Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Sino-Soviet split wikipedia , lookup
Foreign interventions by the United States wikipedia , lookup
France–Vietnam relations wikipedia , lookup
War in Vietnam (1954–59) wikipedia , lookup
Cold War (1947–1953) wikipedia , lookup
Sino-Vietnamese War wikipedia , lookup
North Vietnam wikipedia , lookup
Escalation and Détente After Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1953, his management of politics and economics marked a crucial transition. He pursued a course of reform and shocked his fellow delegates when he denounced the "cult of personality1" that surrounded Stalin, and accused Stalin of the crimes committed during the Great Purges. Khruschev promoted reform of the Soviet system and began to place an emphasis on the production of consumer goods rather than on heavy industry. He sought a thaw in the Cold War, calling for a “peaceful coexistence” with the West. day standoff was the closest the world has ever come to World War III, but cooler heads prevailed and a compromise was reached, and the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles. In turn, the Americans removed their outdated missiles from Turkey six months later (as not to look as if they had given in to a threat). Re-Escalation In 1960, just days before a summit conference between President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev, a U.S. U-2 spy lane was shot down over Soviet airspace. The incident turned out to be a great embarrassment for the U.S. and the summit talks collapsed. This event would only be one of many that would reignite the tensions between the superpowers. In 1959, Fidel Castro led a small guerilla army to victory in Cuba. Quickly, he turned Cuba into a communist state, nationalizing sugar-plantations, and giving enormous plots of land to the peasants. Although some development took place, dissenters and critics were jailed or killed, and hundreds of thousands fled to the United States. As Castro increasingly turned to the Soviet Union for aid, the CIA backed a failed coup attempt in 1961. Around 1,500 Cuban exiles were either killed or captured during the Bay of Pigs incident after President Kennedy called off air support fearing an escalation into war directly with the Soviet Union. The next year, the U.S. imposed an embargo on Cuba, crippling the Cuban economy. Castro, seeking closer ties and financial aid from the Soviet Union, allowed the building of nuclear missile sites on his soil – just 90 miles from the coast of Florida. This maneuver set off the dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, President Kennedy declared a quarantine of Cuba and demanded that the Soviets remove their missiles. This 13 1 When a country's leader encourages praise of himself and his deeds to such a degree that this praise affects nearly every facet of the country's culture. Events back in Europe also increased the tensions between the superpowers. In 1961, with the approval of Khrushchev, East Germany built the Berlin Wall. It was constructed in an effort to stop the drain of labor and economic output associated with the daily migration of huge numbers of professionals and skilled workers from East to West Berlin, and the attendant defections, which had political and economic consequences for the entire Communist bloc. The Berlin Wall became one of the most iconic symbols of the Cold War. It certainly speaks volumes when a country must create barriers and use secret police to keep people within their borders. Years later, the Soviet Union would be confronted with a greater threat of defection. In January 1968, Alexander Dubček, the leader of Czechoslovakia, enacted several democratic and capitalist reforms. This experiment known as the Prague Spring lasted until August, when Soviet and Warsaw troops invaded the country, arrested Dubček and his supporters, and placed a more Soviet-friendly government in control. The policy of the USSR to enforce Soviet-style governments among its satellite states, through military force if needed, became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, named after Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who had been in power since 1964. The Space Race The Space Age began on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first space satellite, into orbit around Earth. Then in 1961 the Soviets built a rocket with enough power to put a person into orbit around Earth, and Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person2 to orbit Earth. Under the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government hoped to increase industrial output to the point where it matched or exceeded that of many Western European countries. To reach this goal, China purchased modern machinery and tried to increase output by running this machinery almost continuously in factories. The government even encouraged the Chinese people to make their own iron and steel in small backyard blast furnaces. The United States had already begun its own ambitious program for space exploration. Now, however, the United States space program expanded rapidly. In 1958 the United States successfully launched an unmanned satellite into space, and in 1961 Alan Shepard became the first American to travel in space. In March 1965 the first Soviet astronaut walked in space and by August the United States had responded with its own 20-minute space walk. On July 20, 1969, the United States won the intense race to put the first person on the moon. The Apollo XI mission transported three American astronauts— Neil Armstrong, Edwin K Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins—to the moon aboard the spaceship Columbia. While Collins stayed behind on the Columbia to help coordinate the mission, Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon aboard the lunar module, the Eagle, making the famous