Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991

摘要

Conventional scholarly wisdom depicts China's late 20th-century conflict with Vietnam as being a short and limited but bloody punitive military offensive launched by Beijing in early 1979. Xiaoming Zhang's path-breaking book suggests that this is probably not the best way to contextualize the operation. Indeed, Zhang interprets the conflict as the most deadly and high profile campaign in what he calls a "long war" lasting more than a decade. As Zhang rightly notes, Sino-Vietnamese border hostilities persisted until the mid-1980s and tensions lingered even longer.