At first glance, the cities of Ulaanbataar, the capital of Mongolia, and Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, may not seem to have very much in common. Some 3,000 miles apart at opposite ends of Asia, the people, culture and history are very different except for one element, having China as a neighbor.

While Mongolia opted for assimilation into the Soviet Union as a communist nation in 1924, gaining independence again in 1992, Communism came to Vietnam in 1946 following the formation of the Vietnamese Communist Party led by Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong in 1930. The First Indochina War pitted the communist Viet Minh against the French. The French were defeated in 1954 and the country was partitioned at the 17th parallel with the communists taking the North. This was followed by the American involvement to prevent the spread of Communism to the Republic of Vietnam in the South and throughout Asia until 1975 when the country was reunited with the communists, backed by China and the Soviet Union, gaining control of Saigon and forcing an American withdrawal.

That friendship with China turned sour when Vietnam invaded the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia, which had been terrorizing Vietnamese citizens along the border. In 1979, China invaded Vietnam, sending 200,000 troops to "teach Vietnam a lesson" over interfering with China’s policy in Southeast Asia. A short, but bloody war followed, leaving thousands dead before China eventually withdrew after a month. From having been allies in forming a communist alliance against the excesses of capitalism, Vietnam and China found themselves estranged, a situation that did not immediately sit well with the third and fourth generation Vietnamese-Chinese who had lived in the country for generations.

Mongolia, sandwiched between the two superpowers of the Soviet Russia and China, opted to side with the Russians after it became apparent in the early 1920s that maintaining independence from either was not going to be a sustainable option. On the basis of the Russian culture and looks being far less related with Mongolia’s, the decision to join the Soviet empire was made in light of the viewpoint that had Mongolia sided with China, they would never have got their country back. Assimilation with China was a greater threat than assimilation by the Soviet Union. This proved correct. When the Russian troops upped and left in 1992, the Mongolians immediately began claiming back their country and reasserting their independence.