BEIJING/HANOI – Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary 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.

       Mr 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 Mr Xi who travelled to Vietnam in late 2023.

       Mr Lam is scheduled to attend September’s United Nation’s General Assembly in the US, and possibly meet with US President Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorised 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 Mr 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 Mr Le Dang Doanh, an economist and former government adviser in Hanoi.

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       Mr Lam visited Laos and Cambodia in July as president.

       The US would be next on Mr Lam’s international itinerary, said Mr 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.”

       The visit would “reassure the Chinese there will be no changes in policy” since Mr Lam took over after the death of long-time leader Nguyen Phu Trong in July, according to Emeritus Professor Carl Thayer from 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.

       Mr Lam will seek to ensure that dozens of agreements signed during Mr Xi’s trip to Hanoi in December – including boosting trade and funding a cross-border railway – will materialise, Prof Thayer said.

       “He wants to be seen as someone who stands up to China and also works with China as an equal,” Prof Thayer said. “Party to party relations are the most important conduits between China and Vietnam.”

       As for the US, Vietnam earlier in August 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 Mr Lam, most likely, won’t use his meeting with Mr Xi as a way to tweak the US, Prof Thayer said. “He is not going to do anything in China that alienates the US,” he said.

       Mr Lam will serve the remainder of Mr 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. BLOOMBERG