Earlier this year as part of the “Vietnam ‘67” series of essays that appeared in the New York Times, historian Olga Dror published a piece about schools for Vietnamese that were set up in southern China during the Vietnam War called “How China Used Schools to Win Over Hanoi.”
I recently gained access to a database of PhD dissertations and MA theses in China. Out of curiosity, I did a search for “越南” (Vietnam) and was amazed at what I found. . .
From what I have been able to determine, so far in this century there have been close to 100 PhD dissertations completed in China that deal with some aspect of Vietnamese history, with the majority having been completed in the last decade. The number of MA theses is also very large, and many of those have been completed in the past few years (indicating that this trend of scholarship on Vietnam getting produced in Vietnam is only going to increase).
I was reading Phan Ngọc’s The Characteristics of Vietnamese Culture (Bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam, 1998) and came across a passage where the author was talking about differences between Vietnam and China by referencing the supposed higher level of autonomy that Vietnamese women had in the past in comparison to their Chinese sisters.