Vietnam protests over Chinese 'invasion plans'
Beijing dismisses online threats
By Greg Torode and Shi Jiangtao
South China Morning Post
5 September 2005
Vietnam has formally protested to China over so-called "invasion plans" appearing on mainland websites that purport to detail the complete military occupation of the country by China.
Hanoi has twice summoned senior Chinese diplomats to voice its concerns over the material which, while unsourced and apparently unofficial, has alarmed diplomatic and military elites in the Vietnamese capital after appearing repeatedly over the past month.
The supposed plans detail a 31-day invasion, starting with five days of missile strikes from land, sea and air and climaxing in an invasion involving 310,000 troops sweeping into Vietnam from Yunnan , Guangxi and the South China Sea. The electronic jamming of Vietnamese command and communications centres is mentioned, along with the blocking of sea lanes in the South China Sea.
"Vietnam ... is a major threat to the safety of Chinese territories, and the biggest obstacle to the peaceful emergence of China," the plans posted on Sina.com and at least three other websites say.
"Also, Vietnam is the strategic hub of the whole of Southeast Asia. Vietnam has to be conquered first if Southeast Asia is to be under [China's] control again.
"From all perspectives, Vietnam is a piece of bone hard to be swallowed."
In a statement to the
South China Morning Post
, Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung confirmed Beijing officials had been asked "to act so that such negative articles will not appear again since these may be harmful to ... bilateral relations".
"This is irrelevant information which goes against the trend of peace, friendship and co-operation for development in the region and the world and is not in the interests of the fine relationship existing between Vietnam and China," Mr Dung said.
He added that China acknowledged Vietnam's request and "stated that the ... article did not reflect the position of the government of China".
A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing, meanwhile, said the "different voices" on the internet represented individual acts "by only a handful of people, which by no means represented China's stance".
"The Chinese government attaches importance to the development of Sino-Vietnamese relations and is actively committed to strengthening publicity of the Sino-Vietnamese friendship," he said.
Vietnamese government sources said they were perplexed that articles remained online, as they believed China actively policed the content of mainland sites.
Many officials believe the articles may have been sparked by rising tensions over the disputed South China Sea, where Beijing has recently been trying to pressure international oil firms into pulling out of their exploration contracts with Vietnam.
The Post reported in July that Chinese envoys had warned ExxonMobil - the world's largest oil firm - that its future mainland business could be at risk unless it pulled out of deals in Vietnam's southern and central oil fields. ExxonMobil executives say Vietnam's legal position is strong.
Song Xiaojun, a Beijing-based military expert, described the internet-based plans, one of which was subtitled "One battle to set the region in order", as a joke.
"It is, at most, a game by a few military amateurs and it has no military value at all," he said.
He said there were still some people in both countries who could not forget the nations' old animosities.
"China and Vietnam have similar political systems and should unite to counter the US, which is the common enemy for both countries," he said. "Clearly the US tries to play Vietnam off against the rising China."
Mr Song described US company ExxonMobil's oil exploration work in the South China Sea as provocative.
"We should be on the alert for possible conspiracy theories behind the so-called invasion plan and other provocative stuff. Sensible people in both countries are well aware that China and Vietnam are destined to be allies. China has no reason to think of invading Vietnam as it needs to make good friends with its neighbours."
He said the mainland government should also learn a lesson from the issue.
"Authorities should be responsible to guide public opinion towards other countries and make its own stance on confusing issues clear and understood. The government should not leave any chances for troublemakers and harmful speculations."
Carl Thayer, a veteran Vietnamese military analyst at the Australian National University, said it was unthinkable that China would consider such an invasion in the modern regional context, but he warned that the case highlighted the potential for "extreme nationalism" on both sides.
"It may well become part of a tit-for-tat trend ... China objects to anti-Beijing protests in Hanoi and then Vietnam feels it must react to something like this," Dr Thayer said.
Current Vietnamese military strategy has long been geared towards deterring China from backing its territorial claims by force, he said.
China is Vietnam's biggest source of imports and both governments have worked to rebuild ties in recent years, despite lingering tensions after the brief but bloody border conflict of 1979.
