WELLINGTON: As countries in the region are busy dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, China is stirring the pot in the South China Sea.
At the same time, the Chinese government survey vessel Haiyang Dizhi 4 is manoeuvring around the Vietnamese EEZ in a move believed to be aimed at pressuring Hanoi not to go ahead with its oil and gas exploration activities in the energy-rich Block 06-01 off the Vietnamese coast.Beijing has a track record of successfully coercing Hanoi to temporarily halt its strategically important projects in that area.
During the Haiyang Shiyou 981 standoff in 2014, then prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung gained a huge boost in popularity by simply being the first Vietnamese leader in decades to publicly defy China in an ASEAN summit. In a recent commentary, the Beijing mouthpiece Global Times dubbed Vietnam “the most significant partner of the US in Southeast Asia”. This viewpoint is noteworthy given the intimate party-to-party relationship between the Chinese and Vietnamese communist regimes.
In 2018, a proposed draft law for Special Economic Zones was met with unprecedented unrest in Vietnam, with thousands of angry citizens burning down police cars and vandalising government offices.
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