Thursday, May 15, 2014

Two Can Play at That Game

China stokes xenophobic nationalism to maintain Communist Party legitimacy. Say, who are Vietnamese rioting about, anyway?

China thinks that they can just insist that Vietnam do what China wants. That might not be how it plays out:

Thousands of Vietnamese set fire to foreign factories and rampaged in industrial zones in the south of the country in an angry reaction to Chinese oil drilling in a part of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam, officials said on Wednesday.

Sadly, Taiwanese businesses took the biggest hits. That's unfortunate.

But while Peking might find it must lean forward to satisfy nationalistic sentiments that Peking has stoked, Hanoi might feel pressure to target China more accurately in defense of Vietnamese waters.

So who explains to their own xenophobic nationalists that they should just calm down?