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! i | I 4 34 . . PEACE IN VIETNAM Communists in transforming China from a weak, backward nation in the throes of social and economic collapse to a major world power capable of challenging the might of the United States and, moreover, being accepted by it as its chief threat to world leader- ship, cannot help but arouse interest in the rest of the under- _ developed world. And even the most conservative member of the formerly subjugated colored races tends to enjoy a certain iden- tification at hearing China’s bellicose defiance directed toward the great white United States. Thus, just as counterinsurgency tends to intensify the very kind of explosion it secks to prevent, so the intensity of American efforts against the People’s Republic of China tends to increase China’s prestige in the underdeveloped areas of the world. For over two thousand years the people of Vietnam consid- ered the Chinese their chief foreign menace; and though they were profoundly influenced by Chinese culture—wet rice farming, political and social institutions, philosophy, law, religion, archi- tecture, and system of writing—the relations between the two areas were often marked by fierce strugsle. The Chinese dominated much of the Vietnam area up to the tenth century a.p. Vietnam retained a certain independence within the Chinese tribute system until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the French gained ascendancy largely by supporting local native powers against the Chinese or Chinese-supported regimes. Again aiter the defeat of | Japan, Chinese nationalist armies occupied the northern area of Vietnam, where they incurred further distrust by looting the coun- try and interfering in its domestic policies. In spite of the tradi- tional fear of Chinese domination, however, events since 1950 have forced North Vietnam into an increasing dependence upon China. Nowhere has the self- defeating nature of American support for colonial and right-wing anti- Communist regimes become so apparent as in Vietnam itself. Relations between Chinese and Vietnamese Communists go back to 1924, when Ho Chi Minh was sent to Canton as part of the Third International Advisory Mission to Sun Yat-sen’s na- tionalist movement there. At this time Ho is said to have worked with Mao Tse-tung in a school for training agrarian revotutionaries and in ‘the late 1930’s to have spent some time in Yenan, capital