This past weekend I ventured over to the Nanluoguxiang (南锣鼓巷) shopping street to check out Great Leap Brewing, a year-old microbrew operation that's caught a fair amount of buzz. Offerings on tap easily surpass anything I've tasted in China. I'd definitely recommend trying a pint of "Danshan Wheat" or "Hop God" on a Friday evening with friends.
Since Great Leap is set back aways from the main hub of NLGX activity, we got to see a slice of relatively untrampled hutong life along the way. Peeking into one courtyard entryway, I found a gem of a Cultural Revolution relic…
The characters in view read:
伟大的导师 Great teacher
伟大的领袖 Great leader
伟大的统帅 Great commander
The characters obscured by the annex to the right most likely continue:
伟大的舵手 Great helmsman (the left edge of 舵 is partly visible)
毛主席万岁！Long live Chairman Mao!
Here's a giant signboard from 1966 with the same "Four Greats" (四个伟大):
I've become especially partial toward––though still not quite hopelessly nostalgic about––"Old Beijing" since I moved to the center of the city in June. Thinking about this these characters helped me think a bit about the concept of "excavating" the layers of the past around me.
While my first instinct was to feel minor annoyance at having the slogan partially obscured (more precisely a train of thought along the lines of "make up your mind: preserve it or paint it over"), the construction itself was more likely than not a direct outgrowth of the sloganeering it covered over. After all, it was during the first heady years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-68) that the socioeconomic makeup of Beijing's hutong neighborhoods shifted so decidedly toward the very folks who would erect these kind of impromptu additions. This change occurred when Red Guards, given virtually a free hand to "make revolution" in urban areas, seized property deeds and either forced hutong residents to either share or entirely evacuate their courtyard complexes. These seizures aimed at both flushing away residual "feudal" counterrevolutionary elements and solving a real housing crunch among the city's least privileged residents. The cumulative result of this unguided campaign can be witnessed beyond many of the ornate entryways that grace Beijing's old alleyways. Crowded but now mature squatter colonies have cropped up everywhere from the southern portion of the former Imperial Archives to the family home of Liang Qichao. Once new families moved in and old deeds had been destroyed, there was not much that could be done to erase the upheaval.
Much like the classic archeologist's dilemma of having to dig below (and thereby destroy) one buried layer of relics to reveal another, the process of excavating Beijing's history often poses contradictions which pit one period's preservation against another. If the rapidly-rising apartment blocks of our contemporary era fail––at least in some measure––to achieve the totalizing destruction that the marketplace seems to demand, future historians may indeed face similar challenges in looking back on what will be our past.
Thanks to Frog in a Well for a shout out on their site, and again to China Beat for giving me the chance to contribute to this week (my second post can be found here). I’ve long been a fan of both sites.
As C.W. Hayford mentioned in his post at Frog in a Well, it isn’t always clear from browsing the front page of the blog when new posts go up. The information is actually buried at the bottom of the article page (once you click through). This is a template design decision on Posterous’s part, but in this case I’m glad it helped draw attention to an older post. I hope to get back in the habit of regular updates even as things ramp up again in the fall.
I’ve been traveling stateside for the past couple weeks, and been keeping busy putting together a high school curriculum for World History and another course on "China and the Modern World." I've mainly been focused on familiarizing myself with the terrain of global history, looking out particularly for linkages that may resonate with Chinese students.
So far I’ve selected a textbook, Robert Strayer's Ways of the World, which narrowly won out over Earth and its Peoples, on account of its relative brevity and my own familiarity with it as a TA. I would have liked to give them a more focused comparison, but it isn’t easy getting e-friendly trial copies––especially without a university affiliation. Still, both texts separated themselves from others by not falling back on Western exceptionalism as an organizing principle. This was an important consideration given my own research interests, the background of my students, and the questions raised by authors who I’ve read in preparation for the course. Although I have long been skeptical of the Western historical narrative, three books have sharpened my ability to confront outdated, sometimes racialized explanations for Euro-American ascendence.
The first of these is Kenneth Pomeranz’s Great Divergence (Princeton, 2000), which, following R. Bin Wong’s China Transformed, makes mutual rather than one-sided comparisons to see why China’s commercial core (the Yangzi River valley) diverged from Europe’s (west, later northwest). A key take away for me is that while Western Europe’s stunning record of economic growth during the nineteenth century cannot be explained wholly by external factors, the difference between that region and its equivalents in China, India, and elsewhere rests on its coercive extraction from its colonies abroad.
