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“Without the Lips, the Teeth feel the Cold(脣亡齒寒)” and the Structure of Asymmetry : The Vietnam-China Relations and the Historyscapes of the Border

  • 중앙사론
  • 2020, (52), pp.447-499
  • DOI : 10.46823/cahs.2020.52.447
  • Publisher : Institute for Historical Studies at Chung-Ang University
  • Research Area : Humanities > History
  • Received : November 23, 2020
  • Accepted : December 12, 2020
  • Published : December 31, 2020

JUHYUNG SHIM 1

1인천대학교 중국·화교문화연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the trajectory of the bilateral relationship between Vietnam and China through the historyscapes of the border in motion. In 2020, both countries celebrated the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the bilateral relationship. As neighboring socialist countries facing the national border, Vietnam and China have shared the extraordinary history of anti-imperialist war and nation-state building, deeply inscribed in the border region since the beginning of the 1940s. After the Japanese troops conquered part of south China, they entered through the northern border of Vietnam in 1940. Since then, the discourse of “without the lips, the teeth feel the cold (脣亡齒寒),” once Hồ Chí Minh referenced in his poem for Sino-Viet anti-imperialist alliance, has long been appropriated for Viet-China Relationship. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was established in 1945, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949. While the DRV was in the middle of the First Indochina War against France and enclaved in its northern border with China, the PRC granted its official recognition as the first country ever in the world to the DRV in 1950. The so-called socialist fraternity seemed to burgeon and shape an exceptional relationship between Vietnam and China; however,the apparent difference in scale had constituted the asymmetric political structure in the Cold War era. While many scholars have examined the Vietnam – China relationship mainly focusing on the party-state level interactions, this paper attempts to problematize the historyscapes of the border as the vulnerable and legible place of the bilateral relations. The borderscapes between Vietnam and China had been constituted by the imagination of the socialist fraternity as well as been affected by the structure of asymmetry deeply embedded in the bilateral relations. The border had served as the memorable site of historical moments: the military cooperations until 1954, the safe-havens and the flows of aids during the Vietnam War, the war in 1979, and the normalization of the diplomatic relations in 1991. The historyscapes of the border have been not only reflected by but also mattered to the Viet-China relations. This paper also tries to focus on the Vietnamese perspective about China and the border, since the way Vietnam copes with China and governs the border reveals its political strategy to manage the normalcy of the asymmetric bilateral relations and how China responds to it. In sum, the Cold War historyscapes of the border between Vietnam and China have unraveled that the political strategy of intimate independence rather than dominance or dependence has kept being in question at the border region. The border between Vietnam and China has gradually been transformed from the symbol of the socialist fraternity to the place of encountering asymmetric national ‘geo-bodies’ of both countries.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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