By H.D.S. Greenway
BOSTON GLOBE - May 25, 2014
Vietnam may
prove harder to push around than some of China’s other maritime
neighbors in contested waters. Vietnamese and Chinese ships recently
rammed each other and fired water cannons to contest China’s bringing in
a giant oil rig off the barren sandspits called the Paracel Archipelago
that both claim in the South China Sea. It was not the first such
confrontation.
Forty years ago, when there was still a South Vietnam, I watched
South Vietnamese war ships holed by gunfire limp home into the port of
Danang. They had not been fighting their mortal enemy, North Vietnam.
They had clashed with Chinese forces off those same disputed Paracel
islands that lie about equidistant from the Chinese and Vietnamese
coasts. China made a big fuss over the confrontation at the time, saying
its forces had protected the motherland. South Vietnam scored a
propaganda victory over Hanoi by calling upon all Vietnamese, of
whatever political persuasion, to denounce the Chinese occupation of
sacred Vietnamese soil.
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