Once upon a time the idea of Communist China going to war against Communist Vietnam would have seemed nearly absurd even to most knowledgeable observers. Beijing and Hanoi were seen as the closest comrades-in-arms, locked in a life-or-death common struggle against U.S. encroachments in Asia. Did not their revolutions—the Chinese and the Vietnamese—share a common past and a common fate? In 1979 these preconceptions were shattered by a development that had seemed implausible a few years earlier: Chinese and Vietnamese troops were shooting at and killing each other with a passion and hatred usually seen only among the most implacable enemies. Even today, many years later, the brief but intense Sino-Vietnamese border war of 1979 retains an aura of the grotesque, which is why the renowned Chinese historian Chen Jian has called it “one of the most meaningless wars in world history.” Zhang Xiaoming's book is a valuable effort to...
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Summer 2016
July 01 2016
Zhang Xiaoming, Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 296 pp. $34.95
Sergey Radchenko
Sergey Radchenko
Cardiff University
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Sergey Radchenko
Cardiff University
Online ISSN: 1531-3298
Print ISSN: 1520-3972
© 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2016
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Journal of Cold War Studies (2016) 18 (3): 198–200.
Citation
Sergey Radchenko; Zhang Xiaoming, Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 296 pp. $34.95. Journal of Cold War Studies 2016; 18 (3): 198–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_r_00662
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