Unrelated to China, but why is the Vietnam War listed as Indecisive or unclear outcome?
As far as I know it’s because both sides had pretty banal low-level and straightforward stated goals that were all “met” so there wasn’t a clear “winner” and a “loser” in those strategic goals. It was really more of a 3 week skirmish than a full war. Vietnam obviously wanted to force China out of their country, and China said they wanted to bat Vietnam on the nose and force them to pull out of and not occupy Cambodia, or Laos or Thailand.
Which China left meaning Vietnamese succeeded in their strategic goals, and the Vietnamese diverted major resources and pulled out of Cambodia and didn’t occupy Thailand and Laos meaning the Chinese succeeded. There weren’t really any major strategic goals that were stated by either side that showed blatant failure; like China never said they intended to fully occupy Hanoi and create a Chinese puppet state and failed. Vietnam as far as I know never said they intended to continue occupying Cambodia or occupy Thailand and then failed to. So in a way they both got what they wanted and it was a status quo antebellum situation. Thus indecisive in the context of if it weren’t ‘indecisive’ there would have been a winner or loser.
Thailand and Laos were under multi-factional civil wars whose royal governments were also US proxies; so the Vietnamese were also involved there (and involved with their local communist parties), prompting Sino-Soviet-split-related concerns with China since even though both China and USSR provided support to Vietnamese communists; the USSR became the dominant supporter and ally of Vietnam and continued to be. China also had an alliance with Cambodia dating before Khmer Rouge even; which was in part because Cambodia wanted assurance against the larger Vietnam and Thailand. The split in the Chinese Cultural Revolution era between the ultra-lefts and others had half of the CPC supporting the Prince and half of it supporting the Khmer Rouge against the prince. North Vietnam and Khmer Rouge provided support for each other for a while too. The politics were a mess. No idea what other involvements China had with Thailand and Laos other than Sino-Soviet fears.
People overstate the significance of Chinese casualties as meaning a loss when that’s not how war works. Strategic objectives are all that matter. The losses (if you average the wildly disproportionate claims from all sides; impossible to actually know when you look at it) were more even than something like The Winter War between USSR-Finland; and though that war had the Soviets suffer disproportionate losses, it was still a complete strategic victory for the Soviets; they got everything they were after which had refused by Finland in previous requested land-swaps, namely gaining the Karelia buffer region.
List of wars being involved in is not a list of countries being invaded and occupied, nice try though.
Except that it’s not. China’s development has been overwhelmingly peaceful, and China has played a positive role around the globe helping many other nations develop and improve their standard of living. On the other hand, the US has been at war throughout all of its miserable existence, and is responsible for carrying out countless crimes against humanity around the globe. It remains the greatest threat to human existence today.
Immediately thought of Vietnam and Cambodia. OP really doesn’t know much history… [Edit: I just checked because I wasn’t sure, but China didn’t invade Cambodia as far as I can tell. I knew they invaded Vietnam in support of Cambodia, but I didn’t know whether some of the Sino-Vietnamese battles also took place in Cambodia, and apparently, no.)]
Image says “Has invaded since PRC was founded”, not “is occupying right now”, don’t try to change the terms of the debate when contradicted. You still could’ve made a point that China invaded much fewer countries than the US, but at least try to have an accurate map or the accurate words.
Yeah, apart from other areas of china (if you can call those “invasions and occupations”) there’s only been one time they’ve invaded another country and that was Vietnam in 1979.
Helping kick out US troops from a sovereign state that has asked for their help isn’t an invasion though
probably not a door you want to open unless you want the top map to suddenly get a lot less red
also, even if you accept that line of thinking, it still became an invasion when they crossed the 38th parallel
I’m surprised that nobody defended the Western Allies’ takeover of former Axis empires yet. I am going to write this to prevent any attempts:
The Western Allies reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution.
Italian anticommunists pardoned Fascists while punishing thousands of partisans; there was no equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials for the Italian Fascists; the liberal bourgeoisie refused to prosecute Fascists for their atrocities in Ethiopia; and there were continuities between Fascism & the post‐1945 Italian police.
When the Western Allies took Algeria from the Axis, they let the fascists continue running the internment camps; important elements of the Fascist era survived in postwar France.
The U.S. Army continued keeping Jews in the Axis’s concentration camps (‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.’ — Harry Truman, Sept. 1946); West Germany’s régime was polluted with surviving Axis personnel; fascist elements survived in West Germany.
Somebody could argue that there was no alternative to the Western Allies, but plenty of partisans were active in France, for example, and the Eastern Allies could have reached every Axis‐occupied region given enough time.
I’ll freely concede that the Western Allies were better than the Axis… but that’s not exactly saying much.
The U.S. Army continued keeping Jews in the Axis’s concentration camps (‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.’ — Harry Truman, Sept. 1946)
This point specifically I think is unfair. When you liberate a prison that has prisoners from far away, you can’t necessarily arrange for everyone to get sent home immediately. Honestly, with the state of anatomical atrophy the survivors had been reduced to – such that eating a larger-than-average meal would kill them – I’d worry about them even being able to make the trip if it was taken immediately.
I could be missing something though (and I concede that them still being there in Sept. 1946 means they were probably being unduly deprioritized)
Stark comparison but China regularly has skirmishes with India on India’s side of the border.
