Read Online Asia's Cauldron by Robert D. Kaplan - Free Book Online

Vietnamese independence. What clarified the nineteenth century Qing dynasty’s acceptance of an independent Vietnam was the French mapmakers’ insistence on delineating their own territory of Indochina from that of China.
    â€œChinese contributions to Vietnam cover all aspects of culture, society, and government, from chopsticks wielded by peasants to writing brushes wielded by scholars and officials,” writes Cornell University area expert Keith Weller Taylor in
The Birth of Vietnam
. 10 Vietnamese family names and vocabulary and grammar, as well as artistic and literary styles, reflect deep Chinese influences. 11 Indeed, Vietnamese literature was “impregnated” with the classical Confucian heritage of China. Chinese used to be the language of Vietnamese scholarship just as Latin used to be in Europe: this, despite the fact that along with Chinese, the Vietnamese language has Mon-Khmer and Thai origins. Through it all, Vietnamese peasant cultureretained its uniqueness to a greater extent than did the culture of the Vietnamese elite. Among the elite, explains the University of Michigan Southeast Asia expert Victor Lieberman, Chinese administrative norms were “internalized to the point that their alien origins became irrelevant.” What helped reinforce the fierce desire of all Vietnamese to be separate from China was their contact with the Chams and Khmers to the south, who were themselves influenced by non-Chinese civilizations, particularly that of India. Precisely because of their intense similarity with the Chinese, the Vietnamese are burdened—as I’ve said—by the narcissism of small differences, and this makes events from the past more vivid to them.
    Vietnamese military victories over China in the north, like that of Emperor Le Loi’s near Hanoi in 1426, and against the Chams and Khmers in the south in 1471 and 1778, all worked to forge a distinct national identity, helped by the fact that, up through modern times, China rarely let Vietnam alone. In 1946, the Chinese colluded with the French to have the former’s occupation forces in northern Vietnam replaced by the latter’s. In 1979, as we know, four years after the United States quit Vietnam, 100,000 Chinese troops invaded. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping “never lost his visceral hatred of the Vietnamese,” writes Robert Templer, and, therefore, devised a policy of “bleeding Hanoi white,” by entangling Vietnam in a guerrilla war in Cambodia. 12 Now, because of conflicting Vietnamese and Chinese claims to the South China Sea, China’s naval intrusion on the Gulf of Tonkin, and China’s covetous attitude toward Vietnam’s 1,900-mile seaboard straddling the sea lines of communication that link the Indian and Western Pacific oceans, this has all become operative history; whereas Vietnam’s war with America simply isn’t: except for one detail, though. Because the Vietnamese defeated the United States in a war, they see themselves as the superior party in the bilateral relationship: they have no chips on their shoulder, no axes to grind, no face to lose regarding a future de facto military alliance with America. Vietnamese harbor relatively few sensitivities about the American War precisely because they won it.
    The American War, like the Chinese invasion that followed, andVietnam’s own invasion of Cambodia that had led to the Chinese invasion in the first place, are all part of a similar history that seems long past. It is a history of ground wars that stemmed, in part, from Western decolonization. Now that land border questions are settled, nationalist competition in much of Asia has extended to the maritime domain; namely to the South China Sea. In fact, Vietnam has a creation myth in which the country was founded by a union between the Dragon Lord Lac Long Quan and the fairy Au Co. Together they produced one hundred sons, fifty migrating with the mother to the mountains