As part of the SEAC Southeast Asian Waters Seminar series Bill Hayton (Associate Fellow, Chatham House) spoke on Vietnam and the South China Sea. The talk was chaired by Prof. John Sidel.
Talk Abstract
Why did Vietnamese begin to care about the islets of the South China Sea? When French colonial authorities made claims to the Paracel and Spratly islands during the 1930s their efforts were largely ignored by wider public. It was only in 1974, in the context of the closing stages of the Second Indochina War and following the seizure of the western half of the Paracel Islands by the People’s Republic of China, that the fate of these tiny rocks and reefs became emotionally important to the people of the (southern) Republic of Vietnam. This paper will emphasise the importance of feelings of ’national humiliation’ in the development of Vietnam’s maritime geobody, paralleling a process that had taken place in China forty years earlier.
A video recording of this event is available to watch here.
Speaker and Chair biographies
Bill Hayton (@bill_hayton) is an Associate Fellow in the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House. He is the author of 'Vietnam: rising dragon’ and ’The South China Sea: the struggle for power in Asia'.
Prof. John Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and a forthcoming book Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia.