Being there

HUNDREDS of thousands lined the streets of Vietnam’s capital on October 13th as Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, arrived for a three-day visit. They were not there for him, though. It was a state funeral for Vo Nguyen Giap, a legendary general, second only to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam’s pantheon of national heroes. Indeed, many Vietnamese found the timing of Mr Li’s arrival rather offensive and thought that he should have postponed it to avoid intruding on their grief. “Disrespectful” and “arrogant” were two adjectives used. “Typical” was another.

Unperturbed, Mr Li (pictured above, left) was able to portray his meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Tan Dung (above, right), as a “breakthrough”. It capped a fortnight of high-level Chinese diplomacy in South-East Asia, intended to repair ties frayed in recent years by China’s extensive and disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Xi Jinping, China’s president and leader of the Communist Party, visited Indonesia, Malaysia and the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). Mr Li attended a summit in Brunei with leaders of the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and went on to Thailand. That Barack Obama was due at both APEC and ASEAN, but withdrew because of the budget stand-off in Washington, gave the Chinese leaders’ tours even more prominence.

Vietnam is the ASEAN country where suspicion of China is strongest. After centuries of animosity and a brief, bloody war in 1979, a territorial dispute still simmers, the most extensive of the four China has with ASEAN members in the South China Sea (the others being Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines). Not only do both China and Vietnam claim the Spratly Islands to the south, but Vietnam regards itself as having been illegitimately evicted from the Paracel islands to the north, when China seized them in 1974 from the dying regime of the former South Vietnam. Confrontations over fishing and oil and gas exploration are frequent.

Yet in June, during a visit to China by Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang, the two countries signed a new “strategic partnership”. China is Vietnam’s largest trading partner—not even counting a flourishing illegal trade over the border—as it is for ASEAN as a whole. Mr Li’s breakthrough was to go further in parking the territorial dispute so that it does not get in the way of other business. He even agreed to a “maritime co-operation” work group.

In China, this helped smother unpleasant memories of 2010, when, at a meeting in Hanoi, Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state at the time, waded into the South China Sea dispute, declaring an American “national interest” in it. China blames American interference for emboldening Vietnam and the Philippines to stand up to it over the sea. Now China Daily, an official newspaper, has quoted a Chinese analyst: “Hanoi has already realised that it is unrealistic to count on Washington to give public support to its claims on some islands.”

That analysis is a stretch. But Mr Li’s tour, like Mr Xi’s, was a reminder of how big a regional power China has become, and of how absent Mr Obama was. Everywhere they displayed their economic clout. In Thailand, for example, Mr Li delighted the government by offering help in two areas of self-inflicted economic harm, by agreeing to buy more rice and rubber. Mr Xi had already floated the idea of a Chinese-led “Asian infrastructure bank” to help meet one of the region’s most pressing needs. In Brunei, Mr Li had earlier proposed a new treaty with ASEAN, to realise his vision of a “diamond decade” in its relations with China.

Not that alluring

If this was a charm offensive, however, one ASEAN country still gets the offence without the charm. China is incensed that the Philippines is challenging its ill-explained, expansive claim in the South China Sea at the international tribunal of the United Nations’ law of the sea. It suits China to try to isolate the Philippines. Vietnamese scholars, however, say their government is fully aware of this—and has not ruled out joining the Philippines’ legal action.

A few weeks of diplomatic activity have not changed the fundamental reality—that South-East Asia looks to China as its main trading partner and America as the prime guarantor of its security. They have, however, heightened a perception that power in the region is shifting. A commentary in the Jakarta Post, an English-language newspaper in Indonesia, argued bluntly that “it is China, not the United States, who is the leader of the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century.” Pointing to Mr Obama’s no-show and the government shutdown, it concluded that his “much touted ‘pivot’ to Asia feels more like a pirouette with an overemphasis on military engagement.”

The Chinese press is happy to foster the impression of a power shift, taking the argument beyond South-East Asia. Its official news agency, Xinhua, published a commentary calling for a “de-Americanised world”. It argued that, with the possibility of a sovereign default by the superpower, “such alarming days when the destinies of others are in the hands of a hypocritical nation have to be terminated.”

That notion attracts some sympathy in South-East Asia but few would want an American-led international order to give way to one dominated by China. Some Vietnamese officials thought the criticism of the timing of Mr Li’s visit to Hanoi was unfair. After all, he was there in time to offer condolences at a time of national grief. But it is not just in Vietnam that many are prepared to think the worst of Chinese motives.