Analysis | Why Vietnam is wary of fellow communist China’s growing clout

To understand the challenges Xi Jinping faces in assuming greater leadership in world affairs, look no further than the Chinese president’s travels through his own backyard this week.

Over five days in Vietnam and Laos, Xi played two seemingly disparate roles: defender of global commerce and torch-bearer for international communism. While the trip presented China as an alternative to a more inward-looking US, it also showed the region’s ambivalence to embrace Beijing’s world view.

While landlocked Laos has much to gain from Xi’s “Belt and Road” trade and infrastructure initiative, Vietnam has been suspicious that China will use its growing economic and military might to assert more control over disputed territory in the South China Sea. Before hosting Xi in Hanoi, Vietnam’s leaders discussed weapons sales with US President Donald Trump and joined with Australia and Japan to resurrect a Pacific trade pact that excludes China.

Even so, Vietnam has little choice but to hedge its bets, particularly after Trump withdrew the US from a Pacific trade pact seen as countering China’s influence. China is by far Vietnam’s largest trading partner.

“Countries like India and Japan and Vietnam have clear concerns and scepticism,” said Ha Hoang Hop, visiting senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. “Countries such as Laos, which is receiving economic support from China, are very happy to accept Chinese influence.”

In Hanoi, residents have been particularly open about their disdain for China, which in 1979 fought a brief border war with Vietnam in a dispute over Laos. A Pew opinion poll released earlier this year found just 10 per cent Vietnamese view China favourably, compared with 84 per cent for the United States.