Puppet State - Korea, Vietnam and China in The 1950s

Korea, Vietnam and China in The 1950s

During the 1950–1953 Korean War, South Korea and the United States alleged that North Korea was a Soviet puppet state. At the same time, South Korea was accused of being an American puppet state by North Korea and its allies. In 1955, the Vietnamese Catholic leader Ngo Dinh Diem, encouraged by the United States, declared the creation of South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) in the southern part of Vietnam. The northern half above the 17th parallel of the country was then under the control of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). However North Vietnam was largely independent from the Soviet Union and China, in 1979 Vietnam fought against China in a brief war.

The Paris Peace Accords were preceded by months of intensive negotiations over whether the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (Viet Cong) should be treated as an independent party or as a puppet of North Vietnam.

In 1951 Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, branded the People's Republic of China a "Slavic Manchukuo", implying that it was a puppet state of the Soviet Union just as Manchukuo had been a puppet state of the Empire of Japan. This position was commonly taken by American propaganda of the 1950s, despite the fact that the Chinese communist movement had developed largely independently of the Soviet Union.