Tonkin, officially the Republic of Tonkin, was a short-lived semi-Marxist state in Indochina that existed officially between May 5, 1988 and October 17, 1997, when it was reunited with Vietnam following the fall of Saigon. However, Tonkin existed semi-officially from 1967 and onwards, when the proposed breakaway state was first suggested by the Communist Party of Vietnam, which exerted considerably more power in the north than in the Westernized south. Tonkin was inexorably tied to Chinese goals, and despite China's strict anti-Communist policy, they supported Tonkinese rebels during a thirty-year period, hoping to gain influence throughout Indochina, which it viewed as its personal backyard. The earliest proposal for a Tonkinese state was in 1946, after the American withdrawal from Saigon