But not completely. While China today benefits from favored trade relations with the United States and aspires to join the World Trade Organization, Vietnam balks at the kind of economic reforms that would give it even the former. The long negotiated trade agreement with the United States lies unsigned because the leadership in Hanoi fears losing its economic and ideological power over society. The inner circle of decisionmakers, led by Le Kha Phieu and his military patrons, will not go as far as China in economic reform not because they are great nationalists but because they remain primitive Communists. Vietnam today has some differences with China over territorial borders and islands in the South China Sea that are related to potential oil and natural gas reserves.
Vietnamese leaders do wish to retain their political independence.
But both countries are now reunited by a residual ideological desire to preserve key aspects of Leninist socialist misrule. Twenty-five years after the fall of Saigon, the belief that Vietnamese communism represented just another chapter in the heroic saga of Vietnamese nationalism resisting foreign domination remains the basic stock of Vietnamese Communist propaganda. But the time is long past for Western academics and journalists who made their professional careers promulgating this fairy tale to admit that they were wrong. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.