Vietnam And China 1938 1954

Pondering the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Professor Chen turns to the Indochinese war (1946-1954), the Vietnamese Communist movement under Ho Chi Minh (1944-1945), and even earlier to Ho's activities in the late 1930’s. He examines the questions: Did the Sino-Vietnamese relationship after World War II assist or hinder the Vietminh Communists? Why was the Vietminh able to obtain Chinese military aid without inviting massive Chinese intervention, as happened in Korea? What was the Soviet position on the Indochinese war and what was it at the Geneva Conference of 1954? Is there any difference between Vietnam’s relations with the weak Nationalist China in the 1940’s and those with powerful Communist regime in the 1950’s? Finally, Professor Chen compares the position of the United States, North Vietnam, Britain, Communist China, and the Soviet Union in 1954 and 1968. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Why did the People's Republic of China and Vietnam, two "comrades and brothers," engage in such a tragic war?

The value of asymmetry theory is demonstrated in the dynamics of the Sino-Vietnamese relationship.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan has now written a rich and definitive account of the fateful battle that ended French rule in Indochina—and led inexorably to America’s Vietnam War. Dien Bien Phu was a remote valley on the border of Laos along a simple rural trade route. But it would also be where a great European power fell to an underestimated insurgent army and lost control of a crucial colony. Valley of Death is the untold story of the 1954 battle that, in six weeks, changed the course of history. A veteran of the French Army, Ted Morgan has made use of exclusive firsthand reports to create the most complete and dramatic telling of the conflict ever written. Here is the history of the Vietminh liberation movement’s rebellion against French occupation after World War II and its growth as an adversary, eventually backed by Communist China. Here too is the ill-fated French plan to build a base in Dien Bien Phu and draw the Vietminh into a debilitating defeat—which instead led to the Europeans being encircled in the surrounding hills, besieged by heavy artillery, overrun, and defeated. Making expert use of recently unearthed or released information, Morgan reveals the inner workings of the American effort to aid France, with Eisenhower secretly disdainful of the French effort and prophetically worried that “no military victory was possible in that type of theater.” Morgan paints indelible portraits of all the major players, from Henri Navarre, head of the French Union forces, a rigid professional unprepared for an enemy fortified by rice carried on bicycles, to his commander, General Christian de Castries, a privileged, miscast cavalry officer, and General Vo Nguyen Giap, a master of guerrilla warfare working out of a one-room hut on the side of a hill. Most devastatingly, Morgan sets the stage for the Vietnam quagmire that was to come. Superbly researched and powerfully written, Valley of Death is the crowning achievement of an author whose work has always been as compulsively readable as it is important.

Christopher Goscha resituates the Vietnamese revolution and war against the French into its Asian context. Breaking with nationalist and colonial historiographies which have largely locked Vietnam into 'Indochinese' or 'Nation-state' straightjackets, Goscha takes Thailand as his point of departure for exploring how the Vietnamese revolution was intimately linked to Asia between the birth of the 'Save the King Movement' in 1885 and the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. But his study is more than just a political history. Goscha brings geography to bear on his subject with a passion. While he considers the little-known political movements of such well-known faces as Phan Boi Chau and Ho Chi Minh across Southeast Asia, the author takes us into the complex Asian networks stretching from northeastern Thailand and the port of Bangkok to southern China and Hong Kong - and beyond. There, we see how Ho and Chau drew upon an invisible army of Vietnamese and Chinese traders, criminals, prostitutes, sailors and above all the thousands of emigres living in Vietnamese communities in Thailand.

This book charts the development of the First Vietnam War – the war between the Vietnamese Communists (the Viet Minh) and the French colonial power – considering especially how relations between the Viet Minh and the Chinese Communists had a profound impact on the course of the war. It shows how the Chinese provided finance, training and weapons to the Viet Minh, but how differences about strategy emerged, particularly when China became involved in the Korean War and the subsequent peace negotiations, when the need to placate the United States and to prevent US military involvement in Southeast Asia became a key concern for the Chinese. The book shows how the Viet Minh strategy of all-out war in the north and limited guerrilla warfare in the south developed from this situation, and how the war then unfolded.

These two books offer readers a fresh perspective to re-examine and revaluate the so-called “China Threat” and the non-Western way of conducting foreign relations exercised by Asian countries due to the lasting impact of their traditional cultures on their diplomacy. 此書著為讀者提供全新視角來重新檢驗和評估所謂的”中國威脅論”和亞洲國家之非西方式外交及其傳統文化外交之影響.

Following the French reoccupation of Indochina at the end of World War II, the pro-Communist Vietnamese nationalists, or Viet Minh, launched a grassroots insurgency that erupted into a full-fledged war in 1949. After nearly ten years of savage combat, the western world was stunned when Viet Minh forces decisively defeated the French Union army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. Logistics dominated every aspect of the First Indochina War, dictating the objectives, the organization of forces, the timing and duration of the operations, and even the final outcome. In A War of Logistics, Charles R. Shrader meticulously examines both French Union and Viet Minh logistical units during the period of active conventional warfare, as well as external support provided to the French by the United States and to the Vietnamese by China. Although the Vietnamese had few advantages over their opponents, their military leaders brilliantly employed a highly committed network of soldiers and civilians, outfitted to accommodate the challenging terrain on which they fought. Drawing on extensive research such as declassified intelligence documents, the reports of French participants, and accounts by Viet Minh leaders, including Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh, A War of Logistics provides in-depth coverage of the often-ignored but critically important topic of logistics in modern military campaigns.