Question: Which of these statements about the Chinese-Vietnamese relationship is not true?

1. China and Vietnam are both ruled by Communist Party governments.
2. Buddhism and Confucianism are important parts of the historical cultures of both China and Vietnam.
3. China played a pivotal role in helping Vietnam expel both French and American military forces.
4. China and Vietnam remain close friends and strong allies.

In fact, the correct answer here is no. 4: China and Vietnam remain anything but close friends and strong allies despite their numerous similarities; there are ample historical reasons for this. In ancient times—going back to 100 BCE—China invaded Vietnam and ruled it for a thousand years before the Vietnamese people rose up and expelled their conquerors. As we have already noted, as late as 1979, China similarly invaded Vietnam as “punishment” for its alliance with the Soviet Union—although it was primarily China that was truly punished as its army suffered extremely heavy casualties.

This invasion history notwithstanding, the primary source of enmity between the two countries today is China's repeated bullying of Vietnam in the waters of the South China Sea. While the South China Sea is often referred to as a “marginal sea”—meaning that it is partially enclosed by islands—there is nothing “marginal” about a body of water that is the largest in the world after the five oceans.1 Indeed, through the South China Sea's more than one million square miles fully one-third of all global shipping now transits.

It's not just this modern day “silk and spice” trade that makes the South China Sea so important. Its waters are also home to some of the most fertile fishing grounds in the world in a region where fish is a key source of protein. In addition, beneath its seabed may lay oil and natural-gas reserves comparable to that of the Persian Gulf.

Most broadly, and strategically, it may also be accurately said that whoever controls this gateway to the Indian Ocean also controls Southeast Asia itself—and perhaps East Asia as well given that much of the oil that lights the lamps of Japan and South Korea must first pass through the South China Sea.

Given these high economic and national security stakes, it should come as no surprise that the South China Sea is also a center of intense conflict. As for possible war triggers, trip wires, and flash points involving China, there are at least two sets.

The first, examined in this chapter, involves Vietnam and is centered on the Paracel Islands group in the northern part of the South China Sea. The second, examined in the next chapter, revolves primarily around the Philippines and land features such as the Spratly Islands group to the south.

Let's begin then with a tour of the Paracel Islands—arguably ground zero in any potential war between China and Vietnam. These islands are located a little over three hundred miles from Hainan Island in China and a little under two hundred miles from Da Nang, Vietnam. They consist of just thirty small islets, sand banks, and reefs with a total surface area of a mere 1.3 square miles.

Small in land mass though they may be, these land features are, however, spread out over 5,800 square miles of ocean. As such, they convey very expansive resource rights under the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty.

In particular, and as we have discussed previously, under the Law of the Sea Treaty, nations are granted two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zones radiating out from their coastlines. Within these so-called EEZs, these nations are entitled to all of the natural-resource rights both within the waters themselves—think fish here—and beneath the seabed—think oil and natural gas.

Now here's the key “will there be war” point: It is not just the large coastlines of countries like China from which EEZs can be delineated. If an island is habitable, no matter how small it may be, it gets a two-hundred-mile EEZ as well—one that radiates in a full 360-degree sweep.

In fact, this is a key point often lost on analysts and journalists who routinely devalue disputes over the Paracel and Spratly Islands as meaningless squabbles over worthless “rocks in the sea.” This is, however, an extremely myopic view. As MIT professor Richard Samuels has duly noted, because of the expansive maritime rights that the Law of the Sea Treaty conveys even to seeming “rocks,” the seas no longer contain the islands but rather the islands contain the seas.2

The broader implication of this point for our “will there be war” question is one aptly noted by former White House advisor Stefan Halper: A continental power like China can significantly extend its maritime rights in “concentric circles” and in “leapfrog effect” simply by taking control of even very small islands in the South China Sea.³ Indeed, by seizing the Paracels from Vietnam, China has effectively extended its EEZ from two hundred miles to over three hundred miles from mainland China. In similar leapfrog fashion, with its successful Spratly Island grabs, China can now claim an EEZ that reaches out over five hundred miles.