quote, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The “Space Race” was not just a competition for bragging rights between the two superpowers, it was a way for each side to develop a technological advantage over the other. We can attribute much of today’s technology to the efforts of the thousands individuals who worked to invent the means by which space travel could occur. Communist China Impatient to accelerate progress, Mao’s government announced the Great Leap Forward. This plan aimed to speed up economic development while simultaneously developing a completely socialist (communist) society. Backyard Furnaces During the Great Leap Forward The Great Leap Forward also established huge collective communities, called people’s communes, that incorporated agricultural activities and small industries. Life on a commune bore a strong resemblance to life in the military with dormitories and communal dining halls. Often, children were taken from parents to be raised in separate dormitories. People worked long hours in the fields or factories under strict supervision, and everyone received the same pay, regardless of how much he or she produced. This led the people to work only as hard as they had to; a common problem with communist economies. Many of the changes made under the Great Leap Forward reflected Mao’s rejection of individualism. The Communist Party controlled almost every aspect of people’s lives on the communes. Furthermore, the Communists stressed loyalty to the Communist Party and to the state, moving away from the Chinese people’s traditionally strong ties of family loyalty The Great Leap Forward failed dismally. Industrial output decreased, and there were food shortages. In fact, it has been estimated that more than 20 million people starved in China between 1958 and 1960. The failure of the program also led to disagreements within the Communist Party. Faced with falling productivity and constant criticism from workers and peasants, the government abandoned the Great Leap Forward. The Cultural Revolution 2 The Soviet Union had earlier launched a dog into orbit, and the United States launched a monkey into orbit soon after. In the early l960s, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s prestige within the Communist Party hierarchy was seriously damaged. Mao was forced to give up the day-to-day administrative tasks of running the country to another leader, but he remained in his position as Communist Party chairman. Although peasants still had to work on the communal farmland, they also had small private plots of land, on which they could raise their own crops. They were also given monetary incentives to raise more crops. Mao was highly critical of these policies. return after the war, the Viet Minh, a communist-led guerrilla group that had fought the Japanese, now began to resist the French. Nonetheless, by the end of 1945 the French had regained control of much of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Viet Minh, hoped to negotiate a quick settlement of the independence question. However, the French would agree only to recognize Vietnam as a free state within the French empire. In 1946 fighting broke out between the French and the Viet Minh. The war dragged on for years. After a major defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu (dyen byen foo), in which the Viet Minh captured some 13,000 French troops, French leaders were finally ready to negotiate an end to the war. Painting of Mao, Youth, and Their "Little Red Books" In 1966 Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, best known as the Cultural Revolution, a violent attempt at social change. Mao aimed to rid China of the “Four Olds”—old customs, old habits, old thoughts, and old culture—replacing them with a new socialist culture, Mao chose China’s young people to lead this revolution. These radical high school and college students soon became known as the Red Guards. Student members of the Communist Party were encouraged to carry copies of Mao's Little Red Book of quotations. Acting under Mao's leadership, these "Red Guards" used his quotations in their mission to weed out intellectuals. The Red Guards went on a rampage throughout China, vandalizing historic buildings, ruining ancient works of art, burning books, and destroying anything they considered part of what they called the “old way.” However, they saved their greatest zeal for those people who did not comply fully with Mao’s teachings. The Red Guards denounced these people, publicly humiliated them—and sometimes beat, tortured, or even killed them. Those who survived punishment by the Red Guards lost their jobs and their Communist Party membership. The Cultural Revolution had a disastrous effect on the Chinese economy. Agricultural and industrial production fell dramatically, and the country’s economic development plans suffered a severe setback. The Vietnam Conflict In the late 1800s, the French became the dominant power in the eastern part of the peninsula of Indochina, an area roughly equivalent to the present-day countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. However, during World War II, the Japanese took control of the area. When the French tried to The Geneva Accords, signed in 1954, divided Vietnam into two zones at the 17th parallel. With Chinese and Soviet assistance, the Viet Minh began to consolidate their economic and political strength, building a communist state in the north. By contrast, the south ruled by totalitarian methods, attempting to suppress all opposition to the government. Leaders also refused to hold the proposed elections in 1956. By the late 1950s the Viet Minh formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) with the goal of reuniting Vietnam. The NLF, a mixture of Viet Minh members and dissidents from the south, soon became known as the Viet Cong, or Vietnamese Communists. With