You didn't comment on my post to you from a week ago. Would like to discuss the Vietnamese conflict? No matter. I appreciate your point of view.
Methinks the prophets Isiah and Ezekiel prophecies will come true, just like their other prophecies have.
A well known Chinese curse is coming true, to wit: may you live in interesting times.
5.56mm
Re the Sino-Indian and the Sino-Vietnamese border wars, these things are to the participants a lot like the way the various characters in the Kurosawa movie Rashomon perceived that melodrama - every single person saw something quite different from what the others did. As an amateur Russia-watcher turned China-watcher (after the collapse of the Berlin wall), what strikes me about the end of the Sino-Indian and Sino-Vietnamese wars is how vehemently the Indians and the Vietnamese feel that they were defeated. And the reason they feel this is because of their perception that they lost territory in those clashes. Clearly, there was no shortage of triumphalism on all sides during the conflicts in question - a fair amount issued in order to buck up morale and bolster support for the respective governments in power at the time.
Ultimately, I think there's a lot of reflexive and unwarranted contempt for the fighting ability of Chinese forces. Between their record in the Korean War and as the one of the few countries in Asia that inflicted enough casualties on European troops during their limited clashes to deter complete conquest, I'd say they have little to prove.
Re the Vietnamese, I'd say the seeds of future contention between the DRV and PRC were sown as early as 1974, over a year before the collapse of Saigon in 1975, when the PRC occupied the Paracel Islands and drove off an RVN attempt to dislodge them. I suspect it was then that that the DRV realized that the Chinese might have adopted the Communist label, but they continued to divide the world into two categories - current provinces and future provinces.
As to may you live in interesting times, that's probably chinoiserie, rather than Chinese. It was one of the literary devices used by authors when they wanted to use an aphorism that they had coined and thought sounded neat but needed a source of ancient provenance to give it weight. Given that very few Westerners then (or now, for that matter) were acquainted with the Chinese language, it was easy enough to attribute the saying to the Chinese.