My question is what was Vietnam thinking when they continued widespread land reclamation after the 2002 DOC?
Surely they knew they couldn't hope to compete with China in island reclamation and base building in the South China Seas, and at the same time they set a serious precedent.
Is it Dai Viet (Great Vietnam) syndrome again?
Well I think they plainly didn't expect China to have the will or abilities to do what it did. I don't think anyone outside China did until China demonstrated it.
The western media is partly to blame, as they tend to have this wanting to have their cake and eat it too attitude towards China, where they dismiss Chinese warnings as empty words when it suits their agenda at the same time as they play the China threat card.
China put out plenty of warnings, the western media and vietnam just chose to ignore and dismiss them, and then had the cheek to imply China was being unreasonable by escalating their response from mere words to action after it has been repeatedly shown that mere words just doesn't register with them.
The Vietnamese miscalculated because they projected their own mentality on China thinking the only reason China didn't do something was because it lacked the will and/or means to do so.
Thus they mistook Chinese restraint for weakness and pressed when they should have held, which provoked China into making a reaction.
As my earlier post pointed out, because of the power dynamics involved, and also because of Chinese philosophy, when China did finally decide to act, it tend to do so in a decisive way.
The Chinese don't rate the proportional tit for tat gradual escalation western philosophy advocates, but instead prefer shock and awe grand moves that serve as examples, yet always leave itself room for further lessons to be taught should the first not have the desired effect. So I guess there is an element of gradual escalation, just on a much bigger scale than what western tacticians would work on.
