Had we known that, 57 year later, one boat would ram another boat, I'm pretty sure America would have abandoned plans to invade Vietnam.

I don't think the US government genuinely feared that all the Asian communists would unite together. Rather, the worry was that Vietnam would be in the Soviet sphere of influence, and that the rest of Indochina would have fallen to either the Maoists or the Soviets, which it very nearly did. United or not, a red Asia would have been beyond our ability to influence; in fact, from a strictly humanitarian perspective, a united communist front might have been preferable, in that it would have stopped the infighting and instability that cost the region countless more lives. Communism as understood in context, or perhaps more accurately, vanguard socialism, is an inherently militaristic ideology, and when you consider that many of these regional rivalries stretch back hundreds, if not thousands of years, it was perhaps inevitable that foreign crisis should follow foreign crisis amongst people who, to an outside observer, should have been fellow travelers.

China's always hated Vietnam, they even invaded Vietnam after our own war there ended, while Vietnam was in the process of invading communist Cambodia.

China should declare war on Vietnam. That would turn out well.

A mixture of engrish and internet-speak? Charming

The other side of the coin is their overheated economy. I'm really dreading when that souffle finally collapses.

And it will collapse.
It must be really terrifying to live in the Philippines or Malaysia, where China has decided that everything 15 feet beyond the beach is now theirs.

Yeah, when I was majoring in this stuff in college we always had lectures about how the government was losing its moorings more and more each year. That, as soon as they can't "bring home the bacon," for the growing bourgeois middle class that demands representation and the extremely poor that have no rights and work in terrible conditions, there will be an all out revolution. Similarly, each year there are more protests by these people and more mass jailings. But, using manufactured foreign "threats," bribery, and corruption, the party somehow holds onto power, if only in name.

I like to think of it as "Commercial Darwinism".

I bet it could be traced to when it passed into the slimy, liver-spotted hands of Rupert Murdoch.