To view the outside world from Hanoi, Hue, or Ho Chi Minh City is quite different from viewing it from Beijing, Chongqing, or Guangzhou. Most obviously, China is part of Vietnam's outside picture — usually and in most respects the largest single part of the picture. However, before we turn to the Sino-Vietnamese relationship we need to consider the basic parameters of Vietnam. These shape the relationship of domestic and external politics and the salience of China within Vietnamese external politics.

Since we have described Chinese politics as centric, it is quite tempting to describe Vietnamese politics as eccentric. This would be correct according to the mathematical meaning of the term. While China's politics, including its external relations, seems to revolve around itself, Vietnamese politics usually takes a more elliptical orbit. The larger focal point is Vietnam itself, but there is usually also an external point of reference that co-defines politics. Vietnam's understanding of the outside world plays a larger part in its domestic politics and self-understanding than it does for China. For traditional Vietnam, China was the primary external point of reference. For twentieth-century Vietnam, the external focus was first France and then socialist internationalism. In the twenty-first century Vietnam's external focus is more ambiguous than it has ever been before, and yet external relations are subjectively and objectively more important than they have ever been before. China is likely to play the largest single part in Vietnam's external relations, but it is by no means a dominant part.