A second book I’ve instructive is Jack Goody’s Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006). While not uniformly convincing (debunking a common claim that Athens “invented democracy” seems a more straightforward endeavor than an all-fronts assault on a still-unsettled debate on the city-state’s economic significance), Goody nevertheless manages to lay out a convincing case that the story of the West is based more in self-serving narrativity than objective fact. I’ve put this down for the moment but hope to come back to it before the end of the summer.
Last, but hardly least, is a Routledge survey by Peter Stearns, Globalization in World History (2010). Partly due to his wide reach, Stearns has probably been most influential in suggesting an overall theme for the course. He points to several “waves” of globalization over the last millennium. Cautioning against the “new global historians” that posit a unique pattern of post-1945 globalization, he provides rich examples of transregional linkages stretching back to 1000 CE––if nothing else it’s just cool to learn that “Arabic numerals” actually originated in India, and that 39 percent of the contemporary Chinese diet are foods originally found in the Americas (imagine Sichuan cuisine without the chili peppers!). Rather than simply argue globalization began earlier because people, diseases, money, plants, ideas, or whatever else crossed civilizational boundaries earlier, he is careful to show how each era built upon previous advances.
Detailing events from the past, and linking them together through larger themes is always an important goal for a course. However, a major reason why I am specifically searching out texts that might be viewed in some circles––both American and Chinese––as “revisionist” is to encourage critical thinking. I know this is a constant refrain among instructors, but I think it is especially vital for students accustomed to an exam-centric educational background who plan to attend universities in the United States (as a sizeable majority of my students intend to do). My next step as I lay out the syllabus to create a framework for students to develop their analytical ability. So far I am primarily drawing on tools I remember back from when I was a high school history student. These include the “SPICE” chart, which divides up social, political, intellectual, cultural, and economic analysis, as well as discussion of primary sources and participatory activities like debates and mock trials that allow students to relive key historical moments from multiple vantages. As I get further in the process I will continue to post updates. In the meantime I will continue to look for further resources––books, links, teaching ideas. I'd welcome any comments here or via twitter @jaredrhall.
This week I'll have two posts up on China Beat. The first one is up now. The post examines the contradictions posed by Beijing Subway's rapid expansion, as well as the tactics residents have employed to resist property seizures and disruptive (sometimes dangerous) design flaws. The second post, which goes up tomorrow, finds similar patterns at play during the 1920s when streetcars were first introduced and railway tracks were being realigned in the city.
Link (1st post): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=3600
In English, we generally recall important turning points in terms of where they unfolded. Simple place names conjure up entire historical epochs. "Pearl Harbor" marks the American entrance into the Second World War and the global struggle against fascism. "Bandung," the conference in of newly independent African and Asian nations that pledged to stand together in 1955 against imperialism and Cold War division. And then, of course, there is "Tian'anmen." It is doubtful that mention of the square here in China would, by itself, raise any eyebrows. But try "6-4" (六四) and you are can expect quite a different reaction.
The difference stems from the convention in Chinese to refer to politically significant episodes in China's post-dynastic history by date (rather than place), using a truncated month-day pattern. Those with passing familiarity with modern Chinese history are likely to have come across this pattern directly transliterated in reference to major political movements, for example May Fourth (五四) or May Thirtieth (五卅). If you have spent time in mainland China you may recognize March Eighth (三八) as International Women's Day or October First (十一) as National Day. If your travels have taken you to Taiwan, you might have encountered February Twenty-eighth (二二八), a shorthand for the Guomindang's 1947 massacre of native Taiwanese, or October Tenth (双十), an alternate National Day for a government that traces its origins to the uprising that toppled China's last dynasty, the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥革命).
In logical, if Anglophone, fashion, I had long assumed that "Xinhai" was a place name. However, yesterday I was introduced to the sixty-year naming cycle often used to reference terms in the late Qing period. This "sexagesimal" system, known in Chinese as ganzhi (干支), combines the ten heavenly stems (天干) with the twelve earthly branches (地支). The system produces a unique name for each year in the cycle. A few of the better-known events whose Chinese names derive from this system include the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War (甲申战争), the Hundred Days of Reform of 1898 (戊戌变法), the Boxer Uprising in 1900 (庚子事变), the Boxer Protocol the following year (辛丑条约), and of course the Xinhai Revolution in 1911. Although difficult to represent visually with any elegance, I have attempted to illustrate below (click to enlarge).
