독백과 망각의 전쟁— 중월전쟁과 아시아 냉전의 역설성

Abstract

This article investigates why the 1979 Border War between China and Vietnam disappeared from the public discourse in the 1990s after propaganda for the war had been spread nation-wide throughout the 1980s. In seeking clues that might provide answers to this question, two films and a short story from the 1980s will be analyzed: Wreath at the Foot of the Mountain (1984), 15 Year-old Moon (1986), and “A Woman and a Half of a Man” (1985). It should be noted that the party ideology of legitimizing the war was already being eroded in these works to a different degree, although they appear to adhere to the canonical framework. The equivocal stance toward the war demonstrated in these works is somewhat understandable, given the fact that the war itself was inherently ironic. At the domestic level, the war was complicit with Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening policy. The cause of the war was inevitably undercut by the process of legitimizing the Reform and Opening policy. At the global level, the war reveals the paradox of the Asian Cold War: On the one hand, the Asian Cold War was a part of the global Cold War, but it simultaneously disrupted the Cold War logic; the war was, after all, waged between socialist countries. The multi-layered paradoxes are attributed to the ideological crack revealed in the three aforementioned contemporary works of art, which foretells the war’s inexorable exit from the public discursive arena shortly thereafter.