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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   18435 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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We don't really have a good understanding of what the Sino-Vietnamese war was about.

Really? I thought it was a relatively straightforwardly punitive operation designed to punish Vietnam after Vietnam retaliated to repeated Cambodian aggression by invading Cambodia and decapitating their government (stopping the Cambodian genocide). Obviously the Vietnamese and Chinese both can claim to be the winners (Vietnam: we stopped them! China: we went as far as we needed to go to make our point!) but if the motives are obscure it's news to me. (And I would be happy to update my understanding here.)

Yes, that's fair. I mean that «punish» is a lousy theory of victory. What goals did China actually hope to achieve versus what it achieved? In Korea, it's pretty simple, they wanted to prevent the collapse of DPRK and maintain a defensive buffer at a minimum, eliminate South Korea as a stretch goal, and they succeeded in their minimal goals. Americans also succeeded in their minimal goals, then MacArthur developed more maximalist ambitions, suffered a defeat, and the American strategy got scaled back, so nominally it's a «stalemate» for the entire war.

I think that Chinese regional strategy has the minimum goal of «have no actively hostile nation on its border», and it's been broadly successful. There's still India and they are militarizing the border, but luckily it's a border that neither side can exploit for a meaningful invasion.

In Korea, it's pretty simple, they wanted to prevent the collapse of DPRK and maintain a defensive buffer at a minimum, eliminate South Korea as a stretch goal, and they succeeded in their minimal goals.

A more cynical answer is that, in 1950, Mao and the PRC was saddled with an alarmingly large number of veteran soldiers left over from Nationalist China. They were of highly questionable loyalty (having fought the last 10 years against the PRC) and the PRC government couldn't afford to pay them, being desparately poor at that time. So by launching them into a spectacularly bloody war against a foreign country, he managed to both eliminate them in a cost-effective way and boost his own popularity by riding a wave of nationalism.

Do you think it made strategic sense to have a border with an American protectorate?

It's not like these answers are mutually exclusive. Both can be true.

I mean that «punish» is a lousy theory of victory.

Hmm, I don't think so. Punitive expeditions are about as old as mankind. Vietnam attacked China's ally and China could either do nothing (devaluing its worth as an ally in the future) or do something. It chose to do something.

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