There are some limitations and exceptions to these rules. Natural disasters, as "non-political" events, might be recalled by either the place or time they occurred. For example, the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake is known both as May Twelfth (五一二) and Wenchuan (汶川). The last big earthquake in Tangshan is similarly termed both July Twenty-seventh (二二七) and Tangshan (唐山). Simply on the basis of my own impression, I believe in both cases there is a slight preference for place over time. In addition, even highly political events sometimes take on more than one moniker. Just as the Xinhai Revolution can described in English as the Wuchang Uprising, the same (武昌起义) can be used in Chinese, especially when referencing to the initial mutiny as distinct from the overall movement to overthrow the Qing.
Still, these two methods are useful to locate sources that might reference particular historical events by what might at first be unfamiliar. Now I know to stop scanning the map for Xinhai and to ask about "Double-Twelve" (双十二事变) rather than the Xi'an Incident.
Beijing Time Machine is on brief break for the start of the new term, extended into this week in part by technical issues stemming from the Net Nanny's amped up attack on my VPN service. Posterous makes it simple to post via email, so I can always use that as a fall back option if Witopia's workarounds fail. Headed for a weekend hike at Cuandixia (爨底下), a mountain village on the outskirts of Beijing. I'll have a new post up when I return.
Over a week has passed since the original “Jasmine Revolution” chatter began on 20 February 2011. This post combines what were originally intended to be separate sketches of Li Hong and Xiao Wang. It seems to work better to put them in their original context, which is the debate depicted below. Xiao Wang’s older relation, Lao Wang was profiled in the last post. Both Li Hong and Xiao Wang are pseudonyms.
It was early evening in an unfamiliar part of town. A group of friends, catching up after the Spring Festival holiday, decided to meet up to try Irish fare for the first time at a pub across from the Canadian embassy. The location had been my suggestion, though in retrospect not a particularly a good one. In true expat fashion, the food was both pricey and mediocre. My draught Guinness hit the mark, but my dinner companions stuck to fruit juice (equally pricey and mediocre). The all-Chinese wait staff even managed to insult everyone at the table by refusing to speak anything but English. Perhaps the pub's one redeeming quality was its anonymity. No uneasy glances were exchanged or heads turned as the discussion escalated.
On this night it was two women who did most of the talking: Li Hong, a reporter for the Xinhua News Agency, and Xiao Wang, a graduate student at the People’s University where I study Chinese. Both in their mid-twenties, they developed a friendship in college that drew on their mutual passion for literature. As an undergraduate, Li Hong enjoyed composing short stories with protagonists drawn from the ranks of migrant workers and struggling single mothers. Xiao Wang was an even more prodigious writer. By the time they had left school, she had completed a novel and published her poetry in a handful of literary magazines. If there was a common thread binding together what they wrote, it was the influence of “diceng” (底层) writers like Liao Yiwu (廖亦武) and Wang Xiangfu (王祥夫) that vividly detail the experiences of those among the “lower strata” of Chinese society.
Taking Sides on the Demonstrations
Not long after we sat down Xiao Wang asked Li Hong if she had heard anything at work about a commotion at Wangfujing earlier that day. The latter shrugged, and Xiao Wang described what she knew – that demonstrations had been planned to follow the Jasmine uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and that over a dozen cities in China had been called on to participate. Li Hong noted nothing had been said at Xinhua, but that “Normal Guy” – the pet name she by which she refers to her exceedingly ordinary accountant boyfriend – had received a text warning him to avoid the streets around that part of the city. It was clear she did not share Xiao Wang’s sympathy for the protesters and relayed Normal Guy’s annoyance at having to find a detour to work. For Li Hong, this was just beginning of the kind of trouble further protests might stir.
Li Hong made an early bid at heading off further discussion by borrowing from the party’s standard playbook. Her dismissal of the demonstrations echoed the tone aligned exactly with Jeremiah Jenne’s paraphrasing of the party line: “Stick with us, because without us there will be only chaos.”
I did not know Li Hong before she began working at the government’s official mouthpiece and was accepted as a party member, but the two factors seemed to underpin her self-assurance. She spoke in measured tones, and smiled even when she found herself out-gunned. After all, she knew she was not speaking for herself but on behalf of an oath-bound elite that stakes sole claim on the future course of one-fifth of humanity. Despite being a member of what has long been the world’s largest political party, it still placed her among the most privileged six percent of the population. At least from this vantage it is perhaps unsurprising that she was so adamant about defending the party’s position against potential rabble-rousers.