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Vietnam protests hawkish Chinese web postings
Chinese officials have confirmed that plans posted online for an invasion of Vietnam do not reflect Beijing's official position. But the postings are heightening tensions at a time when China seeks to gain control of oil-rich regions in the South China Sea.
By Jonathan Adams
Christian Science Monitor
10 September 2008
The Hanoi government has complained to Beijing about postings on Chinese websites that detail plans for an invasion of Vietnam. Chinese officials have dismissed the posts as the ramblings of a hypernationalist minority. But the diplomatic flare-up is seen as an indication of rising tensions between the two nations over the potentially oil-rich South China Sea. There, China has been pressuring Western oil firms to cancel joint exploration projects with Vietnam in waters that Beijing also claims.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the invasion plans have been posted on the popular Chinese web portal Sina.com and at least three other websites. Analysts interviewed by the SCMP characterized the posted "invasion plans" as the work of kooks, with little military value.
The supposed plans detail a 31-day invasion, starting with five days of missile strikes from land, sea and air and climaxing in an invasion involving 310,000 troops sweeping into Vietnam from Yunnan, Guangxi and the South China Sea. The electronic jamming of Vietnamese command and communications centers is mentioned, along with the blocking of sea lanes in the South China Sea....
"Vietnam is the strategic hub of the whole of Southeast Asia. Vietnam has to be conquered first if Southeast Asia is to be under [China's] control again," the plans say. "From all perspectives Vietnam is a piece of bone hard to be swallowed."
The SCMP added that Vietnamese officials were baffled that the postings remained online after they registered their complaints, since Beijing can easily block any Web content that has been brought to its attention.
The Straits Times, a Singapore daily, reported that Chinese officials have assured Vietnam that the postings do not reflect Beijing's official position.
The web postings come as China and Vietnam are squaring off over exploration projects in the South China Sea in areas that both claim. In July, Beijing had warned the American oil giant ExxonMobil to scrap an exploration deal with Vietnam, reported the World Tribune. The report suggested that Vietnam had a better case for its claim to potentially oil-rich fields off its coast. But China is flexing its growing political muscle by asserting its claim to nearly the entire South China Sea.
A Hong Kong newspaper says Beijing's diplomats have threatened retaliation if ExxonMobil goes ahead with a preliminary agreement with the Vietnamese state oil firm PetroVietnam. The deal covers exploitation in the South China Sea off Vietnam's south and central coasts, according to the Sunday Morning Post....
The Hong Kong newspaper quoted unidentified sources saying Exxon Mobil was confident of Vietnam's sovereign rights to the blocks it was now seeking to explore. But it is clear that ExxonMobil could not dismiss China's warnings out of hand given the rapidly increasing Chinese market for crude oil and oil products....
Last year, Chinese media targeted an agreement between Vietnam and BP near the Spratlys maintaining that those islands had been an "indisputable part of Chinese territory since ancient times." The Spratlys, like other island groups in the region, are uninhabited rocky outcroppings and coral but are in an area that may contain large oil and gas deposits.
Reuters reported that China and Vietnam are actually cooperating in oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam's north coast. But in waters further south, the two sides are at odds. The territorial dispute in southern waters led British oil giant BP to scotch its plans for exploration there.
Once united by their communist ideology, relations between Vietnam and China cooled in the 1970s, particularly when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in late 1978 to oust the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge regime. Partly in retaliation, China invaded Vietnam a few months later, as detailed by Global Security. The two sides fought a nasty one-month border war that left tens of thousands dead before Beijing retreated. Border clashes continued throughout the 1980s.
That history helps explain Vietnam's sensitivity to public "invasion plans" on Chinese websites, no matter how bogus they might be.
In the past two decades, relations have warmed as both countries moved ahead with pragmatic market reforms, despite several ongoing territorial disputes. In addition to the Spratly and Paracel islands in the South China Sea, the countries are also battling for influence over neighboring, resource-rich Laos. A commentary in the Asia Times argued that Laos is likely to increasingly tilt toward China, despite the landlocked country's historically close ties to Vietnam.
