The Re-emergence of China Studies in Vietnam

Abstract

After war, years of hostility and a long period of gradually improving Party and state relations, the study of China has begun to re-emerge in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Vietnam has had a sinological tradition for hundreds of years, linked to China by history, language, trade, a common border and in a myriad of other ways. From the mid-1950s until the early 1970s, thousands of Vietnamese students and officials studied in the People's Republic of China. Today the People's Republic remains Vietnam's key strategic threat. But the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities are also among Vietnam's key trade partners and a growing source of investment for its economic reforms.Given this close relationship – including the direct hostility in the late 1970s and early to mid–1980s, one of a series of conflicts going back hundreds of years – it is perhaps paradoxical that the study of China in Vietnam has remained relatively weak. During the war against the French which led to the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and the victory at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnamese sinology was a field largely limited to one or two universities and institutes in Hanoi and some additional capacity in Hue and Saigon, with scholars trained in either the older Vietnamese or French tradition. The thousands of Vietnamese who studied in China in the 1950s and 1960s were trained largely for other fields, although Chinese studies did see some development during the 1949 to 1966 period.