Xiao Wang saw things differently. Just a few months earlier she had been moved by Wu Qing (吴青), the daughter of renowned writer Bing Xin (冰心), lecture on her efforts at fighting party corruption on behalf of rural women and the urban poor. The retired professor had sighed as she recounted activist friends silenced by prison or house arrest and speculated it was only a matter of time before she met the same fate. Xiao Wang wondered aloud: If everyone who challenged the party ended up this way, how would things ever change?
Do Anti-regime Protests Help or Hinder Social Progress?
Protests miss the point, Li Hong contended. Underlying all of China’s major social issues was the fundamental problem of China’s population. Political instability would not speed up electrification or health campaigns in the country’s interior any more than it would help create better jobs for migrant workers along the coast. At least for the time being, China’s size made democratic governance impractical; it needed a steady hand on the helm. The proper role for activists was to work constructively to highlight public concerns – not oppose the party or the state.
Xiao Wang appeared unimpressed. The ability to speak openly, she insisted, was essential to solving problems. It was precisely beyond the margins of polite political conversation that the real barriers to improving popular welfare stood.
Li Hong interjected with a statistic about the country’s GDP. I do not recall the precise one, but she might have noted that China grew 10.3 percent in 2010, or perhaps that the country continued to churn out positive growth figures even at the height of the global recession. Regardless, the point she hoped to drive home was clear. If people were not entirely satisfied, they were at least optimistic about the country’s future.
At this point Xiao Wang became visibly frustrated. For her, Li Hong’s reliance on GDP figures highlighted the degree of disconnect between the party and the people whom it claimed to represent. China’s deep – and deepening – inequality was hardly a state secret. It was not just economic development, but also party corruption that fueled this trend. Despite the party’s utopian promises, governance had remained an imperfect process. That shortcoming was natural, she insisted. The real mistake was the effort to trample voices that call out wrongdoing when they see it.
She then shifted to an apt (if at first peculiar) metaphor. She noted that for years Yellowstone National Park in the United States had not recorded any major forest fires. Suddenly, she mimed the flicking motion one might make when improperly disposing of a cigarette, the smallest of sparks had scorched a huge swath of the park. Her point was that public frustration could not be held back indefinitely. Eventually coercion would break down and the system would “erupt.”
The conversation reverted to a back-and-forth, but mainly to retrace ground that had already been covered. At the end, as we collected the change to pay the bill, Xiao Wang asked Li Hong if she really did believe in communism. A momentary silence passed before Li Hong equivocated, then underwent her own mini self-rectification… “Over the long run…”
This is the second post in a series of profiles from 20 February 2011. I am running a day behind, but still working to complete the series.
“What do you think about Chairman Mao?” It was the first thing that Lao Wang said to me after dispensing with the requisite greetings. Facing across from me was a retired engineer who could have passed for a full decade younger than his coal-black hair suggested. Whether the product of natural youthfulness or the Politburo’s favored hair dye, Lao Wang lacked even a single sprout of silver. Now in his seventies, he can still crisply recall the early years of New China. Despite his years of retirement, Lao Wang still peruses the papers everyday and is as fond of history books as he is of the bottle of erguotou and the spicy Yunnan hotpot the waiter sets down between us.
I smile guardedly before responding as I typically do on such occasions, “He was quite lihai.” The goal is to capture the immensity of Mao’s impact on China’s twentieth century without raising nor slamming the door on consideration of the less praiseworthy repercussions of his leadership.
“After the Anti-Rightist Campaign, he turned bad,” Lao Wang states flatly. If he does bear personal scars from the campaign that targeted the country’s intellectual ranks from 1957 to 1958, he does not let on.
Lao Wang remembers the past not in terms of years but as a succession of political campaigns and five-year plans. If the two chronological devices share a common feature, it is in highlighting the outsized role of the Mao and the party leadership once played in the lives of regular Chinese. It was sometime after the first five-year plan was launched that Lao Wang found himself attending Xi’an’s respected Northwestern University. He had not traveled a few provinces away to establish himself as independent of his parents or to explore a new part of the country. Rather, he was assigned there by the authorities that be, just as he found himself transferred to Beijing upon graduation. There he joined a work unit charged with mineral prospecting, an activity crucial for industrial development. His placement in such a strategic sector seems to have shielded him from serious political trouble until his retirement in the 1990s.
