Vietnam’s new president, To Lam, has met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in China on his first foreign trip as leader of the South Asian country.
The general secretary of the ruling Communist Party succeeded Nguyen Phu Trong as leader after Nguyen died last month at the age of 80.
Vietnam, under Nguyen, has pursued a strategy of so-called bamboo diplomacy—named for the plant because of its great flexibility—balancing relations with China, Russia, the United States, and others.
The Aug. 19 visit comes months after Vietnam upgraded its diplomatic ties with the United States, as Western countries move their supply chains out of China and pivot to strengthen the liberal rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific.
To began his three-day visit on the morning of Aug. 18 in Guangzhou, a major southern Chinese manufacturing and export hub near Hong Kong, and visited several locations, including an address where Ho Chi Minh, founder of the Communist Party of Vietnam, carried out revolutionary activities, according to Chinese state media outlets CCTV and Xinhua News Agency.
He then set off to Beijing to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who told To that Vietnam was “a priority in [China’s] neighborhood diplomacy.”
Xi said the Chinese Communist Party “supports Vietnam in adhering to the Party leadership, taking the socialist path suited to its national conditions, and deepening the cause of reforms and socialist modernization,” according to Chinese official media Xinhua.
Vietnam, one of the five remaining communist countries in the world, established formal diplomatic ties with Beijing in 1950.
The strength of ties between the two communist regimes has always met with pressure as Vietnam tried to balance between Beijing and Moscow, and ties soured in the 1970s, culminating in the brief Sino-Vietnamese War of February 1979.
In 2008, both countries established a comprehensive strategic partnership (CSP) of cooperation—the highest level of diplomacy—that was jointly fortified in 2013 to address more shared international and regional issues of concern.
To’s visit will confirm the close ties between the two communist-run neighbors, which have well-developed economic and trade relations despite occasionally clashing over territorial boundaries in the energy-rich South China Sea.
The Chinese regime painted To’s visit as taking Xi’s trip to Vietnam in December 2023 a step further, citing “a good start” to the building of a “China-Vietnam community of shared future that carries strategic significance” when the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced the high-level visit.
The state visit is To’s first since taking office, which Beijing said “fully reflects the great importance he attaches to the development of ties between both parties and countries.”
Both countries signed more than a dozen agreements in December 2023 that included strengthening railway cooperation and development and establishing communication to handle unexpected incidents in the South China Sea. The details of the agreements were not made public.
Xi’s visit in December 2023 followed a trip to Hanoi by U.S. President Joe Biden in September 2023, during which Biden and Nguyen agreed to elevate the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership established in 2013 to a CSP.
Russia, which is the biggest exporter of arms to Vietnam, India, and South Korea, is the only country other than China and the United States with which Vietnam has a CSP.
Earlier this month, the coast guards of Vietnam and the Philippines held their first joint drill near Manila.
