This path was created by Michitake Aso.
Learning in the Sinosphere
The fear of invasion has been explored in the US context but less so for other societies, especially in the “Third World,” which was the site of so many types of invasions. [Include Mark Lawrence's work on the creation of the third world?] Traditional understandings of invasions, or unwanted border crossings, in Vietnamese society have revolved around humans including Mongols, Chinese, and French armies. But biological warfare techniques developed in the twentieth century meant that non-human nature, and the environment itself, could become an invasive threat. Vietnamese medical doctors and cadre became concerned about insidious invasions that would go undetected until after it was too late to resist them and they had to grapple with several questions: What were the geographies of invasion? At what scale could they happen? What would an invasion look like? How could an invasion be differentiated from “natural” processes? Who, and what, would invade? How, in short, could invasions be mapped? And then, perhaps most importantly, how could these invasions be stopped?
After 1949 and the victory of the communists in China, Việt Minh leaders envisioned Vietnam rejoining a modified Sinosphere world, this time linked not by Confucian culture but by communist party rule. In this modified Sinosphere world, a newly established PRC was at the center (though peripheral to the Soviet Union), with parts of Vietnam and Korea joined to this world. By the early 1950s, Japan and South Korea were under U.S. control, and thus out. Not surprisingly, the Việt Minh turned to Chinese investigations in order to better understand potential biological warfare in Northern Vietnam. In addition to Vietnamese medical doctors and students traveling to China for study, the PRC held a conference in Beijing to present the evidence of US biological warfare in North Korea and Northeast China.
If you are unfamiliar with the historical geographies of Northern Vietnam you may wish to explore the subpath on this subject. Otherwise, you can continue on the path about biological warfare during the Korean War.
