经济学人阅读Not as close as lips and teeth

Not as close as lips and teeth China should not fear India’s growing friendship with Vietnam

Oct 22nd 2011 | from the print edition

WHEN China’s sovereignty is at issue Global Times, a Beijing newspaper, does not mince words. In September it growled that a contract between Vietnam and an Indian state-owned oil-and-gas company, ONGC, to explore in Chinese-claimed waters in the South China Sea would “push China to the limit”. Yet this month India and Vietnam have reached an agreement on “energy co-operation”. Global Times is incensed that this was signed just a day after Vietnam, during a visit to Beijing by the head of its communist party, Nguyen Phu Trong, had agreed with China on “ground rules” for solving maritime squabbles. Now, thundered the paper, “China may consider taking actions to show its stance and prevent more reckless attempts in confronting China.”

The more sober China Energy News, a publication of the Communist Party’s People’s Daily, has weighed in, warning India that its “energy strategy is

slipping into an extremely dangerous whirlpool.” Behind such fulminations lie two C hinese fears. One is that India’s involvement complicates its efforts to have its way in the tangled territorial disputes in the South China Sea. The

second is that India and Vietnam are seeking closer relations as part of an American-led strategy to contain China. Even if the first worry has some basis, fears of containment are overblown.

As Mr Trong was in China, however, Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang, was in India, to pursue the two countries’ “strategic partnership”. Paranoid Chinese nationalists could be forgiven for feeling ganged up on. After all, ignoring the border clashes with the former Soviet Union in 1969, these were the countries on the other side of China’s two most recent wars. In both Delhi and Hanoi the experience of brief “punitive” invasion by China respectively still colours attitudes. India was humiliated by China’s foray into what is now Arunachal Pradesh in 1962. Vietnam’s fierce response to the Chinese invasion of 1979 has become part of national legend of perpetual resistance to Chinese domination.

Vietnam still claims the Paracel islands in the South China Sea, from which China evicted it in 1974, as well as the much-contested Spratlys to the south, where over 70 Vietnamese sailors died in clashes with China in 1988. Tension in the area remains high. Earlier this year, after a Vietnamese ship had its surveying cables cut by a Chinese patrol boat, hundreds joined anti-China protests in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

So Vietnam welcomes India’s support, just as it was buoyed last year by America’s declaration, aimed at China’s perceived assertiveness, of a “national interest” in freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Of Vietnam’s partners in the Association of South-East Asian Nations, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines also have partial claims in the sea. Vietnam naturally would like to present as united a front as possible against China’s claims.

It is against this background that some Indian strategists see an opportunity: Vietnam could be “India’s Pakistan”, a loyal all y, as Pakistan is for China, that exerts indirect, debilitating pressure on its strategic rival. Harsh Pant, a professor of defence studies at King’s College, London, argues that Vietnam offers India an entry-point, through which it can “penetrate China’s periphery”.

Tweaking China appeals to Indian diplomats, who habitually complain that their big neighbour refuses to make room for their own country’s rise. Behind that resentment lurks irritation at China’s effort to exert influence in India’s own backyard, not just through its “all-weather” friendship with Pakistan, but in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka as well. Indeed, on Mr Sang’s heels in India came Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, as India