Laos is of increasing strategic importance to both China and Vietnam, two of Asia's fastest growing countries. Vietnam's interests lie primarily in securing its long land border with Laos and developing greater access to markets in Thailand. For China, Laos provides a growing avenue to export products to wider Southeast Asia, particularly from its remote and less-developed, landlocked southwestern regions....
Some analysts here predict that the balance of influence inside the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) could soon shift in Beijing's favor, as senior Lao leaders fade from the political scene and younger, more market-savvy cadre lacking experience in the communist revolutionary period assume positions of power.
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Chinese Invasion of Vietnam
February 1979
Global security
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/prc-vietnam.htm
China's relations with Vietnam began to deteriorate seriously in the mid-1970s. After Vietnam joined the Soviet-dominated Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation (Comecon) and signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1978, China branded Vietnam the "Cuba of the East" and called the treaty a military alliance. Incidents along the Sino-Vietnamese border increased in frequency and violence. In December 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia, quickly ousted the pro-Beijing Pol Pot regime, and overran the country.
China's twenty-nine-day incursion into Vietnam in February 1979 was a response to what China considered to be a collection of provocative actions and policies on Hanoi's part. These included Vietnamese intimacy with the Soviet Union, mistreatment of ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, hegemonistic "imperial dreams" in Southeast Asia, and spurning of Beijing's attempt to repatriate Chinese residents of Vietnam to China.
In February 1979 China attacked along virtually the entire Sino-Vietnamese border in a brief, limited campaign that involved ground forces only. The Chinese attack came at dawn on the morning of 17 February 1979, and employed infantry, armor, and artillery. Air power was not employed then or at any time during the war. Within a day, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) had advanced some eight kilometers into Vietnam along a broad front. It then slowed and nearly stalled because of heavy Vietnamese resistance and difficulties within the Chinese supply system. On February 21, the advance resumed against Cao Bang in the far north and against the all-important regional hub of Lang Son. Chinese troops entered Cao Bang on February 27, but the city was not secured completely until March 2. Lang Son fell two days later. On March 5, the Chinese, saying Vietnam had been sufficiently chastised, announced that the campaign was over. Beijing declared its "lesson" finished and the PLA withdrawal was completed on March 16.
Hanoi's post-incursion depiction of the border war was that Beijing had sustained a military setback if not an outright defeat. Most observers doubted that China would risk another war with Vietnam in the near future. Gerald Segal, in his 1985 book Defending China, concluded that China's 1979 war against Vietnam was a complete failure: "China failed to force a Vietnamese withdrawal from [Cambodia], failed to end border clashes, failed to cast doubt on the strength of the Soviet power, failed to dispel the image of China as a paper tiger, and failed to draw the United States into an anti-Soviet coalition." Nevertheless, Bruce Elleman argued that "one of the primary diplomatic goals behind China's attack was to expose Soviet assurances of military support to Vietnam as a fraud. Seen in this light, Beijing's policy was actually a diplomatic success, since Moscow did not actively intervene, thus showing the practical limitations of the Soviet-Vietnamese military pact. ... China achieved a strategic victory by minimizing the future possibility of a two-front war against the USSR and Vietnam."
After the war both China and Vietnam reorganized their border defenses. In 1986 China deployed twenty-five to twenty-eight divisions and Vietnam thirty-two divisions along their common border.
The 1979 attack confirmed Hanoi's perception of China as a threat. The PAVN high command henceforth had to assume, for planning purposes, that the Chinese might come again and might not halt in the foothills but might drive on to Hanoi. The border war strengthened Soviet-Vietnamese relations. The Soviet military role in Vietnam increased during the 1980s as the Soviets provided arms to Vietnam; moreover, Soviet ships enjoyed access to the harbors at Danang and Cam Ranh Bay, and Soviet reconnaissance aircraft operated out of Vietnamese airfields. The Vietnamese responded to the Chinese campaign by turning the districts along the China border into "iron fortresses" manned by well-equipped and well-trained paramilitary troops. In all, an estimated 600,000 troops were assigned to counter Chinese operations and to stand ready for another Chinese invasion. The precise dimensions of the frontier operations were difficult to determine, but its monetary cost to Vietnam was considerable.
