(BGF) – “Vietnam is no match for China when it comes to military power and never will be”, as H.D.S Greenway comments on Vietnam in its dispute over China’s bringing in a giant oil rig off the Paracel Islands that both claim in the South China Sea. However, as he said, “Vietnam could make further Chinese attempts to control all of the South China Sea expensive and dangerous.”
In the Boston Globe, Greenway shared his thought and own eye-witnessed story about Vietnamese spirit in war 40 years ago and even made a in-depth research into Vietnam history and its victories against Chinese invasions.
Click here to read the full story or visit the Boston Globe website.
Vietnam won’t be pushed around by China
May 25, 2014 | By H.D.S. Greenway
A Vietnamese Coast Guard officer took a picture of a China Coast Guard ship moving toward his vessel, which is near the site of a Chinese drilling oil rig being installed in disputed water. (Photo Credit: AFP)
Vietnam may prove harder to push around than some of China’s other maritime neighbors in contested waters. Vietnamese and Chinese ships recently rammed each other and fired water cannons to contest China’s bringing in a giant oil rig off the barren sandspits called the Paracel Archipelago that both claim in the South China Sea. It was not the first such confrontation.
Forty years ago, when there was still a South Vietnam, I watched South Vietnamese war ships holed by gunfire limp home into the port of Danang. They had not been fighting their mortal enemy, North Vietnam. They had clashed with Chinese forces off those same disputed Paracel islands that lie about equidistant from the Chinese and Vietnamese coasts. China made a big fuss over the confrontation at the time, saying its forces had protected the motherland. South Vietnam scored a propaganda victory over Hanoi by calling upon all Vietnamese, of whatever political persuasion, to denounce the Chinese occupation of sacred Vietnamese soil.
The following year, as North Vietnamese forces were closing in on Saigon and South Vietnam was in its death throes, the North Vietnamese attacked and displaced a small South Vietnamese garrison on the Spratly Islands further south which were, and are today, also claimed by China as well as Vietnam, the Philippines, and even tiny Brunei. The significance was that, even though the war between the two Vietnams was still raging, Hanoi made the decision to steal a march on China, its vital ally, just to make sure that, once the war was over, a Vietnamese garrison remained on the remote islands Vietnam claimed.
In 1979 China actually attacked Vietnam along its northern border, not over islands in the South China Sea, but in order to punish Vietnam for its invasion of Cambodia in order to oust the loathsome Khmer Rouge regime, a China ally. In that encounter the Chinese army received a bloody nose from the more battle-hardened Vietnamese.
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