Kathlene Baldanza. Ming China and Vietnam

The specks of islets or cays in the South China Sea collectively (and controversially) known as the Spratly Islands might have been mentioned only once in this new study on the history of Sino-Vietnamese relations, but the careful and judicious arguments Kathlene Baldanza puts forth in Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia make a convincing case that understanding the tangled past of the two countries is essential in plotting one’s way forward. Baldanza’s point is not that conventional wisdom is completely wrong; there is some truth, she would agree, to comparing Vietnam to David and China to Goliath. Yet it would be misguided to cast the story of Sino-Vietnamese (or, in Baldanza’s framing, Sino-Viet) relations as simply one of “Chinese aggression and Vietnamese resistance” (7). In fact, Baldanza argues, at least as far as the period between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries is concerned, the relations between China and Vietnam (or, more accurately, between the Great Ming and Dai Viet) were characterized by three “themes”: “the close relations between the two countries and their concomitant need to cooperate” (5), the “conflicting understandings [by the two countries] of history and of the transmission of culture” (5), and “the internal debates and divisions underlying decisions about foreign relations in both countries” (7).

China · Framing (construction) · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · Vietnamese · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies