VIETNAM’S new leader To Lam arrived in Beijing today, making a summit with China’s Xi Jinping his first foreign trip.

En route, Lam stopped off in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to follow in the “red footsteps” of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, who founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League there in 1925. He said he wished to revive “the friendly exchanges of the older generation of leaders of Vietnam and China.”

Discussions will include a project to link Vietnam’s capital Hanoi with China through a high-speed rail track. 

China is Vietnam’s biggest trading partner and the two Communist Party-led countries issue regular statements of friendship, but they have also clashed over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Hanoi has sought to avoid being drawn into rivalry between China and the United States, declaring “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with both, as well as with India and Japan.