Il sogno cinese rinviato. L’accoglienza vietnamita del film Operation Red Sea

Since Xi Jinping’s pronouncement in 2012 of the Chinese Dream, many have questioned the extent to which the dream has become hegemonic, understood as a consensus on a set of so- called Chinese values shared, consciously or not, by other world actors. This question is particularly relevant in the case of bordering countries such as Vietnam. Through an examination of a Vietnamese controversy involving the screening of the Chinese film Operation Red Sea, the paper argues that Chinese hegemony reaches its limit in the Vietnamese case. If a sign of a discourse’s hegemony is its status as “common sense” [sensus communis], then the evidence thus far suggests not the widespread dissemination of a universal and universalizing “Chinese Dream,” but a dream hopelessly deferred. On the one hand, the Vietnamese government is cognizant of its powerful neighbour whose political fraternity and diplomatic relations it seeks to sustain; on the other hand, as I will suggest, an emerging form of a nascent modern Vietnamese nationalism complicates if not constrains China’s hegemonic agenda. Nationalism, this paper suggests, is the missing third term that one needs to consider in evaluating the spread of the so- called Chinese Dream.