In recent decades, scholars have debated about relations between the polities and peoples of East Asia prior to the twentieth century. One deeply ingrained but increasingly challenged approach is tributary relations, a hierarchical system that places China at its geopolitical and civilizational apex and arrays its neighbors in descending order, according to their relative acceptance of Chinese cultural norms, diplomatic protocols, and geopolitical agendas. Advocates of the tributary model suggest that it facilitated peaceful relations between China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, because they all shared Confucian values, including a distinctly non-Westphalian embrace of inequality and hierarchy as a key to order and stability. The rise of nationalism (both political and cultural) and the rise of Chinese power have frequently intensified academic debates.
Deftly using both Chinese and Vietnamese primary sources and secondary scholarship, Baldanza instead argues that Sino–Viet relations from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries are best understood as a...