Border Cooperation between China and Vietnam in the 1990s

In spring 1989, several thousand Vietnamese living in the northern border region waded across the Beilun River and entered China. This wave of people came carrying such goods as rice, pieces of copper, scrap iron, and the like, which they traded on the streets of their destination, the frontier town of Dongxing located in China's Guangxi Province. These traders were followed soon thereafter by many thousands of more Vietnamese who chose to celebrate the Tet holidays then underway by shopping in Dongxing for a variety of consumer commodities. The Vietnamese at Dongxing were not alone, for many of their compatriots also had taken the holiday occasion to make similar trips across the border and enter Guangxi. These spring developments were representative of the overall trend in the resumption of economic and trading activities along the border between China and Vietnam that unfolded slowly at the end of 1988 and start of 1989. Such activities had come to a halt 10 years earlier, a casualty of the SinoVietnam War. The 1990s would see expanding contact and cooperation along the frontier that culminated in the December 30, 1999, signing of a treaty by the foreign ministers of China and Vietnam that demarcated the land border between the two countries. This was an important symbolic step signifying the attempt by both sides to place the normalization of relations on a stable and permanent footing and the logical outcome of a decade marked by cordial relations in the border regions. The purpose of this article is to describe the process of normalization on the border during the 1990s. It first outlines the general geography of the