“Without the Lips, the Teeth feel the Cold(脣亡齒寒)” and the Structure of Asymmetry :

The Vietnam-China Relations and the Historyscapes of the Border

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Author : Shim​, Ju-hyung ​

Page : 447-499

Abstract   

  This paper traces the trajectory of the bilateral relationship between Vietnam and China through the historyscapes of the border in motion. In 2020, both countries celebrated the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the bilateral relationship. As neighboring socialist countries facing the national border, Vietnam and China have shared the extraordinary history of anti-imperialist war and nation-state building, deeply inscribed in the border region since the beginning of the 1940s. After the Japanese troops conquered part of south China, they entered through the northern border of Vietnam in 1940. Since then, the discourse of “without the lips, the teeth feel the cold (脣亡齒寒),” once Hồ Chí Minh referenced in his poem for Sino-Viet anti-imperialist alliance, has long been appropriated for Viet-China Relationship. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was established in 1945, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949. While the DRV was in the middle of the First Indochina War against France and enclaved in its northern border with China, the PRC granted its official recognition as the first country ever in the world to the DRV in 1950. The so-called socialist fraternity seemed to burgeon and shape an exceptional relationship between Vietnam and China; however, the apparent difference in scale had constituted the asymmetric political structure in the Cold War era.

  In sum, the Cold War historyscapes of the border between Vietnam and China have unraveled that the political strategy of intimate independence rather than dominance or dependence has kept being in question at the border region. The border between Vietnam and China has gradually been transformed from the symbol of the socialist fraternity to the place of encountering asymmetric national ‘geo-bodies’ of both countries.​

<Key Words>

Vietnam, China, Border, Bilateral Relations, Structure of Asymmetry​