Revolution knows no boundaries? Chinese revolutionaries in North Vietnam during the early years of the First Indochina War

Abstract

This article analyses the roles and activities of three groups of Chinese communist revolutionaries in the early phase of the First Indochina War. The author argues that although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did not begin to provide substantial aid to North Vietnam until 1950, the involvement of Chinese communists, including members of both the CCP and the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), in the First Indochina War started at the very moment the war broke out in 1946. Although the early participants were not as prominent as the Chinese political and military advisers who arrived after 1949, their activities deserve to be examined, not only because they were the forerunners of later actors, but also because they had already made concrete contributions to the Vietnamese revolution before the founding of the People's Republic of China and the arrival of large-scale Chinese military and economic aid. Moreover, interactions between early Chinese participants and the Vietnamese revolutionaries established a pattern that would characterise Sino–Vietnamese relations in the subsequent decades.