Roots of the Sino-Vietnamese Conflict (original) (raw)
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Journal of Cold War Studies, 2019
The terms “decolonization” and “Cold War” refer to specific processes and periods in the international system, but they do not capture the full agency of local actors such as Vietnamese Communists. Based on recently available archival materials from Hanoi, this article maps those terms onto Vietnamese Communist thinking through four specific cases. The declassified materials underscore the North Vietnamese leaders’ deep commitment to a radical worldview and their occasional willingness to challenge Moscow and Beijing for leadership of world revolution. The article illuminates the connections (or lack thereof) between global, regional, and local politics and offers a more nuanced picture of how decolonization in Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1980s sparked not only a Cold War confrontation but also a regional war.
2019
This interdisciplinary research investigates the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) Chinese-inspired mass mobilization and land reform policies to explore the rise of the communist revolution in Vietnam and the country’s violent transformation from colonialism to communism, from 1945 to 1960. I situate this post-WWII period of transformation in North Vietnam within the context of decolonization and the global Cold War and argue that land reform was the communist-led DRV’s most important domestic policy during the First and Second Indochina Wars against France and the United States. Drawing on Vietnamese, English, French, and Chinese sources, including interviews and previously untapped archival documents, the dissertation demonstrates that the mobilization of the masses to implement land reform was an orchestrated class campaign to mobilize popular support against colonial French rule. This support contributed to the 1954 defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu, which essentially led to the division of Vietnam into two opposing polities—Democratic of (North) Vietnam and Republic of (South) Vietnam. Moreover, land reform legitimized and consolidated socio-political power for the DRV by abolishing established, village-level bureaucratic and social-cultural power structures that could block the Party-state’s transformation of the state, society, economy, and culture. Those tasks paved the way for full-scale modernization, following the Sino-Soviet model, on agricultural collectivization and industrialization. The Party-state was then able to assume control over the population by subjugating it to the repressive authority of the state, setting the foundation to militarily outlast the United States in the Second Indochina War. Thus, land reform was the Party-state’s most important domestic policy during this transitional period as it allowed the Party-state to decolonize, to consolidate power, and to transition Vietnam into an authoritarian socialist state. These achievements, however, resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being falsely and summarily prosecuted, tortured, ostracized, or executed. Ultimately, this dissertation rectifies the imbalances in the traditional Western-centric literature of the wars in Vietnam by emphasizing the centrality of non-Western actors—Vietnamese and Chinese—and illuminating the significance of domestic policies such as class mobilization and land reform in nation-building and in determining the trajectories of national and international affairs and the outcome of conflicts. Consequently, it presents a better understanding of the Party-state, its decision-making and rule.2022-01-1
Advances in Sciences and Humanities, 2020
This article aims to analyze to fight against the wrong claims of the hostile forces of Vietnam revolution is that Marxism-Leninism is outdated and the Communist Party of Vietnam should not consider Marxism-Leninism and Chi Minh's thought as its ideological foundation. First, they claim that Marxism-Leninism was born in the economic and social context of the 19th and early 20th centuries, making it unsuitable for the contemporary situation. Second, they state that the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe proved that Marxist-Leninist socialism was mistaken and obsolete. Third, according to them, the mistakes and difficulties involved in building a socialist country originated from Marxism-Leninism. In this paper, the author has used scientific research methods such as analysis and synthesis, interpretation and induction, abstraction and generalization, logical and historical comparison to criticize the wrong claims of the hostile forces. The research has come into 3 conclusions. The first is Marxism-Leninism is a scientific and legal theory; the second is the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries was only the breakdown of a model; the third is the selection and application of Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh's Thought in Vietnam as the ideological foundation is a right thing. Therefore, the application of Marxism-Leninism into the cause of national liberation and building socialism in Vietnam is a right choice of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
A Vietnamese insider discusses the origins of the 1968 Tet Offensive – what is he trying to tell us?