His relatively privileged position also allowed him the opportunity to travel. For most of Lao Wang’s career this meant within China, especially to the country’s less prosperous westward reaches. But after retirement, he overcame his restlessness by accepting commissions abroad. These took him primarily to places in Southeast Asia like Malaysia and the Philippines, but also as far afield as Canada. There, he says, he found himself frustrated by his inability to speak a foreign language. Yet despite having to filter his interactions through a translator, he asked what he could about life abroad.
Perhaps it is a result of these experiences that Lao Wang conveys an almost academic distance from the history he lived. In some ways he goes further than even Mao’s fiercest critics, suggesting that Mao was in fact worse than Stalin. This, he surmises, not because he accepts the glossed over image of the Soviet leader many here share, but because Stalin dealt swiftly with dissidents. It was one bullet to the head – Lao Wang even repeats the motion with his hand – not years of recurrent and escalating torture.
This is not a legacy the Communist Party can so easily escape from today. Lao Wang drives his point not by mirroring the repression of past generations to 1989 or the latest Nobel laureate, but by talking sex scandals.
In a biography released just this past autumn, historian Rebecca Karl warns that
“Many retrospective exposés of Mao – most sensationally, by his private doctor, Li Zhisui (李志绥) – concentrate on the supposed relationship between his sexual appetites and his dictatorial style. These prurient accounts are used to dismiss Mao as a lecherous tyrant.”*
Lao Wang could not disagree more with her effort to cast aside the “alleged sex-tyrant linkage,” to him they are irrevocably linked. He launches into an account of Mao’s visit to China’s Northeast where a young waitress, Zhang Yufeng (张玉凤), caught his attention. Disregarding the fact she was already married, he summoned her to Beijing to serve as his constant companion. There she stayed for almost a decade until his death. When she finally left for home she was awarded “retirement” benefits equivalent to that of a vice minister, remuneration which she still receives to this day.
From here Lao Wang immediately pivots to Liu Zhijun (刘志军), the recently fired railway minister said to have kept eighteen mistresses. Such excess is of course only a small symptom of the kind of corruption that results in the disappearance of an estimated 10 billion RMB from state coffers. But for Lao Wang, it illustrates a core problem for the party: the appropriation of public funds for private indiscretion. Without democratic oversight, he believes, it is impossible to stem the flow of corruption.
If the conversation seems to lean toward reference to the Jasmine Revolution, it did not come up. At the time neither one of us were aware that anyone was fashioning – by street protest or mere tweetup – an overt challenge to the party. But Lao Wang has witnessed revolution first hand, and judging by his comments, even as its beneficiary he did not like what he saw.
That is not to say Lao Wang does not see prospects for change. Not long ago, he notes, Taiwan was also a single-party autocracy. Recognizing the need for reform, Jiang Jingguo (Chiang Ching-kuo 蒋经国) waited until he was ready to retire to legalize opposition parties. How could Hu Jintao do better, he asks, than to cap two terms of party leadership by leaving a democratic legacy to the nation?
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This blog post introduces what became two later posts on Lao Wang, a retired engineer, and a debate between Xiao Wang, a graduate student, and Li Hong, a Xinhua reporter. All three of their names were altered for these posts.
McDonald's along the Wangfujing shopping street and epicenter of the Beijing "protests." Photo via Reuters.
There is a certain narrativity that goes along with writing of any kind, and the news is no exception. Much of what I have encountered about yesterday’s nonrevolution-revolution sounds something like this:
It was eleven in the morning. Twitter and a few other nooks of the Great Firewall’s far side were abuzz with calls to launch China’s own “Jasmine Revolution.” The Arabs, those other great “exceptional” shunners of popular rule, had succeeded in crumbling two ironfisted regimes. If only the spirit of Tunis and Tahrir could be summoned in the long quieted Tian’anmen.
On this day, it was not to be. The physical result of the virtual commotion, at least in Beijing, amounted to a mute gathering on the steps of McDonalds. The American ambassador is said to have looked on (presumably hungry for either a mai-xuan-feng or news coverage to propel his nascent presidential bid). He was joined not by a large number of protesters, but by throngs of journalists and security personnel.
I think I will stop there, though I trust if you are reading this you could probably keep the story going a few lines. (See The New York Times and Charles Custer for good summations). Although I missed the activity in the Wangfujing area, I did have the occasion enjoy several provocative perspectives during the course of the day – the first unprovoked by any sense that anyone was actually plotting to incite antigovernment protests.
