this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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I like the optimism but Sino-Viet relations aren't amazing (but are improving slowly), so depends what you mean by 'back' and in what context
They've had a war(a much smaller and shorter border conflict) with China more recently than the US
On the official government level the relations are pretty good from what i can tell. There are also extensive economic ties between the two countries and a lot of Chinese investment. And what lingering animosity there still is at the level of the everyday people seems to be entirely one sided. I have never heard anything bad from the Chinese side about the Vietnamese.
All that's to say that i think China and the Chinese people as a whole definitely would help Vietnam in case of a conflict with an outside power that doesn't belong in the region.
Would they help in the case of a border conflict with a neighbor, something like the recent troubles between Cambodia and Thailand? I think in that case China would try to make sure there was peace as soon as possible. War causes instability and instability is bad for the kind of business China likes to do (very different model than the US which thrives off of wars and instability).
At a state level, relations are probably the best they've ever been with China. It's warming, but still very cautious.
Yes, but there are lot's of areas where Viet Nam desperately needs investment and modernization (#1 among those is clean energy and clean water infrastructure), but Viet Nam has this delusional "we'd rather go it alone" attitude towards China, but warmly embraces western investments of any kind. As a result, out vital infrastructure gets ignored while cities like TPHCM become increasingly financialized and turned into real estate speculation nightmares -- to the extent that it's becoming almost impossible for people to afford to live there.
We still mostly burn coal for power, and many homes now have 3-6 air conditioners to survive the summers here. The grid is a rats nest, and the more we cool our homes, the more unbreathable the air gets from all the pollution. There's been talk about building a nuclear plant, but it would probably take 30+ years and pretty much no one believe it will ever happen. Not unless we accept a lot of help from China.
Very true. I've never met a Chinese person who bears any ill feelings toward vietnamese, but you still see some weird animosity in some of the older (40+) people here, especially in the south. It's funny because it's not really even about the border war with the PRC, but about the cultural memory of Imperial Chinese occupation, which mostly just exists today in old music and movies.
The attitude among the petite bourgeois here (often landlords), living in China has become enviable. Your son getting a white-collar job in China is starting to become a bigger brag than someone else's son doing similar living in Amerikkka.
Yes, but will we accept that help? That's the real question.
The US doesn't want to invade Viet Nam again; they want us to be proxies against China. What happens will probably depend on how effective the narrative manipulation is. Nepal waited to long to try to regulate or ban US social media. Only vietnamese really know how corrupt things are here -- from bottom to top, but no one here understand how Facebook is a weapon.
Many people here wear US flags on their clothes. They US flag stickers on their cars. They hate Viet Nam and wish the US "won" the war, especially the calis (viet gusanos). I regularly talk to the children and grandchildren of collaborators who secretly wish for the US to re-invade. Recently one woman I was talking with, who was 9 years old in 1975, told me she misses the war because her traitor father used to bring home hamburgers and cookies from the US bases. Her father abandon her when he fled to the US on a naval ship and she blames the 'dirty communists' for taking her dad away. People here very reluctant to talk about any kind of politics or history (alcohol helps), but it's usually really bad tbh.
I hope the government is just playing a careful game by openly licking US and Israeli boots, and doesn't just sell us out.
Ironically that's the same way it is in the US itself with large swathes of the population still holding the Confederacy in high regard, though at the moment most of those types are fairly placated with the naked unapologetic fascism of the current admin.
Many such cases in the global south, even in AES countries. Cuba is another example. A lot of problems could be solved by simply asking for help from either Russia or China, and i highly doubt they would refuse in most cases. But these governments do have to ask. They have to stop being so stubborn about it.
I think it's a mix of genuine concern about presrving sovereignty (or i guess you could call it pride) and the government's fear of being accused of or seen as being a proxy or a vassal to a country that has been heavily demonized by the Western media (which reaches citizens in these global south countries too, unfortunately). Especially if the Western propaganda already accused them of being too close to these countries, they wish to go out of their way to show, including to their own people, that these accusations are false.
It's very unfortunate. One part of the solution is of course to reign in the West's influence in the information space by establishing tighter control over foreign propaganda vectors, and building domestic alternatives for the media and online spaces. The other part is simply, unfortunately, time. The reason why Western investment is not seen in the same way as help from Russia or China, is because the West has been hegemonic for so long. Thus ties with the West are seen as "normal" and apolitical. But this is slowly changing as the West declines and China rises, and China becomes an indispensable part of global south economies.
Or Russia. Russia arguably has the most expertise in the world on building nuclear power.
I think here it's more of an alignment issue, which is, IMO, rooted in economic coercion by the US for decades. By the time China became a major power Viet Nam was already very dependent on US imports. Corruption is a massive problem, too. Capitalism thrives in corruption and our soil very is fertile.
I doubt China would see the US attempt to create a puppet state right on their border and decide to stay passive even if they don't like Vietnam.
That's why I asked for specific context, if 'back' means help them in the case of another imperial invasion then I agree, but 'China will back Vietnam soon' by itself is ambiguous