The Chinese First Lady’s Complicated History With Vietnam

File image of Peng Liyuan, the future first lady of China, singing to PLA soldiers in the Laoshan mountains near the frontier with Vietnam in the run-up to the 1979 border war.

China’s First Lady Peng Liyuan met with Ngô Thị Mận, wife of Vietnam’s Communist Party General-Secretary, on the first day of her visit to Hanoi on Tuesday in what looked to be a perfectly amicable setting.

And that’s exactly the way Chinese and Vietnamese state-run media want to portray Peng’s visit even though the former popular folk singer has an interesting, some say controversial history with the Southeast Asian country.

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by Eric Olander

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