Conventional scholarly wisdom depicts China's late 20th-century conflict with Vietnam as being a short and limited but bloody punitive military offensive launched by Beijing in early 1979. Xiaoming Zhang's path-breaking book suggests that this is probably not the best way to contextualize the operation. Indeed, Zhang interprets the conflict as the most deadly and high profile campaign in what he calls a “long war” lasting more than a decade. As Zhang rightly notes, Sino-Vietnamese border hostilities persisted until the mid-1980s and tensions lingered even longer.

Prior treatments of the war have tended to focus on the operational and tactical aspects of the military campaign, exploring the reasons behind China's attack, and/or documenting China's road to war. Zhang adopts a big picture approach enabling the reader to put the brutal battles of February 1979 in proper context. He makes the convincing argument that the bilateral struggle between Beijing and Hanoi was a manifestation of a larger Cold War contest between Beijing and Moscow. Therefore, Zhang contends that the Sino-Vietnamese conflict could not be resolved without reconciliation between China and the Soviet Union.

But the author's attention to broader geostrategic context does not come at the expense of attention to detail. Zhang presents the most thorough and comprehensive battlefield account of the 1979 Sino-Vietnam conflict available anywhere. The three chapters examining the planning, execution and assessment of the 1979 campaign are bookended by three initial chapters detailing the lead up and four later chapters surveying rest of the “long war,” the broader impact of the war on China, how the conflict was terminated, and overall reflections on the entire enterprise, respectively. One of the most fascinating dimensions of the war that Zhang addresses is its low profile in the annals of post-1949 Chinese military history. Other wars, notably the “Anti-Japanese War” – commemorated with a massive parade in September 2015 – and the Korean War are invariably the subject of considerable hype. By contrast, the conflict with Vietnam is – if not the forgotten war – then certainly the overlooked war.

Painstaking research was conducted over many years in multiple archives – including those of four different provinces – and the memoirs of generals and collections of official military documents were carefully scrutinized, as well as many online resources consulted. I am aware of the extensive and sustained research effort, having reviewed a decade ago Zhang's draft manuscript titled “China's 1979 war with Vietnam: a reassessment,” which subsequently appeared in The China Quarterly 184.

But Zhang did not pause after tirelessly tracking down a remarkably wide array of hard-to-find sources. The author has also taken the time to painstakingly piece together his sources in a coherent and engaging narrative. Moreover, he has carefully interpreted the results and drawn on other major scholarly studies to provide a masterful concluding assessment of the “long war.” The outcome is a fascinating and illuminating piece of scholarship.

This volume is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the Sino-Vietnamese conflict for decades to come. It should be required reading for students of the People's Liberation Army, China's foreign relations, and Cold War history. The Long War is highly recommended for adoption by courses on Cold War history or China's foreign relations.