BEIJING — Vietnam's prime minister, a former child messenger for the Viet Cong, has spent his 10 years in power standing up to the Chinese and steering his country closer to the U.S.
Tipped as a strong candidate to become the head of Vietnam's Communist Party at next week's National Congress, Nguyen Tan Dung has already been dubbed his country's "Putin."
"No one in Vietnam has done a Vladimir Putin, who has served as prime minister and then president," said Professor Carl Thayer, an expert on Vietnam affairs at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy.
Singing, folk dancing and on-stage toasting marked China and Vietnam's enduring ties at a reception in one of Beijing's luxury hotels on Tuesday. In flawless Mandarin Chinese, Vietnam's ambassador to China extolled "comradeship" during the ceremony commemorating 60 years of diplomatic relations between the two communist countries.
But just a day before the supposedly warm reception, Beijing brusquely rebuffed Vietnam's protest over test flights to a disputed reef of the South China Sea. Dung will need all of his Russian counterpart's steeliness to fend-off China's increasingly assertive territorial claims off of Vietnam's coastline.
"China has indisputable sovereignty over the [Spratly Islands] and their adjacent waters," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said at a press briefing Monday, referring to the spray of reclaimed coral reefs in the South China Sea. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan all challenge China's sweeping territorial claims.
This assertiveness makes Vietnam's shift toward the U.S. inevitable, according to Ernest Bower, an American expert in Southeast Asia and CEO of consulting group BowerGroupAsia.
Whoever ends up leading the Vietnamese Communist Party "will need as a core credential a credible commitment to stand up to the China challenge," he added.
Vietnam and the U.S. are bo
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