1. General overview Part I. Basic Structure: 2. The parameters of China's external posture 3. Vietnam's basic parameters 4. The politics of asymmetry Part II. The Relational Dynamic: 5. From the beginnings to Vietnamese independence 6. Unequal empires 7. The brotherhood of oppression 8. Lips and teeth: 1949-75 9. Illusions of victory: 1975-90 10. From normalization to normalcy 11. Change and structure in asymmetry.

China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry

Introduction Part I. Race, Security, and Cold War Humanitarianism: 1. Bipolar (dis)order Part II. The Global Humanitarian Regime at Arms: 2. Through a glass darkly 3. Mission impossible 4. Back to the future in Indochina 5. 'Solidarity is might!' Part III. Global Health, Development, and Labor Migration: 6. Know your body and build socialism 7. The time machine 'development' 8. Far away, so close 9. Things fall apart Conclusion.

Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime

By definition, the cold war was understood on both sides of the conflict to be a global struggle that stopped short of direct military engagement between the superpowers (the U.S. and the USSR). In Europe, the putative center ofthat struggle, the geopolitical battle lines were fixed after the early 1950s, or they at least could not be altered by normal military means without provoking World War III—which would result in mutual annihilation. Therefore, each side hoped to make gains over the other by using more subtle, political, and often clandestine methods, winning the “hearts and minds” of people in the other bloc (as well as maintaining potentially wayward support in one's own bloc), hoping to subvert the other side from within. The cold war was an enormous campaign of propaganda and psychological warfare on both sides. A vast range of cultural resources, from propaganda posters and radio broadcasts to sophisticated literary magazines, jazz bands, ballet troupes, and symphony orchestras, were weapons in what has recently come to be called the “Cultural Cold War” (Saunders 1999). Studies of the cultural cold war have proliferated since the late 1990s, most of which focus on U.S. cultural policy and are concerned with the European “theater” of this conflict (Hixson 1997; Fehrenbach and Poiger 2000; Poiger 2000; Berghahn 2001).

The Cultural Cold War in Korea, 1945-1950

The collision of a U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance plane with a Chinese military aghter on April 1, 2001, focused attention anew on Beijing’s willingness to risk the use of force in pursuit of political objectives. The effort to deter U.S. intelligence oights over China’s exclusive economic zone brought Chinese jets within dangerous proximity of U.S. aircraft. This raised the arst tension in the Taiwan Strait since China’s missile tests in 1995–96. That had occasioned the dispatch of two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups toward the vicinity of Taiwan. More recently, China undertook a steady buildup of missiles across from Taiwan. This, together with greater emphasis on East Asian security by George W. Bush and his administration, justiaes reexamination of the circumstances under which China used military force for deterrence or coercion from 1950 to 1996. What patterns, if any, emerged during this period? To what extent are they likely to continue or change with respect to Taiwan in the coming years? How will the advent of high-technology weapons affect China’s decision to use force in the future, particularly against Taiwan? My study, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Vietnam, addressed some of these questions but was largely inferentially based on intelligence materials. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, newly opened archives in Moscow provided authoritative documents on Sino-Soviet relations, and the Korean War in particular. Recent Chinese collections of primary materials, sup-

China's Use of Force, 1950-96, and Taiwan

For historians of Soviet foreign policy, the Third World in the Cold War has long been something of an afterthought--or, in the words of one leading practitioner, "a sideshow to the main drama of the Cold War." (1) Indeed, the very term "Cold War" reflects a focus on Europe. First used in reference to the Nazi "phony war" (Sitzkrieg) in 1938, the term described opposing troops facing each other but not exchanging tire. (2) That applied well enough to post-World War II Europe, where the war remained "cold" in that no direct military engagements took place. But the term hardly fit the Third World, where many if not most countries found themselves embroiled in genuine military conflict with global implications at some point during the "Cold" War. When the Third World did come to scholars' attention, it was usually during moments of crisis involving superpower showdown. In these conflicts, Third World leaders seeking help from the USSR were typically considered Soviet puppets, and Third World countries themselves functioned only as a backdrop to Soviet-American confrontation. This view of Soviet-Third World relations in the Cold War could be crudely summed up in an anecdote from June 1950. When reporters asked the State Department spokesman which individual bore responsibility for the North Korean offensive, he blamed Iosif Stalin. He posed the rhetorical question, "Can you imagine Donald Duck going on a rampage without Walt Disney knowing about it?" (3) Third World leaders like Kim II-Sung, in this construction, were Stalin's puppets of his creations. This view that Moscow directed all of its allies' actions in the Cold War is no longer sustainable. The declassification of archival materials in the 1990s in Moscow and across the former Soviet bloc rebalanced the "objective correlation of sources" between the superpowers. It revealed opposition to Soviet policies both within and beyond the Soviet leadership. Yet it did little to change the geographical of topical focus of the field. (4) Even the best scholars at the leading institutions of the new Cold War history used these newly excavated sources to answer old questions with broader perspective and more sophistication. The history of superpower crises has been greatly enriched by the nuggets harvested from what Mark von Hagen termed the "archival gold rush." These materials showed how Third World clients shaped Soviet foreign-policy decisions through persistence, manipulation, and pleading. Yet scholarship on the Cold War has remained focused on wars and crises in Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, and primarily on military aid of relationships between communist parties. Now that the gold rush is over, it is time to mine further afield, searching for new documents and new approaches to the study of the USSR in the world. (5) In doing so, scholars can build on recent overviews of Soviet foreign policy that devote more attention to Soviet engagements in the Third World. (6) Work on East-South relations can become part of a broader effort to study the USSR in transnational context--a trend familiar to readers of this and other journals on Soviet history. (7) This essay will make the case for studying Soviet-Third World contacts in particular. (8) By taking better account of the connections with the Third World--whether political, cultural, economic, of diplomatic--historians of the Soviet Union could contribute to multiple scholarly agendas, many of which already relate to their own concerns. More serious attention to East-South relations will help recast the Cold War as a fundamentally multipolar conflict, with the superpowers constantly responding not just to each other but to their allies and adversaries in the Third World. Scholars not centrally concerned with international relations could also benefit from a consideration of the full range of East-South connections; whether interested in the Academy of Sciences of in higher education, studying the physical and intellectual traces of the Third World in the USSR offers excellent insights into ostensibly "domestic" Soviet history. …

Qiang Zhai

Papers

China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975