These conversations were not entirely out of place in the capital. Despite living just under the nose of official censorship, people I have encountered in Beijing generally speak freely, and often quite passionately, on all topics political. By saying that I mean to make no claim on the portrayal of the “average Beijinger.” However, I do believe I am on safe ground to suggest that this type of earnest civic debate has long been an important characteristic of local life. What began centuries ago with whispers of palace intrigue matured into sophisticated consideration of public affairs, a culture that survived the removal of the government to Nanjing from 1927 to 1949. Lao She’s “Teahouse” (茶馆), written in 1957 and set in the interwar years, vividly illustrates this culture as it portrays patrons noisily debating the ills of imperialism and warlords while sitting under a sign that warns “Don’t discuss state affairs” (莫谈国事).
The following profiles prepared in the spirit of the wonderfully textured though (hopefully temporarily) defunct blog Six. They focus on the historical legacy of the ruling Communist Party, the contemporary condition of Chinese society, and the prospects for change in the years ahead. Those profiled were raised outside the capital and arrived here in search of education or work. They offered their views in Chinese over the course of two meals on 20 February 2011. Few of their comments were prompted by me, in part because I wanted them to speak without interjecting my own narrative, and in part because I was preoccupied enough trying to understand what they were saying and remember it all for later. In the interest of personal privacy and political sensitivity their names as they appear here have been altered.
The first profile will appear tomorrow in this space.
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National flags, from left to right: China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Democratic Kampuchea (1975-79). Images from Flags of the World.
Looking at these banners side by side, it is strange to consider they once raised opposite one another on the battlefield. However, it was on this day in 1979 that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched an invasion of Vietnam with a fighting force of roughly 200,000 troops.
Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) had hinted at the attack a month earlier when he told then American president Jimmy Carter, “Children who don’t listen have to be spanked.” According to military historian Peter Worthing, the toll of Deng’s little lesson mounted in the range of 25,000-63,000 PLA soldiers, and another 20,000-62,000 Vietnamese. These figures are more staggering given they account for less than a month of hostilities. Chinese forces, halted briefly in the outskirts of the Vietnamese capital and returned back across the border in what has been termed variously a victory, defeat, or stalemate. Although the main fighting ended on 16 March, border skirmishes would continue for the better part of the next decade.
It was Cambodia that was the proximate cause of the conflict. Two months earlier the Vietnamese had invaded what was then known as Democratic Kampuchea, the yet another Communist state headed by the über-Maoist Pol Pot. To understand how these seemingly fraternal regimes came to view themselves as enemies requires a longer lens on the conflict.
The inversion of Marxism from a vehemently antinationalist ideology into a vehicle for nation-state consolidation stands as one of the great historical ironies of twentieth-century. The problem stretched back to the Soviet decision to pursue “Socialism in One Country” in the 1920s, which in practice meant subordinating the needs of the international Communist movement to Russian national interest. This strategy was especially apparent in the aftermath of the Second World War when Stalin established a ring of compliant satellites in Eastern Europe, much as they had several decades earlier with the Mongolian People’s Republic (established 1924). Whether through coercion or genuine ideological affinity with Moscow, the Eastern Bloc enjoyed remarkable cohesion through the course of the Korean War (1950-53), and until Stalin’s death in 1953.* It was only then that Mao became more vocally assertive of Chinese leadership in the global (especially East Asian) Communist movement.
Even after the Sino-Soviet split transformed portions of China's northeastern border into moonscape, it seemed that the Vietnamese antiimperialist struggle would help bound all sides together against a common American menace. After all, Ho Chi Minh had not only been active in the Moscow-backed Comintern but was also a political organizer in China (he even had a Cantonese wife, Tăng Tuyết Minh or 曾雪明, whom he wed over the objections of his comrades). For awhile events progressed exactly along these lines. As Chen Jian reveals, as late as 1966 Chinese ground forces were active in large numbers assisting the North Vietnamese in their struggle against the Americans. That involvement coexisted with economic and technical aid from the Soviets.
The turn from comrades-in-arms to sworn enemies can be traced along timelines of shifting ideological predilections and geopolitical alignments. Vietnam ultimately sided with the Soviets with the promise of greater technical assistance. The Khmer Rouge irked Hanoi as a gang of Maoist extremists. However, the key factor that even made possible conflict among Communist states was the embrace of nationalism. After all, whatever the -ism, Communist states in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia were all built on a common program of agrarian mobilization. And global political alliances, especially with archcapitalists like the United States, only made sense if one conceived the nation-state as being not only autonomous from, but more important than, the socialist cause. By unveiling this reality, the Sino-Vietnamese War stamped out the last dreams of solidarity within the international Comunist movement.
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