Dr Sang Huynh1
1Vietnam National University, Viet Nam
Biography:
Huynh Tam Sang is a lecturer at Ho Chi Minh City-University of Social Sciences and Humanities, a Young Leaders Program member of the Pacific Forum, a research fellow at the Taiwan NextGen Foundation, and a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University as part of the 2024 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Taiwan Fellowship.
Abstract:
This paper delves into the rationale, the means, and the outcomes of Vietnam’s strategies towards accommodating China’s South China Sea assertiveness. While scholars have embraced various component of hedging to explain Vietnam’s statecraft vis-à-vis China, they are unlikely to offer an all-inclusive understanding of the country’s hedging in the contested sea. To address the limitations of academic works, the author details Vietnam’s South China Sea hedging behaviours under the foreign-policy construct of “cooperation and struggle,” which includes a set of nuanced strategies: selective engagement, partial deference, limited resistance, and indirect balancing. The author concludes with a summary of merits, drawbacks, and future possibilities of Vietnam’s hedging in response to China’s growing maritime influence.