Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...parallels with French and later American involvement in Vietnam grew more obvious to Woodside as the years went by. But in 1963, he was impressed not by the implications of early U.S. involvement in Indochina, but by the character of the Vietnamese people. "How could they throw the Chinese out?" he says. "Obviously, the Vietnamese were very tough. Obviously they had a civilization of their own which they cared about...
Woodside had a lot of ground to make up. For starters, he had to learn Chinese and other languages, none of which came naturally. They're hell," he says blundy. So as late as 1963, Woodside had only a casual, non-scholarly interest in Vietnam, where Ngo Dinh Diem seemed firmly entrenched despite rumblings of dissent among Buddhist monks...
...Woodside was casting about for a paper topic that spring for a seminar on traditional Chinese foreign policy, and chanced across an interesting problem--the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in the early 1400s...
...When I started studying this, I had no idea of what had happened," Woodside recalls. "I knew China had invaded Vietnam in 1406, but I didn't know what the outcome...
...research turned up a record of events that seemed startlingly familiar. "The Chinese tried to colonize Vietnam, and they got thrown out," he says, still amazed. "The Vietnamese launched a guerilla war, and got rid of the Chinese by 1427. The consequences of this Vietnam war from the point of view of the Chinese were disastrous. They had inflation, and a high desertion rate from their army in Vietnam. There was a very painful debate in Peking in the 1420s on how to get out of Vietnam. Two groups appeared in the Peking court. One group wanted...