Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. In this community, Vietnam once
again found itself looking to China, this time for its model of political
control and economic liberalisation. The formula also made reference
to a family relationship that, in the understanding of both China and
Vietnam, restored the historical hierarchy between the two countries.
China was the superior power, Vietnam the inferior, distasteful though
this might be to Hanoi.
For China, resolution of the Cambodian problem and normali-
sation of relations with Vietnam restored a relationship that
Vietnamese arrogance and ingratitude had temporarily disrupted. For
Vietnam events going back to the founding of the PRC confirmed that
even a radical change of ideology had not altered China’s historic
determination to dominate Southeast Asia. For a brief period of less
than a century, Chinese weakness and Western imperialism had com-
bined to alter the regional balance of power. Then the Soviet Union
had taken advantage of America’s withdrawal of Vietnam. By the
1990s, however, European imperialism and Soviet communism had
both departed. The European age in Asia was at an end. Only
America, as the sole remaining superpower, maintained a counter-
vailing presence in Northeast and Southeast Asia to oppose an
economically and militarily stronger, politically more influential, and
ominously more nationalistic China.
The economic imperative
For China the 1990s were a decade of economic development. The
Chinese economy grew for much of that time at rates averaging around
10 per cent per annum. This compared with substantially lower growth
rates in most of Southeast Asia, especially towards the end of the
decade due to the impact of the Asian economic crisis. China weath-
ered the crisis remarkably well, earning gratitude in the process by not
devaluing its currency.
Fresh beginnings