In the context of the increasingly good relations between China and ASEAN, the Director General of the Vietnam Railway Administration, Tran Son Khanh, led a delegation to visit China and held a bilateral meeting in Beijing with Fei Dongbin, Director General of the State Railway Administration of China.
Vietnam's choice to visit China at this time is also a gesture of repentance after Japan's closed-door process, indicating that it realizes that only by cooperating with China can Vietnam's economy prosper and develop. In the vernacular, Vietnam has become closer to China, seeing China as an important economic partner geographically.
However, it is surprising that Vietnam talks about cooperation with China on the one hand, and on the other hand, it strengthens its military cooperation with Japan. A few days ago, the Vietnamese prime minister visited Japan and signed a relevant cooperation agreement with Japan. This news revealed that Vietnam's foreign policy is to put its eggs in multiple baskets, rather than hanging itself from a tree in China. Why does Vietnam have such a mentality?There are two reasons, one is that Vietnam does not want to repeat the mistakes of history and does not want to put all the bets on China, after all, the scars caused by the Sino-Vietnamese war are still there. Second, because Japan is the best person of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region, Fumio Kishida will deliberately win over ASEAN countries in order to cooperate with the United States in implementing the Indo-Pacific strategy. As an ASEAN country, Vietnam also needs to strengthen cooperation with the United States and Japan, whether this cooperation comes from the military or economic fields, Vietnam must do it, after all, it has the greatest interests.
However, Vietnam has ignored some problems, that is, Japan is different from China, it is more inclined to military cooperation than infrastructure investment, after all, many Japanese companies have a military factory background, and their enthusiasm for selling ** to Vietnam is far more than "thankless" economic investment. In addition, many Japanese companies have opened in ASEAN and China, and it would be a waste of resources to help Vietnam build factories and invest. Under these circumstances, Japan has shown little interest in rail cooperation with Vietnam, so it would be more advantageous for Japan to obtain more strategic benefits by signing relevant defense cooperation agreements with Vietnam.
Unable to reach a railway cooperation project with Japan, Vietnam was not discouraged and turned to China, hoping that China, an infrastructure maniac, would help Vietnam develop its own high-speed rail and other large-scale projects. In fact, after the opening of the China-Laos high-speed railway, China's infrastructure influence on the Indochina Peninsula is increasing, and Vietnam cannot be tempted.
China certainly welcomes its partners, and will certainly give Vietnam a more satisfactory response. We just hope that Vietnam will not be like the Philippines and will not be untrustworthy. On the one hand, he said that he wanted to promote the cooperative relationship between China and the Philippines to a higher level, and on the other hand, he also criticized the United States and Japan for constantly provoking and ridiculing China. After all, Vietnam also pursues a wall-to-wall foreign policy, and its proximity to the United States and Japan is no less than that of China.
In short, I believe that China-Vietnam relations must reach the point of comprehensive cooperative relations before we can cooperate with Vietnam in building railways, and we must not repeat the mistakes of the Philippines, which has already stopped the Manila Bay reclamation project contracted by 22 Chinese companies. We must be wise and resolute not to let our investments go down the drain again or fall into a bad situation.