18 February 2004	Wednesday	26 Zilhaj 1424

BEIJING: A quarter century after they went to war, China and Vietnam have seen ties improve dramatically, although there is no guarantee against future tension in a relationship marked by centuries of suspicion.

In fact, the Vietnamese are so wary of the intentions of their giant northern neighbour that the United States now appears the lesser of two evils, according to observers.

"Vietnam is worried that China wants to embrace it too tightly," said Andrew Tan, an expert on regional security at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

"So it's trying to balance it out with another power, by appealing to the United States," he said. The war that started on Feb 17, 1979, was one of the brutal and largely forgotten third-world conflicts that marked the second half of the 20th century.

China attacked across the border in order to teach Vietnam "a lesson," after Vietnamese troops had toppled the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and emerged as a dangerous, Soviet-backed player in continental Southeast Asia.

There is no exact figure for how many Chinese and Vietnamese lost their lives during less than five weeks of fierce fighting. But the consensus seems to be of around 20,000 deaths, or around one third the number of Americans who died in the course of the entire decade-long US engagement in Vietnam.

It would be several years before Sino-Vietnamese ties started recovering from this low, and it would take a change of leadership in Moscow to bring it about.

With the gradual erosion of communism in the Soviet Union, Vietnam little by little lost a powerful patron, while China for the first time in a generation no longer had to worry about Russian encroachment.

China and Vietnam are now united in an attempt to bring about economic reform while avoiding political freedom. At the same time, a future-oriented rhetoric seems designed to consign a conflict-riddled past to oblivion.

"(We hope) more young people will be attracted to the cause of developing Sino-Vietnamese friendship," then Chinese president Jiang Zemin told university students in Hanoi during a visit to Vietnam in February 2002.

The problem is that history is not easily put to rest in the tortured relationship. The Vietnamese nation was to a large extent defined by an incessant effort to maintain an independent identity in the face of Chinese political oppression and cultural dominance, according to observers. And much more current issues conspire to create potential for renewed conflict, most prominently the scramble for resources, including oil, in the South China Sea.

"It has been dormant for some years, but it's still an active issue," said Nanyang Technological University's Tan. "There's no reason to believe it could not lead to tensions in the future."

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has never become the counterweight to the rising Chinese power that some observers expected. While some of its 10 members - most importantly Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia - are wary of China, the rest want to do business with the world's fastest-growing major economy.

Beijing has done its best to encourage the view of China as a benign power, seeking to create confidence along all 22,000 kilometers (13,640 miles) of its borders. A key part in this strategy was China's accession in October last year to a Treaty of Amity and Cooperation with ASEAN. -AFP