Updated Aug. 16, 2024, 03:52 a.m. ET.
Vietnam’s top leader To Lam will visit China for three days from Sunday, the 67-year-old’s first foreign trip since he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party on Aug. 3.
He will meet President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Qiang, Chairman Zhao Leji of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, and Chairman Wang Huning of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference National Committee, China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.
He will also meet representatives of leading Chinese corporations in Beijing, according to Vietnamese media.
Lam became general secretary two weeks after the death of his 80-year-old predecessor Nguyen Phu Trong. Lam has been serving as president since May.
Xi, who sent Lam a congratulatory message on his appointment, last visited Vietnam in December 2023, 14 months after Trong’s final trip to China.
Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales Canberra, said the visit underscored the importance of good relations between the countries' leaders and parties.
“Trong’s sudden death brought an end to a long-standing personal relationship with Xi,” said Thayer.
“Party protocol in these matters is for a new party leader to visit China as soon as practical to reaffirm the importance of intra-party relations.”
The neighbors, who fought a brief but bloody border war in 1979, normalized relations in 1991. In 2008, Vietnam elevated their relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” the highest level of engagement.
Speaking ahead of Lam's visit, Vietnam's Minister of Foreign Affairs Bui Thanh Son emphasized the economic benefits of warm relations.
“We have been impressed by the figures such as two-way trade in the first half of 2024 rising 24.1% year-on-year to US$94.5 billion; the number of FDI projects in the six-month span remaining at the top with 447 new ones worth nearly $1.3 billion,” he said in an interview with Vietnamese media, referring to foreign direct investment.
Son also highlighted what he called a positive tourism recovery, adding: “Vietnam hosted 2.1 million Chinese tourist arrivals during January-July, higher than that of the whole 2023.”
‘Agree to disagree’
Lam’s talks with Xi are likely to “come under the umbrella of linking Vietnam’s ‘Two Corridors, One Belt’ with China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’,” according to Thayer.
“The two leaders will focus on enhancing political trust through party-to-party exchanges and on practical cooperation for mutual benefit such as infrastructure development in the border area (rail and bridges), investment, trade, finance and currency exchange, food security, and green development.”
The two sides have clashed over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea, which have earned diplomatic rebukes from Hanoi and sparked widespread public protests in Vietnam.
Son said Lam and Xi were likely to have “frank, sincere, and substantive,” discussions on territorial issues, while claiming that the situation was “basically well controlled; and exchange and negotiation mechanisms between the two sides on the sea issues regularly maintained.”
The two leaders are likely to gloss over the issue by “agreeing to disagree,” according to Thayer.
“Trong and Xi recognised that territorial disputes in the South China Sea were a major irritant in bilateral relations. Xi and Lam are likely to reaffirm that their disputes should be resolved peacefully by better management of differences following the consensus reached by high-level leaders in the past.”
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Vietnam has adopted a flexible approach to foreign policy, known as “bamboo diplomacy,” under which it has established six other comprehensive strategic partnerships with Russia, India, South Korea, the United States, Japan and Australia.
As president Lam met Russia’s President Vladimir Putin while he was on a visit to Vietnam in June and spoke to him by telephone after being named general secretary.
The U.S. became a comprehensive strategic partner during a visit to Hanoi by President Joe Biden in September 2023, during which the U.S. president courted Vietnamese tech executives in a push to develop new semiconductor supply chains.
Vietnam’s National Assembly Chairman Tran Thanh Man was keen to stress the economic benefits of having the U.S. as a “partner of strategic importance,” during a reception for Ambassador Marc Evans Knapper in Hanoi on Thursday, pointing out that bilateral trade topped US$66.1 billion in the first seven months of this year, after approaching $111 billion in 2023.
Edited by Mike Firn.
Updated to add comments by Carl Thayer.