China must have been encouraged by the noises coming out of Vietnam earlier in the week after President Xi Jinping’s visit to the emergent southeast Asian powerhouse. Post-visit press conferences abounded with the kind of rhetoric that was designed to show two nations united in a common future: pledging to be “good neighbours”, promising a future between the two that revolved around a relationship of mutual understanding and cooperation, Beijing must have considered the visit a successful one. However, even with Xi Jinping’s declarations of mutual, hand-in-hand progress still ringing in the halls of the Vietnamese National Assembly, Hanoi was already playing a double game: Japan had been given the right to make port calls in a Vietnamese naval base facing the South China Sea – a strategic first. Read more
