China Builds Resentment in South China Sea

I guess I missed the 2014 riots in Vietnam that burned down over 100 Chinese manufacturing facilities, large and small.  We have heard next to nothing about it since then, largely due to press controls by China.  There was a short piece on the evacuation of 3000+ Chinese citizens from Vietnam in the latest U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission annual report to Congress, and it kind of made me wonder why the Chinese would have to evacuate its citizens from a country that was supposed to be friends with China.  This kind of thing happens all the time to the U.S. but not China.

A country doesn't evacuate it citizens unless there is a real risk something bad will happen to them.  Reports in the Financial Times [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/251f27a2-de4c-11e3-9640-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3uObULUwO ] and The Wall Street Journal [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-vietnams-anti-china-riots-a-tinderbox-of-wider-grievances-1403058492 ]  are pretty illuminating.  Bad things might have happened, if the Vietnamese government hadn't stepped in.  Three people were killed and a good many businesses burned down, not all of them from the mainland.  Taiwan and China suffered equally, as did South Korea.  However, we did not see a report of evacuation of their citizens.  Once mobs gets started, they sometimes fail to see the differences between friends and enemies.

These events had economic roots, but not the kind one associates with manufacturing in foreign territories, where labor costs, working conditions, and competition from foreign immigrants is enough to get people excited.  This was, at least on the surface, about something else - an oil platform the Chinese put in the South China Sea, where Vietnam laid claim to the waters it was floating on.  We rarely have riots in the streets over something like that, and we can be pretty sure the Vietnamese rarely do either.  They haven't stopped being one of the few remaining Communist Party led countries of the world.  China is another.  Oil separates politics pretty fast.

Sentiment must have run deeper than just an oil platform to have riots requiring the evacuation of citizens of China.  Maybe some of them remember that the Chinese and Vietnamese fought a short war over boundary issues in the North, right after our withdrawal from there. They don't forget as quickly as we do.  Maybe the cultures clashed a little bit more than they want to say.  Maybe they really are upset that the Chinese would stake a claim to territories long considered to be owned by Vietnam.  If so, there will be more to come.  In a news special, the BBC sent a small private aircraft over one of the South China Sea islands where the Chinese had been doing a lot of construction.  They were repeatedly warned about their penetration of Chinese airspace.  The more frequent the warnings the more nervous the flight crew became.  The same warnings were given over and over.  The Chinese don't seem to care that other countries find their claims dubious and disturbing.  It will come to a bad end one day, and the kinds of happenings that led up to the evacuation of their business leaders from Vietnam are just the beginning.