(Bloomberg) -- Vietnam’s To Lam is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in the coming week in what would be his first overseas trip since taking over the country’s top leadership barely a month ago.
Communist Party General Secretary Lam, who is concurrently Vietnam president, will visit China from Aug. 18 to Aug. 20, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. He is expected to have an audience with Xi who traveled to Vietnam in late 2023.
Lam is scheduled to attend next month’s United Nation’s General Assembly in the US, and possibly meet with President Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak about his plans. Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The back-to-back China-US trip underscores Vietnam’s enduring flexible foreign policy it calls bamboo diplomacy in approaching geopolitical issues.
Beijing as the first stop for Lam instead of the US follows an “informal rule” that Vietnam’s new leader will often first travel to Laos and Cambodia before China, according to Le Dang Doanh, an economist and former government adviser in Hanoi. Lam visited Laos and Cambodia in July as president.
The US would be next on Lam’s international itinerary, said Alexander Vuving, an Asia expert at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii.
“Vietnam’s top leader should go to China before going to the United States,” he said. “Doing so will signal Hanoi’s deference to Beijing, which is an important element of Vietnam’s current approach to relations with the great powers.”
No Changes
The visit would “reassure the Chinese there will be no changes in policy” since Lam took over after the death of long-time leader Nguyen Phu Trong last month, according to Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
China is Vietnam’s largest trade partner and also with whom the country also has territorial disputes with in the South China Sea. Lam will seek to ensure that dozens of agreements signed during Xi’s trip to Hanoi in December — including boosting trade and funding a cross-border railway — will materialize, Thayer said.
“He wants to be seen as someone who stands up to China and also works with China as an equal,” Thayer said. “Party to party relations are the most important conduits between China and Vietnam.”
As for the US, Vietnam earlier this month expressed displeasure with the Biden administration’s rejection of Hanoi’s request to be classified officially as a “market economy.”
The decision was seen as a blow for the country’s efforts to boost exports to its most important market. Yet Lam, most likely, won’t use his meeting with Xi as a way to tweak the US, Thayer said. “He is not gong to do anything in China that alienates the US,” he said.
Lam will serve the remainder of Trong’s third term, which ends in early 2026 when a new general secretary will be picked during the Party Congress. He became president in May.
(Updates with US trip in the third paragraph.)
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