably to avoid stirring up the Vietnamese public, which was already upset by Defence Minister General Phung Quang Thanh's speech at the Shangri La Dialogue a few weeks ago in which he said "all is fine" in Vietnam's relationship with China.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Sino-Viet talks still on despite tensions
2 comments:
So Vietnam, how do you feels to have your territory encroached by China? How do you think I feel about Vietnam encroached into my territory, Cambodia? As much as it hurt you about someone(China) trying to steal your land or sea, it hurt me just as much or maybe much more, to see someone(Vietnam)stole and still stealing my land and island. Don't think I and the rest of Khmer(Cambodian)ever forget what you've stolen from us. What we've lost seared deep inside our heart and mind. This is one heart and mind you will never ever taken from us. You use many various deceitful tricks to obtain our lands. China is using the same tactics to take what it want for its own agenda. What comes around will come back around to haunt you.
I think that vietnamese don't feel anything because they stole lands from each of the three coountries (China, Cambodia, and Laos)vietnam borders. Vietnamese leaders do whatever they want to enlarge their territory to the detriment of their neighbours. We can say that the existence of current vietnam is due to the stealing of lands of other countries by vietnamese leaders in the past as demonstrated by the history:
1. In the 16th century, Dai viet(vietnam) swallowed the kingdom of Champa (current central vietnam). After swallowing Champa, they[vietnamese] began to encroah upon Cambodia's Kampuchea Krom territories and settling them by sending vietnamese settlers. Finally, they succeeded in swallowing Kampuchea Krom (current south vietnam) in 1949. They also began to occupy Cambodia's Koh Tral in 1939 and are occupying it until today. Currently, they are infringing upon Cambodia's territory along its eastern border because Cambodia is weaker military than vietnam.
2. They are doing the same thing towards Laos because the latter is weaker than vietnam. They are installing a lao puppet government in vientiane. They occupying military and colonizing Laos by sending millions vietnamese settlers into Laos.
3. Vietnam was a colony of China for more than thousand of years until 15th century. The South China sea including Xisha (Paracel) and Nansha (Spratly) islands belonged to China since the ancient time. More recently vietnamese leaders including former vietnamese prime minister Pham van dong recognizezd China's sovereignty over these islands as testified by this statement: "China has continued exercising its sovereignty over the Xisha Islands since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Vietnam appeared to acknowledge and respect China's sovereignty over the islands before the mid-1970s. In 1956, Vice-Minister Dung Van Khiem of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam received Li Zhimin, charge d'affaires ad interim of the Chinese embassy in Vietnam, and told him that "according to Vietnamese data, the Xisha and Nansha Islands are historically part of Chinese territory". "In September 1958, Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong solemnly stated in a note to Premier Zhou Enlai that Vietnam recognizes and supports the Declaration of the Government of the People's Republic of China on China's territorial sea that the breadth of the territorial sea of the People's Republic of China should be 12 nautical miles and that this provision should apply to all territories of the People's Republic of China, including the Xisha Islands and the Nansha Islands in the South China Sea. Pham Van Dong's note suggests that the Vietnamese government acknowledged China's sovereignty over the Xisha Islands and Nansha Islands".
Now vietnam has no right to claim China's Xisha(Paracel) and Nansha(Spratly) islands in the South China sea.
Conclusion : don't trust vietnamese
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