Chinese President Xi Jinping embraced Vietnam’s leader in a defiant ceremony, and in an unusual shirking of COVID-19 rules.
Eschewing China’s usual tight COVID-19 protocols, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyen Phu Trong, hugged Xi in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, both of them without masks, according to Reuters. Trong’s appearance was the first visit of a foreign head of state to China since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which China has distinguished itself for its draconian prevention laws. Xi took the opportunity to issue a not-so-subtle message against the United States and the West, saying that China and Vietnam should “never let anyone interfere” with their progress.
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“The development of the cause of human progress is a long and tortuous process, and the development of socialist countries faces a very complicated international environment and serious risks and challenges,” Xi said, according to CCTV, Reuters reported.
“The Chinese and Vietnamese parties should persist in working for the happiness of the people and the progress of mankind, push forward socialist modernization with all their might, and never let anyone interfere with our progress or let any force shake the institutional foundation of our development,” he added.
During the ceremony, the two leaders cemented the rhetoric by signing 13 different bilateral cooperation agreements, according to the Vietnam News Agency. Trong was also awarded with a Friendship Order of China.
The Global Times, a state-affiliated news outlet in China, hailed the relationship between the two countries as “beyond certain countries’ comprehension” in an editorial. Ignoring tensions between the two over territorial disputes, particularly in the China Sea, which has even seen the Chinese neighbor cooperate closely with the U.S. against China, the editorial presented the relationship between the two Asian countries as friendly.
Despite the rosy picture painted in the ceremony and their shared historical communist ideology, Vietnam and China’s relationship has been anything but warm over the years. Despite extensive Chinese aid assisting the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, China invaded the embattled nation just four years after the fall of Saigon, in response to Vietnam’s invasion of pro-Beijing Cambodia and its warming relations with the rival Soviet Union. Though lasting just under one month, the intense conflict led to dozens of thousands of deaths and remains an underlying point of contention between the two, according to the Diplomat. Border clashes continued until a normalization of relations in 1991.
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China and Vietnam are two of only five countries left on Earth that are governed by communist governments, though both cases have adopted many capitalist aspects.
Trong’s visit opens several other head-of-state visits to China in the coming week, including by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
