Vietnamese history has been essentialised in four words: Bac cu, nam tien (resist to the north, expand to the south). In this narrative, all other elements – ideologies, economy and society were weaved around this central drive, as the key to understand Vietnamese history.In this talk Li Tana will discuss this theme with her new book A Maritime Vietnam: From earliest time to the 19th century (Cambridge University Press, 2024). It is a borderless history rather than a history of states. Even so, the journey through the book’s 10 chapters shows repeatedly that it is only when viewed against this expansive background that some of the more important, sometimes even determinative, features of Vietnam’s past can be properly understood.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Li Tana obtained her BA from Peking University and PhD from ANU (1989-1992). The thesis led to her monograph The Nguyen Cochinchina, Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. She taught in Wollongong University and ANU. Her edited books include Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880, and The Tongking Gulf through History.
Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building projects in Asia. Her first book State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (Cambridge University Press, 2024) weaves together international, national, and transnational-local histories to present a new approach to the highly volatile Sino-Vietnamese relations, centering on the two modernising revolutionary powers' competitive and collaborative state building on the borderlands and local responses to it. Subsequent projects are a history of China's ocean shipping industry and the historical memory of the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War partnership in the two countries. Her research has been funded by the Association for Asian Studies China and