Of course, through this revanchist process, China's EEZ has begun to significantly overlap with the Exclusive Economic Zones of other countries in the region, and how these overlapping resource rights should be resolved has become a matter of fierce contention. It is precisely when a bullying China resorts to coercion or outright military force to settle these disputes in its favor that the waters of the South China Sea at least figuratively begin to boil.

Today, in the case of a simmering and often seething Vietnam, such Chinese bullying takes many different forms. For example, Chinese fishing vessels, often accompanied by Chinese coast-guard ships, continue to push Vietnamese fishermen further and further out from waters that Vietnam has fished for centuries. While these contested waters are often clearly within Vietnam's own Exclusive Economic Zone, they are also caught within the Paracel Islands overlap claimed by China—a claim all the more noxious to Vietnam given that China seized the Paracels from it to begin with.

In similar coercive fashion, China's ships have cut the cables of Vietnamese oil exploration rigs and otherwise are deterring Vietnam from developing oil and gas reserves clearly within its EEZ via swarming displays of military and paramilitary force. On top of this, China has deployed its own fleet of massive floating oil exploration rigs that have made regular, and often well-publicized, incursions into waters claimed by Vietnam.⁴

In response to such Chinese bullying, Vietnam has embarked on its own very rapid military buildup; and to be clear: There is absolutely no “security dilemma” involved here where two countries are innocently misreading what might in reality only be the defensive military buildups of the other. Rather, this is an old-fashioned and highly dangerous offensive arms race—Vietnam knows a rapidly militarizing China wants its natural resources, and it is responding to this undisguised aggression with its own quite-significant military buildup to protect itself.

For example, to counteract Chinese naval power, Vietnam is acquiring a potent fleet of Russian Kilo-class submarines while Russia has already “provided enough Yakhont antiship missiles to the Vietnamese navy to equip a battalion.”5 As a very effective strategic complement to Vietnam's submarine fleet, these missiles have sufficient range so as to be “considered a considerable threat to Chinese vessels operating in the disputed waters.”⁶

Nor is it just Vietnam's navy muscling up. Its air force is adding twelve more supermaneuverable Russian Su-30 jet fighters to an already substantial arsenal, and “taking off from Bien Hoa” near Ho Chi Minh City in the north, these fighters have a combat radius that “covers the entire South China Sea.”⁷ Meanwhile, from the Phu Cat Air Force Base along the southern coast of Vietnam—a former US base during the Vietnam War—Vietnamese fighter jets and bombers are within easy reach of China's military installations on Hainan Island.⁸

As a still further complication to this “will there be war” equation, there are the cautious overtures now being made to the United States by a Vietnam perhaps hoping to tuck itself beneath the same kind of security umbrella now enjoyed by other US allies in Asia such as Japan and the Philippines. There is, of course, no small irony here given that the two countries fought a bitter war for more than a decade.

That said, having defeated the United States, Vietnam is not afraid of it, and in its strategic calculation, it would rather have a superpower friend physically located over seven thousand miles away than a superpower foe on its borders with a long history of invading Vietnamese territory. To analysts like Naval War College professor Lyle Goldstein, however, any such new formal defense-treaty alliance between Vietnam and the United States might actually become itself a trigger or trip wire for war.

As Goldstein sees it, if the United States were to establish forward bases in Vietnam, this might constitute a “red line” for China. The more subtle underlying point here is that while China understands the historic relationship between the United States and the Philippines and can tolerate a renewed US naval presence at the Philippine's Subic Bay facility, Vietnam has been a historic rival for centuries, and any substantial US military presence in Vietnam would constitute both a significant escalation and a provocation.9

At the end of the day, then, the China-Vietnam trigger is one fraught with dangerous possibilities and no shortage of strategic conundrums. Whether this trigger is ultimately pulled will depend not just on how aggressively China continues to press its claims but also on how diplomacy in the region dances around any emerging American-Vietnamese alliance.

Unfortunately, this is not the only trigger the world must worry about in the South China Sea. The other, which we will discuss in the next chapter, involves the southern part of the South China Sea, principally the Spratly Islands but also other key land and maritime features such as Macclesfield Bank and Scarborough Shoal.