conditions in the south growing more and more chaotic, a group of army officers assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam, and took control of the government in 1963. Over the next three years, several different military groups ruled South Vietnam. American troop strength began to reach significant numbers in the mid- l960s under President Lyndon Johnson after an alleged military assault by the Viet Cong against U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Johnson administration explained the increasing American military presence in a number of ways. First, communism had to be contained. Second, the administration cited the domino theory, the belief that if South Vietnam fell to communism, all of Southeast Asia would follow. At the beginning of 1968, North Vietnamese, troops and the Viet Cong launched a major offensive. American and South Vietnamese forces drove bad the attackers, inflicting heavy casualties. Even so, the Viet Cong considered the Tet Offensive—named for the Vietnamese New Year celebration, during which the attack began—a psychological victory. Many Americans, after seeing television pictures of the fierce fighting, openly questioned United States involvement in the war (Vietnam was America’s first “living room” war – because citizens were able to see the horrors of war in their homes for the first time). During 1969, the first year of Richard Nixon’s presidency, there were 540,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. Nixon announced a policy of ‘Vietnamization.” This involved allowing the South Vietnamese gradually to take over fighting the war while the United States supplied them with arms, equipment, air support, and economic aid. As a first step in this process, he announced the gradual withdrawal of American troops. Yet at the same time, Nixon expanded the war by allowing the invasion of neighboring Cambodia. Many Viet Cong troops were able to move along the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” – the name given to the loose network of roads and trails through the jungles in and around Vietnam. The Americans used “Agent Orange,” an herbicide that turned out to be toxic & even carcinogenic, to eat away at the jungles to better see the enemy. In 1973 the major parties in the Vietnam War reached a cease-fire agreement. Under this agreement, known as the Paris Peace Accords, the United States withdrew its remaining troops from South Vietnam. In return the North Vietnamese were to release American prisoners of war. However, fighting continued in Vietnam in violation of the accords. The South Vietnamese army, without American support, could not hold back the enemy advance, and in April 1975, North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon. Within 24 hours the South Vietnamese government surrendered. Estimates of civilian and military casualties for both North and South Vietnam range from 1.3 million to more than 2 million. American combat casualties totaled more than 58,000 killed and some 300,000 wounded. After the war, North Vietnamese officials controlled and administered all of South Vietnam, Then, in July 1976, the two Vietnams united as one country—the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—with Hanoi, in the north, as the capital. The former southern capital, Saigon, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the North Vietnamese president, who died in 1969. Even before unification, the North Vietnamese had begun to reform the south along communist lines. Economically, this reform involved nationalizing property, imposing controls on private enterprise, and moving the population from cities to rural areas. As a result, more than 1 million South Vietnamese fled their country. Some left because they feared punishment by the North Vietnamese. Others left because of food shortages. However, most people moved on because they did not want to live under a communist government. Many of these “Boat People,” as the refugees were called, died at sea. Those who survived spent months in crowded camps, waiting for permission to settle permanently in another country. Many eventually made their way to Western countries - most commonly to the US. Détente Efforts to improve relations with the Soviet Union and Communist China began under President Richard Nixon. In 1972, Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit Moscow. During his visit, President Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT. This agreement limited each country’s production and deployment of certain nuclear weapons. Nixon and Brezhnev also signed several accords related to environmental, health-related, and technological cooperation. The general improvement in Soviet-American relations that followed became known as détente (dayTAHNT), a French word meaning an easing of strain. Chinese-Soviet relations worsened during the 1960s as both countries began to station troops along their common border. As a result, a number of clashes occurred. However, China became more willing to come to terms with the United States. The first major sign of change came in 1972, when a US Ping Pong Team was sent to China for a goodwill competition. This seemingly random visit resulted in something much more substantial when President Richard Nixon visited China. Soon after, the two nations began to permit the exchange of other sports teams, journalists, educators, artists, and business leaders. While many Americans saw opportunities for investment and trade in China’s rapidly growing economy, mutual distrust of the Soviet Union provided much of the basis for the improvement of Sino-American relations. Finally, in 1979, the United States gave full diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China. At about the same time, the United States withdrew its recognition of the Nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan.