In Hanoi's diplomatic circles, there's a half-joking saying: the last era was China breaking away from the Soviet Union, and this era it's other countries' turn to break away from China. It refers to the same action—no longer treating a massive neighbor as a political coordinate, but simply as a reality that can be used and also turned away from.

If we turn the clock back to the mid-twentieth century, we can see the structure being built step by step. The regime we call "China" today is not a continuous form that naturally evolved from Qin and Han to a modern state, but rather a systemic experiment the Soviet Union conducted on the former Qing Empire's territory: wrapping the remnants of an old multi-ethnic, multi-border empire with a Bolshevik-style party-state machine. Ideology, organizational structure, security apparatus—all were built according to Moscow's template. For peripheral countries, this regime was not some "civilizational center," but a massive tool the Soviet Union deployed in Asia.

Later, this tool learned to cut its own strings. After the Sino-Soviet split, Beijing used the rift between itself and Moscow to sell "anti-Soviet" value to America and the West, exchanging it for technology, markets, and security buffers. The Soviet Union collapsed in crisis, while China survived on the winds of globalization and transformed itself into the "world's factory." From Hanoi's perspective, this was a very shrewd defection: preserving the power structure left by the Soviet Union while switching to a new blood supply system.

The problem is that defection wasn't treated as "the last necessary turn," but as a technique that could be used repeatedly. Treaties and promises became consumables. The Sino-British Joint Declaration was dismissed with the phrase "just a historical document," meaning: even if written into international archives and guaranteed at the United Nations, as long as it's not profitable today, it can be categorized as "the past." This attitude quickly overflowed from specific cases into a habit. Anyone dealing with Beijing had to mentally apply a discount: documents can be turned, words can be retracted, camps can be switched at any time.

From that moment on, the psychological burden for others to do the same to China became much lighter. After all, China did this to the Soviet Union, and to Britain—any country breaking away in the future can easily find precedents.

Vietnam's experience happens to be on the other side. This country is accustomed to: "There's always a regime from the north pressing down." Sometimes from Chang'an, sometimes from Beijing, sometimes from Paris or Washington. What Vietnamese society learned wasn't how to attach, but how to endure: drag when you can, negotiate when you can, guerrilla warfare when you can't win, and when you can win, drag the invader to exhaustion. The 1979 war against China re-engraved this experience—the opponent could have tanks and propaganda machines, could claim to "teach you a lesson," but in the end, who could afford the consumption, who could hold out in a long-term confrontation, the answer wasn't on the northern side.

Therefore, in Vietnamese political language, few genuinely regard Beijing as a "superior." The Cold War era's "comrade" and "brother" were more like pragmatic cooperation with the Soviet-China axis. When the Cambodia issue erupted, Vietnam directly sent troops to overthrow the Khmer Rouge, and behind the Khmer Rouge stood Beijing. From that moment, the question of "who to follow" was already answered in practice. For decades since, Hanoi's basic attitude toward China has remained: a dangerous big neighbor, an important trading partner, necessary to maintain contact, but not worth entrusting one's fate to.

Entering the twenty-first century, the Soviet Union disappeared, and China continued forward along that machine's inertia. Real estate, infrastructure, foreign trade orders lifted the country to a short-term high, while simultaneously burying massive debt and structural risks. Internal control tightened increasingly, external promises became increasingly flimsy. For neighboring countries, China simultaneously possessed two characteristics: massive scale, getting too close would be suffocating; thin credit, leaning on it would be hard to expect it to follow rules at critical moments.

On the other side, a new Cold War structure was taking shape. America wanted to reduce dependence on Chinese manufacturing, Japan and India had their own security anxieties, and most multinational corporations just wanted to prepare a few backup bases for themselves. Vietnam happened to be at this transition point: close to shipping lanes, labor costs still relatively low, regime stable but not closed enough to completely reject foreign investment, with real security vigilance toward China, yet not treating America as a savior.

So we can see a series of actions: more factories and supply chain links landing around Bac Ninh, Hai Phong, Ho Chi Minh City; R&D centers beginning to move from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Vietnam; China's regulatory departments launching reviews of some tech companies involved in Vietnam, releasing signals of "don't go too far from me." For enterprises, such signals only accelerate their determination for multi-location layouts; for Vietnam, each new landing project quietly changes the direction of that industrial chain on the map.

On this thread, Vietnam doesn't need to shout about "betrayal." Here, the words used more are "shifting" or "repositioning": slowly moving the survival center of gravity away from an unreliable big neighbor, putting security and development as much as possible into a multi-center structure to spread risks. The attitude toward China doesn't need to be dramatic: borders still negotiate, trade still happens, soft when needed, hard when needed; what really changed is just the mental ranking—Beijing is no longer an "unoffendable axis," but just one of many variables.

This is the true meaning of "doing to China what China did to the Soviet Union." The Soviet Union gave China industrial start, wartime shelter, and ideological resources; China eventually turned toward America and global markets, while preserving the Soviet-style power structure, leaving the Soviet Union in history's ruins. Today, China can't give Vietnam that much, but provides a reference sample: how a machine assembled by external forces, after betraying its parent, turned betrayal into a common tool. What Vietnam needs to do is simply, in the next round of transformation, stay further away from this machine in advance.

From this perspective, Vietnam isn't "learning to betray China," but continuing its consistent practice: facing massive power from the north, keeping distance, cooperating only when beneficial. Under the socialist camp's outer shell, China was once the Soviet Union's key proxy; now that shell has long rusted through, and the proxy itself is in decline. Vietnam has no obligation to sink together with this structure.

As for how Beijing will interpret this centrifugal movement, it will probably still use old rhetoric: so-and-so is "unfriendly," "influenced by external forces," "forgot common history." For Vietnam, these words seem somewhat distant. What we really care about is whether this narrow land can avoid being dragged into another failed empire's collapse, whether those new factories and new ports can sustain the next generation's livelihood. The last round was China breaking away from the Soviet Union; this round it's other countries' turn to consider how to break away from China. What history repeats isn't slogans, but the structure itself.