By 1987 China had stationed nine armies (approximately 400,000 troops) in the Sino-Vietnamese border region, including one along the coast. It had also increased its landing craft fleet and was periodically staging amphibious landing exercises off Hainan Island, across from Vietnam, thereby demonstrating that a future attack might come from the sea.
Low-level conflict continued along the Sino-Vietnamese border as each side conducted artillery shelling and probed to gain high spots in the mountainous border terrain. Border incidents increased in intensity during the rainy season, when Beijing attempted to ease Vietnamese pressure against Cambodian resistance fighters.
Since the early 1980s, China pursued what some observers described as a semi-secret campaign against Vietnam that was more than a series of border incidents and less than a limited small-scale war. The Vietnamese called it a "multifaceted war of sabotage." Hanoi officials have described the assaults as comprising steady harassment by artillery fire, intrusions on land by infantry patrols, naval intrusions, and mine planting both at sea and in the riverways. Chinese clandestine activity (the "sabotage" aspect) for the most part was directed against the ethnic minorities of the border region. According to the Hanoi press, teams of Chinese agents systematically sabotaged mountain agricultural production centers as well as lowland port, transportation, and communication facilities. Psychological warfare operations were an integral part of the campaign, as was what the Vietnamese called "economic warfare"--encouragement of Vietnamese villagers along the border to engage in smuggling, currency speculation, and hoarding of goods in short supply.
China's netizens menace Vietnam
By Rowan Callick
The Australian
11 September 2008
THE Rudd Government's warnings of substantial regional arms build-ups have been thrown into sharp relief by Chinese "netizens" warning that Vietnam risks invasion if it continues with its moves to explore the South China Sea for valuable oil and gas.
The Chinese internet threats underline the risk of energy issues triggering clashes between east Asian neighbours, a problem highlighted by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Tuesday.
China has been pressuring ExxonMobil to withdraw from an exploration deal with PetroVietnam, and Vietnam is lodging a complaint about Chinese online rumours of invasion plans.
China has claimed much of the Spratly Islands and part of the continental shelves of The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, as well as of Vietnam, in its determination to control the development of petrochemical exploitation in the region. The Association of South East Asian Nations has pinned some of its reputation on resolving these disagreements.
The sporadic diplomatic spats over access to resources in the South China Sea became more serious several weeks ago, when China warned ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil corporation, that its business in China would be imperilled if it failed to withdraw from joint exploration deals with Vietnam.
Soon after that, what purported to be Chinese invasion plans for Vietnam were posted on major websites in China, including the market leader, sina.com.
The South China Morning Post reported that the Vietnamese Government had issued a formal protest to China in response -- aware that Beijing has the capacity, if it wishes, to block access to the internet for such material.
The purported invasion plans refer to five days of missile strikes from land, sea and air, followed by the downward thrust of 310,000 troops. They rehearse the blocking of routes through the South China Sea -- which would be disastrous for Australia, because most of its lucrative commodity exports to China, Japan and South Korea traverse those waters.
The plans claim that Vietnam "is a major threat to the safety of Chinese territories, and the biggest obstacle to the peaceful emergence of China", as well as "the strategic hub of the whole of Southeast Asia".
They say that "Vietnam has to be conquered first if Southeast Asia is to be under China's control again." One version of the plan is headlined: "One battle to set the region in order."
No analyst is taking these internet postings seriously, however -- except that they indicate the intensity of Beijing's desire to put pressure on Hanoi to co-operate on oil exploration, even off its own coast.
China last attempted to invade Vietnam in 1979 -- a move that ended disastrously for Beijing, defeated in a war that today is quietly forgotten.
Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung told the South China Morning Post that Beijing officials had been asked "to act so that such negative articles will not appear again since these may be harmful to ... bilateral relations.
"This is irrelevant information, which goes against the trend of peace, friendship and co-operation for development in the region and the world and is not in the interests of the fine relationship existing between Vietnam and China."
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