The late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh once described China and Vietnam as “both comrades and brothers”. During the Vietnam War, China supplied the North Vietnamese with guns and other weapons to fight the US troops in South Vietnam. However, during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, China discovered much to its regret, dismay and amusement that the Vietnamese turned the guns and other Chinese weapons around at the Chinese army. Fortunately for China, Vietnam did not have a nuclear missile programme of its own, otherwise history would be different. As in the turbulent Sino-Vietnamese ties, mutual suspicion and distrust between China and Korea go back a long way to ancient times. The "comradely, brotherly" relationship between China and North Korea surely ranks as one of world’s strangest. There is a line in the play The Tempest, by William Shakespeare : “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” It is spoken by Trinculo, King Alonso's jester, who has been shipwrecked and finds himself seeking shelter beside Caliban, whom he regards as a "sleeping monster". The current territorial dispute between China and Vietnam is a mirror image of a possible future Sino-Korean conflict once North Korea subdues the South. However, unlike the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, China will have to prepare for a nuclear holocaust as it will be clashing headon with a nuclear-armed Korea. Of the two strange bedfellows, who is the sleeping monster? http://www.historynet.com/war-of-the-dragons-the-sino-vietnamese-war-1979.htm http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight...nd-brothers-china-and-vietnam-are-going-their http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/tempest/section5.rhtml https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/the-tempest/summary-and-analysis/act-ii-scene-2
In ancient times, the Northern part of Vietnam became populated by peoples coming from what is modern-day Southern China. Northern Vietnam was almost like a province of China (or at least a tribute state) at many points in the past. So Vietnam shares some close cultural similarities to China, much more so than any other nation in Southeast Asia. Vietnam would probably have been absorbed into China if it had not been so far away. Even the Southern provinces of China were considered very distant from the Empire in ancient times. In terms of languages, although the fundamental grammar structure of the two languages are different, the phonology of Vietnamese strongly resembles Cantonese, and Vietnamese has borrowed a lot of vocabulary from both Southern and Northern China at different times in history. Before French colonization, Vietnamese used to be written in Chinese script.
