From 1985 to 1991 I made a number of visits to China and Vietnam and talked to some of Vietnam's China experts and to some of China's Vietnam experts. By that time the hostility that had emerged during the 1970s had become embedded. Not only did I hear different “sides” of the conflict in each country, but the perceptions that each had of the other side struck me as profoundly distorted. The problem was not a lack of information. Each set of experts that I talked to had more information than I did. But the Vietnamese China experts seemed hypersensitive to every gesture and action emanating from China, while the Chinese Vietnam experts seemed overly concerned with “big picture” questions and out of touch with the realities of the place that I had just visited.

After the normalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991, the distance between the two viewpoints diminished, but the disparity remained and grew more complicated. Now both countries were concerned about developing a peaceful relationship, but “off the record” and in concrete areas of confrontation, the Chinese disparaged the Vietnamese as unreliable, while the Vietnamese were alert to Chinese malevolent inscrutability and bullying. The attitudes were not simply the residual effects of previous hostility. The issues were the peacetime problems of border trade, bridges, rail connections, and so forth, not problems of history. But there was a continuity of roles.