The first episode of Ken Burns' story of the Vietnam War was on last night, and it talked about the early history of the war. Part of that was a look back at the involvement of China in Korea, where the whole back and forth of the Korean War was covered in the context of Vietnam, Russia, and China. Then, kind of as an aside, Burns mentions that the Chinese lost one million men to keep North Korea, and almost took away the South at the same time. For the Chinese, the 50's are like yesterday.
There were very few families in the US that were not affected by Vietnam, but there were only 58,000 casualties. It seemed like more when almost every High School class had one or two. Now imagine a million lost people, most of them killed in suicidal attacks right in the face of powerful weapons. My uncle had been there and told us about the atrocities committed by the Chinese as they moved south through the country. I have never seen most of those incidents mentioned in history books, but he was there and I believe him.
Even in a country of a billion people, a million casualities is a lot. These were students and family men in almost every part of China. They must remember this, and certainly do not want to face the same situation again, this time with nuclear weapons. Mao was a different kind of leader than the ones since. Let's hope they have more sense than political goals that throw away the lives of their own people.
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