Xi Jinping and Joe Biden Compete to Win Over Vietnam, the Region’s Critical Partner

On a state visit today, his first in six years, Chinese leader Xi Jinping aggressively courted Vietnam, a fulcrum of strategic activity in the region, including the South China Sea and Taiwan. The visit comes just months after the Biden administration upgraded ties with Vietnam, following years of increasing U.S.-Vietnam security cooperation that led many analysts to see Vietnam, after Singapore, as Washington’s closest security partner in Southeast Asia. The visit also comes just after Japan signed its own deal with Hanoi to boost security ties and possibly begin delivering Japanese military aid to Vietnam.

Vietnam has a long history of wars and historical enmity with China, and China is not generally popular with the Vietnamese public, which has erupted in multiple anti-China protests in recent years. Hanoi also, among Southeast Asian states affected by China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea, has been most assertive in pushing back, by bolstering ties with powers like Japan and the United States, upgrading Vietnamese coastal forces, and, at times, directly and forcefully confronting Chinese vessels in a way the Philippines and other claimants have not or cannot.

In many ways, in the unstable security environment in Southeast Asia, Vietnam is the fulcrum state, a country with a large and professional military, critical ports where even aircraft carriers can dock, and, if it is clearly aligned with one side or the other, the capability of tipping the regional security balance. It is no accident that so many powerful actors—including India, Australia, and other Southeast Asian states—have spent many years almost desperately wooing Hanoi.

But as Xi’s visit shows, despite all their hedging and new deals with Washington and Tokyo, the Vietnamese leadership still probably views China as their closest strategic partner. Beijing is by far Vietnam’s dominant trading partner, and has been for years, and even with greater military aid from Japan, the United States, or South Korea, Vietnam’s military remains based on Russian platforms, which is why they have continued to try to buy Russian arms despite sanctions.

Xi met with Vietnam’s top leader, Nguyen Phu Trong, and has already signed over thirty agreements with Hanoi, including possibly major infrastructure deals like rail projects. More importantly, Vietnam agreed to “support the initiative of building a community of shared future for humankind,” a major Chinese initiative that some see as an attempt to build an alternative global order to the existing one, dominated by liberal democracies; China’s initiative, which it has pushed hard to many developing countries and middle-level powers, would place a priority on development and economic growth, instead of ideas like growth combined with bolstering rights and freedoms and developing democracy.  

At the meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, Xi also announced the creation of a “China-Vietnam community with a shared future of strategic significance,” according to the Associated Press. In the past, Vietnam had not agreed to this language, which implies to some Vietnamese a secondary role to China, a kind of alliance with Beijing—and an imperative to support China at major regional meetings. But at this meeting, Hanoi signed on.

As Hunter Marston of Australian National University notes, the combination of Hanoi agreeing to what is essentially China’s language in both of these areas shows that, despite all the wooing, Vietnam still sees China as its most important partner. (Hunter Marston previously worked for CFR as my intern but is currently not affiliated with CFR.) There are still more meetings to come for Xi, and he will likely try to throw a wrench in U.S. plans to source critical rare earth materials from Vietnam, move more semiconductor production there, and forestall closer U.S.-Vietnam security ties—all goals he may be successful in obtaining.