The feud between North Korea and Vietnam

Prefect of Jiangning

2024-06-18 20:25Interested in the international field

Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to North Korea from Tuesday to Wednesday (June 18-19) and Vietnam from Wednesday to Thursday (19-20) is reminiscent of what was once a "big socialist family."

With this as an introduction, let's talk about the grievances and grievances between North Korea and Vietnam.

On August 4, 1964, the Vietnamese version of the "Lugou Bridge Incident" - the Beibu Gulf Incident broke out.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident is the US version of the Lugou Bridge incident, and the plot is very bloody, in which the US side claimed that its aircraft carrier "Ticonderoga" and two destroyers were pursued by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, and the US ships were lucky to avoid them, and their lives hung by a thread.

At the critical moment of life and death, the "Constellation" aircraft carrier, which was visiting Hong Kong, rushed to the aid and confronted Ho Chi Minh's small speedboats with a two-carrier battle group.

In order to exacerbate the tense atmosphere, US President Johnson addressed the whole nation on the same day: "The US warship was peacefully sailing in the Gulf of Tonkin but was attacked by North Vietnamese warships......

The next day, the long-planned U.S. military dispatched a large number of planes to bomb North Vietnam, and the war escalated.

In November 1964, Johnson, who had succeeded in stirring up national sentiment, was elected president by an overwhelming majority.

Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, November 1964

In the face of the aggressiveness of US imperialism, it is natural that the socialist camp will have to respond.

In October 1964, Kim Il Sung flew from Pyongyang to Hanoi via Beijing, Wuhan and Nanning on a Viscount Vickers passenger plane provided by the Chinese side.

Just like the ups and downs of the past between China and the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, and China and Vietnam, there have been many stories in the history of North Korea and Vietnam.

In 1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (later renamed the Socialist Republic of Vietnam) was established.

Although the country was nominally stated, Ho Chi Minh was basically in a state of guerrilla warfare and being swept away by the French until China fully intervened to resist France and aid Vietnam.

Relatively speaking, Kim Il Sung's life was better, and the situation stabilized relatively quickly.

The fifties were a period of relative harmony within the big socialist family, and mutual visits were very frequent.

Ho Chi Minh visited North Korea in 1957, and Kim Il Sung visited Vietnam twice in 1958 and 1964.

At the end of 2018, not long before the "Kim summit" was held, the Vietnamese side also specially selected a special one to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Kim Il Sung's visit to Vietnam, which was very face-saving for the DPRK.

Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh

There are historical reasons why the Vietnamese side wants to commemorate Kim Il Sung's visit to Vietnam.

In the sixties and seventies of the last century, the DPRK was a very developed economy as a "model country" in the socialist camp, and in comparison, Vietnam, which was fighting every day, was miserable, and it was the object of assistance from the brothers in the big socialist family.

China and the Soviet Union naturally accounted for the lion's share of aid to Vietnam; Other than that, you have to count North Korea.

In 1964, Kim Il Sung did not go to Hanoi to meet Ho Chi Minh empty-handed, but was full of sincerity.

In the following years, several batches of MiG-17 fighters of the DPRK Air Force arrived at Jialin Airport in Hanoi via Mengzi, Yunnan, China, and formed a fighter aviation regiment.

While training North Vietnamese pilots, they directly participated in air battles against the American army and South Vietnam, and their work was very full.

In addition to military and material assistance, many North Vietnamese youths also went to Pyongyang to study in Pyongyang during this period to learn advanced experience in socialist construction.

Kim Il Sung's generosity towards North Vietnam was also an important reason for the stimulation from South Korea.

At that time, relations between South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam were very close, and during the Vietnam War, South Korea and Taiwan were strongly supported by the United States at the request of the United States.

Unlike Chiang Kai-shek's practice of secretly sending military advisers and special forces, the ROK directly sent regular troops into Vietnam, and the ROK successively invested 300,000 troops in the Vietnam War in the 60s.

Since the south is so powerful, Pyongyang in the north naturally cannot lag behind, so the DPRK is very active in aiding Vietnam.

It is worth mentioning that the performance of South Korean soldiers in the Vietnam War was extremely poor, often slaughtering innocent people and committing many crimes.

When Saigon fell in 1975, hundreds of South Koreans were captured before they had time to evacuate, and Brigadier General Lee Dae-yong was detained by Vietnam until April 1980.