Azja Pacyfik, 2020
Few would surely deny that whilst the Soviet Union existed, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had profound eff ects across a range of aspects of world history. It was, for example, possible to think of a 'Soviet Third World' within a wider topic of Soviet Third World interests 1. But as time has passed, the CPSU's possible legacies are not much studied, especially regarding less-developed countries that were not part of the Soviet Union itself. Yet, in the collegium of country specialists working on countries such as Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and parties such as East Timor's FRETELIN (quite apart from North Korea and China), my experience is that affi rmative answers are usually returned to the technical question of 'how important is to know about the CPSU, Lenin, Stalin and what happened between his death in 1954 and Yeltsin's decree in November 1991 banning it in the Russian Federation'. This includes, a sense that beyond the need to know this sort of thing for research, teaching also requires that students be introduced to these matters. As somebody who has worked on Vietnam for many years, my own opinion, for the case of Vietnam, is 'a lot'. The view that we need to know far more than we do about the legacy of the CPSU in Southeast and North Asia has been confi rmed by leading scholars such as Tony Reid (person communication). Asking around, other country specialists tend to confi rm this. However, a search of Google Scholar (26 th April 2020) on 'CPSU AND legacy', whilst returning nearly 7,000 citations, includes around 4,000 for the period since 1992, and the great majority Adam Fforde 193 of those cited are for either countries that were part of the Soviet Union (including the Soviet Union itself) or part of the Soviet 'eastern Europe'. This suggests to me that there is a need to explore these legacies in greater detail 2. And it is possible that part of these legacies is a fear of a concentration of power combined with respect for the value of formal and informal ways of avoiding this. The concentration of power around Xi Jinping in China, therefore, would not only be felt to be very dangerous in some other contemporary Communist countries (such as Vietnam), but, drawing upon lessons learnt after the deaths of Stalin and Beria in the Soviet Union, as well as before 3 one would expect values and methods to exist to stop it.
H-DIPLO, 2011
Very positive review, but with some critiques, of Peter Zinoman. “Nhan Van Giai Pham and Vietnamese Reform Communism.” Journal of Cold War Studies 13:1 (Winter 2011): 60–100. DOI: 10.1162/JCWS_a_00071. The review, which appeared in the online site H-DIPLO, underlines the signal contribution of Zinoman's work. It also suggests, however, that more attention should be paid to the colonial context of the public sphere and dissent which shaped debate in 1956. It also takes issue with some minor aspects of Zinoman's approach to past scholarship on the Nhân Văn--Giai Phẩm affair. .
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 2013
is well known to students of modern Vietnam through his magisterial and widely praised two-volume work The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975 (2003). In that work, Elliott argued that the Viet Minh movement gained a moral advantage with the August Revolution of 1945 that the non-Communist regimes and their backers were never able to cope up with in the following three decades. So, to what extent has the allure of revolutionary glory been able to maintain itself until the present time? This is part of the issue that Elliott addresses in Changing Worlds. His new investigation commences more or less when the former one stopped, in about 1975, with the bulk of the work dealing with the years 1989-2006. As is well known, these years saw a number of decisions and policy changes that paved the way for an increasing engagement with the outside world including the old enemies U.S. and China, and a restructuring of the economy of the country. It is important to note what the book is not. Anyone expecting a broad depiction of social and economic changes during the period in question will be disappointed. Also, it is not a study of the Vietnamese political system per se. Comparative aspects are limited in spite of the obvious parallels with the post-Maoist Chinese case. The task that Elliott has set upon himself is rather mapping the emergence of a new thinking among the elite groups, changes in political intent, and the dynamics of the political system. How did the once unthinkable become mainstream within a decade and a half ? Divergent views of key political issues among the elite are analysed in circumstantial detail, in particular those linked to security and foreign policy. Given the secretive nature of the Marxist state, archival work is obviously off-limit, and Elliott's analysis is based upon interviews, media stuff and other printed materials in English and Vietnamese. As he himself admits towards the end of the book, the methodology entails numerous potential pitfalls. Are the statements emanating from the political elite sincere or merely rhetoric? Are they expressions of a true change of mind or just afterthe-fact conventions? Elliott dares not give a definite answer, although he points to a number of factors in recent history that have encouraged
