Ideological output in technical assistance: China's political and ideological education towards Vietnamese interns in China in the Cold War period

Intern training, as an important form of economic and technical assistance between socialist countries, was carried out throughout the 28-year long foreign assistance that the People's Republic of China gave to Vietnam. On the part of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, its fundamental purpose of sending large numbers of interns to China was to meet the practical needs of sustaining a long-term war. In the eyes of the Chinese government, however, the key to fulfilling the training task did not merely depend on whether the trainees from those brotherly countries had mastered professional skills, but more significantly on whether they had identified with the Chinese political ideology. Such cognitive difference regarding the relationship between national interests and political ideology resulted in continuous frictions between the two countries, especially after the Sino-Soviet split and the start of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which also determined that China's inculcation of political ideology would eventually fall into a predicament. China made efforts to maintain the training of Vietnamese interns as an internationalist obligation until the end of friendly bilateral relations, ultimately having to face the reality that Vietnam took an oppositional stance. As a result, the highly expected "seeds of friendship and revolution" failed to take root and sprout in the end.