A cemetery of North Korean pilots in northern Vietnam

This is the case among socialist countries, when it is good, brothers live and die, and when it is bad, they fight with their lives.

When ideology and inter-party relations are mixed, they form a not very healthy inter-state relationship, and it is easy to talk about trivial matters.

At the end of the sixties, North Vietnam began to negotiate with the United States, and Kim Il Sung was very angry, but he still got along with Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan and other Vietnamese leaders on face.

In the late seventies, with the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, relations between North Korea and Vietnam broke down completely.

Like China at the same time, North Korea firmly supports Cambodia and sides with Beijing.

During the 1979 war of self-defense and retaliation against Vietnam, the official statements of various countries at that time were in three ways:

1. Support Vietnam

2. Demand that China withdraw its troops from Vietnam and Vietnam withdraw its troops from Cambodia

3. Condemn only Vietnam

Among them, only two countries "condemned only Vietnam", one was North Korea, and the other was Cambodia, which was attacked by Vietnam.

Because of this strong statement, DPRK-Vietnam relations have entered a low point since the end of the 70s, just like Sino-Vietnamese relations.

On October 1, 1959, Kim Il Sung attended the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China at the Tiananmen Tower

The collapse of the Soviet Union's Big Brother in 1991 brought the socialist camp to an unprecedented ideological crisis, and everyone abandoned their old suspicions.

Among them, the improvement in relations between North Korea and Vietnam is interesting, and it is the door to exchange opened through military cooperation.

Military fans generally know that North Korea's missile technology has always been very good, especially when compared with a group of countries of the same size, it is far ahead.

Although Vietnam was once touted as the "world's third military power" in the late 70s, it mainly relied on the army, and its high-tech arms were very ordinary.

In June 1994, Senior General Duan Quy, Minister of National Defense of Vietnam, led a high-level military delegation to Pyongyang in an official visit to Pyongyang. In November of the same year, Marshal Choe Quang, Minister of the People's Armed Forces of the DPRK, paid a return visit to Hanoi.

The core issue discussed by the DPRK and Vietnamese militaries was the issue of North Korea's arms sales to Vietnam -- rice for missiles.

It turned out that after the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, North Korea fell into an unprecedented food crisis as the Soviet Union and China ran out of food.

It just so happened that Vietnam is an important rice producer in Southeast Asia, so the two sides hit it off, and Vietnam bought dozens of North Korean Hwasong-6 missiles (the North Korean version of the Scud C missile) for 100 million US dollars in rice.

Perhaps because of the good performance of North Korean missiles, Vietnam repeatedly asked Pyongyang for missiles in the late 90s, and bought more than 300 missiles one after another.

These hundreds of missiles have greatly increased Vietnam's deterrent power in the region, and it is considered the most powerful missile force in Southeast Asia.

Of course, the Chinese people also have a lot of complaints about this matter, such as saying that this is the DPRK's response to the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea.

Although the military cooperation between the DPRK and Vietnam was relatively warm in the 90s, there were few exchanges in the economic, trade and diplomatic fields, and it was not until the beginning of the 21st century that the leaders of the two countries resumed reciprocal visits.

In October 2007, Communist Party of Vietnam leader Nong Duc Manh was invited by Kim Jong Il to visit North Korea, the first visit to Pyongyang by a Vietnamese leader since Ho Chi Minh in 1957.

For the sake of grandeur, Kim Chong-il personally picked up Nong Duc Manh, and the specifications were very high.

However, unlike Kim Il Sung, who is familiar with various occasions, North Korea was very closed off at the diplomatic level during Kim Jong Il's tenure, and always let the veteran Kim Yong-nam go out to complete some ceremonial affairs.

It was not until 2019 that Kim Jong-un completed an official return visit to Vietnam.

Kim Jong-un and Nguyen Phu Trong

The past is long, and time seems to have slowed down in the diplomatic process of socialist countries.

After Khrushchev's visit to China in 1959, the next Soviet leader to visit China was Gorbachev in 1989.

After Ho Chi Minh's visit to North Korea in 1957, the next Vietnamese leader visited North Korea in 2007 in Nong Duc Manh.

After Kim Il Sung's visit to Vietnam in 1964, the North Korean leader visited Hanoi again in 2019, 55 years later.

In the past half century, from his happy family to the back of a hundred years, various experiences have been mixed

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Personal opinion, for reference only