The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War: Agency and Society in the Study of the Second Indochina War
Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2009
The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War: Agency and Society in the Study of the Second Indochina War O nce upon a time, during the 1970s and 1980s, the Vietnam War (1959-1975) was studied mainly as an episode in American history. Anglophone authors in the United States and elsewhere wrote extensively about the war during its closing stages and during the first years of the postwar era. This early scholarship on the war included a great deal of pathbreaking research that shed new light on important factual questions; it also sparked impassioned debates over how to interpret the war's origins, course, and consequences. For all of its originality and vibrancy, however, this scholarship focused overwhelmingly on American sources and the American dimensions of the war-that is, on issues having to do with American actions and American motives. Vietnamese and other non-American actors typically played only marginal roles in these accounts; few studies of the war published during these years made use of Vietnamese or other non-American sources. 1 The decidedly America-centric quality of most Vietnam War scholarship in this period was most clearly apparent in the perennial debate between so-called "orthodox" scholars and their "revisionist" counterparts. The questions at stake in this debate were important ones: What were the root causes of the war? Why and how did the United States become involved in Vietnam after 1950? What explains the escalation of the war over the course of the 1960s? Who was responsible for the "loss" of South Vietnam? Nevertheless, both "orthodox" and "revisionist" scholars alike
7. From Cheering to Volunteering: Vietnamese Communists and the Coming of the Cold War, 1940–1951
Connecting Histories, 2009
How did leaders of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) greet the outbreak of the Cold War, and in particular the formation of two opposing ideological blocs? Existing scholarship has depicted an independently minded ICP charting a pragmatic course vis-à-vis Moscow in the 1941-1954 period. 1 This line of interpretation would suggest that the arrival of the Cold War, which imposed a rigid global order on small countries, would not be celebrated in Vietnam. Using party documents and Vietnamese newspaper sources, in this chapter I examine the changing worldviews of ICP leaders from 1940 to 1951 in the context of anticolonial nationalist revolution. Long before the outbreak of the Cold War, leading Vietnamese communists had cherished a particular worldview in which the world was divided into two camps. 2 In their imagination, the socialist camp represented all the best things in the world whereas the imperialist camp contained the worst. This binary worldview had three particular characteristics. First, international patterns of alliance were assumed to fundamentally reflect the domestic I'm indebted to helpful comments from Nayan Chanda, Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Christian Ostermann, Balasz Szalontai, Peter Zinoman, and participants at the Workshop on Between Imperial Retreat and the Cold War, Paris, September 2004. Christopher Goscha deserves special thanks for his encouragement and advice. I also wish to thank Steven Goldstein for educating me about Chinese foreign policy and Smith College for offering generous financial support and a collegial working environment. Research in Hanoi was sponsored in part by the Center for Vietnamese and Intercultural Studies, whose director Vu Minh Giang was very kind and supportive.
Vietnam in global context (1920-1968): looking through the lens of three historical figures
2019
This article explores the connectedness between Martin Luther King's, Ernesto Guevara's and Rabindranath Tagore's ideas and anti-colonial resistance in Vietnam. By showing how three different local struggles were linked to the socio-political realities in Vietnam, the three can be seen as representatives of a way of thinking global and local in political struggles under the principle of anti-colonial resistance and universal self-determination. In this way, it is argued that looking through the lens of dissident intellectuals and political activists provides a methodological groundwork through which we can experience global intellectual connectedness that counterbalances existing Westerncentric perspectives on Vietnamese history. However, global intellectual connectedness has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because thoughts and ideas have always been defined by and modified under different socio-political circumstances, in this case: for the purpose of strengthening the national cause.