NYT Unrest Poses a Risky Choice for Vietnam

Map: Territorial Disputes in the Waters Near China

“Official Vietnamese history is almost all about standing up to China,” said Robert Templer, author of “Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam. “So it is hard for the government to criticize the public when they say they are doing exactly that.”

In one sign of that ambivalence, the prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, sent a text to millions of citizens after the violence abated, praising the protesters’ defiance but making clear that his authoritarian government would not tolerate continued unrest.

“The prime minister requests and calls on every Vietnamese to boost their patriotism to defend the fatherland’s sacred sovereignty with actions in line with the law,” the text message said, according to news service reports. “Bad elements should not be allowed to instigate extremist actions that harm the interests and image of the country.”

Here in Ha Tinh, where at least one Chinese laborer was killed, many workers could be seen boarding buses for home, hoping to escape a crackdown. But those who remained behind were adamant that their cause was just, even as some denounced the violence and lamented that protesters had targeted non-Chinese companies in their frenzy.

Some likened China’s decision to deploy an oil rig off Vietnam’s coast to an invasion. And many said strident press coverage of Chinese ships training water cannons on Vietnamese vessels near the rig had fed their anger.

A Vietnamese Coast Guard officer filmed a Chinese vessel in disputed waters. Some saw China’s decision to deploy an oil rig nearby as an “invasion.” Credit Hau Dinh/Associated Press

“We’re a strong, patriotic people,” said one middle-aged worker whose factory suspended production.

The latest struggle with China started early this month, when China moved the drilling rig 140 miles off Vietnam, acting on its claim that those waters are Chinese domain, along with about 80 percent of the South China Sea. Such assertions and other claims in the East China Sea have raised fears throughout the region, where many countries contend that portions of the strategic and resource-rich waters are theirs.

In Vietnam, with its history of occupation, the move was seen as nothing short of a challenge to the country’s sovereignty, inflaming its prickly patriotism.

The government, which critics say has a record of using such sentiments when politically convenient, let loose the press to cover the controversy, and television featured tirades against China. Then officials took the unusual step of allowing the press to cover peaceful protests.

The first protests in city centers were peaceful and generated colorful photos of seas of flag-waving Vietnamese. But analysts say the government was unprepared for what followed, as workers near Ho Chi Minh City and then here in Ha Tinh began turning on foreign-owned factories. Scores of buildings were razed or badly damaged, burned by the marauding crowds.

The Formosa Steel mill was the site of protests against Chinese workers. Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

The government arrested more than 400 people and issued anxious statements about the loss of business. But the authoritarian government may have an easier time stopping the protests than quelling the anger that coalesced around the rig. China itself has learned a similar lesson in recent years, when protests against Japan over a maritime dispute and other controversies that were initially tolerated spiraled into attacks on Japanese factories and offices.

Managing nationalist sentiments in this case may be especially difficult because Vietnam’s relationship with China is so complex. The Chinese helped Vietnamese revolutionaries fighting the French, and Beijing has often served as a model for socialist policies. But China has also often been viewed as an aggressor, with its last war with Vietnam starting as recently as 1979.

These days neither the Chinese nor the Vietnamese government likes to discuss that war, which was prompted by Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and claimed thousands of lives. But for years after the hostilities, the Vietnamese Communist Party carried out a propaganda campaign against China that “featured extremely harsh, racist language and imagery,” according to Peter B. Zinoman, a professor of Vietnamese history at the University of California, Berkeley, who is currently in Hanoi.

Many of today’s adults were raised on that current of invective, even as the Vietnamese and Chinese Communist Parties patched up their differences and the governments sought to expand cross-border trade.

China’s economic and military rise has added to the conflicted feelings among many Vietnamese. Chinese investors and contractors have been part of a welcome flood of foreign investment in recent years. But critics of the Vietnamese government have maintained that some of those investments benefited party cadres in Vietnam while doing little to help the broader population.

Photo

Protesters in Makati City, the Philippines, in front of the Chinese Consulate there on Friday. China’s assertions of ownership in the South China Sea have also raised fears in the Philippines. Credit Bullit Marquez/Associated Press

Still, China’s decision to move the rig into position trespassed into one area that the government and its critics can agree on, analysts say.

Earlier this year, Vietnamese newspapers broke with longstanding reticence about reporting on a military clash in 1974, when China seized control from South Vietnam of the southern Paracel Islands. The news had been avoided in part because of sensitivities of lionizing the South Vietnamese, but the recent news coverage included heroic portrayals of the struggle.

By the time China moved the rig, anti-Chinese feelings were already at a slow boil.

Vietnamese anger with China has “spread from the elite of intellectuals and cadres to workers,” said Carl A. Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who studies Vietnamese politics. “This is new. This is populist pressure.”

Analysts say the fact that the explosion of violence targeted businesses was evidence that the motivations went much deeper than nationalism, saying workers tapped into a well of resentment against low wages and against their own government.

“I think the anger that lies underneath this has just as much to do with corruption and incompetence in the government in Hanoi than in any resentment of China,” said Mr. Templer, the expert on Vietnam. “It all adds up to a lot of anger and very few ways to channel that.”

But a number of workers insisted that their reasoning was simpler.

“Our complaint isn’t about wages,” Ho Van Hang said. “It’s about China.”