The New York Times on June 21, 2017 reported that State-run newspapers in Vietnam and China had recently reported that senior military officials from the two countries would hold a fence-mending gathering along a border, but on June 20, 2017, disclosed that the scheduled meeting was not held. The Chinese Defense Ministry later said in a terse statement that it had canceled the event “for reasons related to working arrangements.” Analysts, citing government sources, said that the Chinese delegation had unexpectedly cut short a trip to Vietnam after tempers flared during a closed-door discussion on disputed territories in the South China Sea. Alexander L. Vuving, a Vietnam specialist at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii, said “This was not what the Vietnamese expected from a polite guest. “You can say both sides miscalculated." The dispute happened during a visit to Hanoi this week by Gen. Fan Changlong of China. It was unclear what precisely roiled his meeting with Vietnamese officials, much less whether the general’s actions had been planned.

Among the reasons being advanced are Vietnam’s apparent refusal to abandon oil and gas exploration in areas of the South China Sea that both it and Beijing claim. A specific source of the dispute may have been the so-called Blue Whale project, a gas-drilling venture in the South China Sea by Vietnam’s state oil company, PetroVietnam, and Exxon Mobil. The companies signed an agreement during a January trip to Hanoi by then US Secretary of State John Kerry.  The drilling site, which is expected to produce gas for power generation by 2023, is close to the disputed Paracel Islands and near the “nine dash line” that shows expansive territorial claims on Chinese maps. Alexander L. Vuving said that China probably resents that Vietnam has formed a partnership with an American oil company, particularly one whose previous chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, is US President Trump’s Secretary of State.

Carl Thayer, a longtime analyst of the Vietnamese military and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales, said that if General Fan Changlong had indeed asked Vietnam to cease oil exploration in that area, Vietnam would have considered the request “inflammatory”; it would have implied Chinese territorial control in the Exclusive Economic Zone off the Vietnamese coast. Thayer said “Vietnam’s leaders would have refused this request and responded by reasserting Vietnam’s sovereignty.” There were unconfirmed reports on June 21 that China had recently deployed 40 vessels and several military transport aircraft to the area. A few days before General Fan Chanlong’s visit to Hanoi, China moved the same oil rig to a position in the South China Sea that is near the midway point between the Chinese and Vietnamese coasts, apparently seeking to pressure Vietnam to cease oil and gas exploration in disputed waters. Data from myship.com, a website affiliated with the Chinese Transport Ministry, showed that the rig has been about 70 nautical miles south of China and 120 nautical miles northeast of Vietnam over the past week. Xu Liping, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing who specializes in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, said that the countries were expected to disagree over territorial claims in the South China Sea, but they have established frameworks to defuse disagreements through government channels as well as through the two countries’ Communist parties. He added that in the end, the two countries “will come out and resolve this problem since both want stability.”

(Comment: The first fence-mending gathering, called the Vietnam-China Border Defense Friendship Exchange Program, took place in 2014. The meeting this week was expected to include a drill on fighting cross-border crime).