The Chinese and Vietnamese had expressed ethnic bitterness and hatred toward each other for centuries. The Sino-Vietnamese alliance was formed largely because at the time they shared a common enemy: the US. The alliance was doomed to collapse beginning in the late 1960s, when Beijing came to regard the Soviet Union, not the US, as the greatest enemy.
Fearing Vietnam’s growing regional hegemony, few countries in Southeast Asia protested China’s invasion or its support of the ousted (and notorious) Pol Pot regime.
However, by the late 1970s, the PLA was not the same army that had brought the CCP into power in 1949; it was overextended, obsolescent, ill-trained, and poorly equipped. As a result of its participation in the Cultural Revolution, it had lost the respect and affection of the Chinese people and gained notoriety for abusing power.
Deng’s strength of personality played a major role in shaping China’s foreign policy. According to Mao, Deng had a character of “steel,” making him unwilling to compromise and difficult to get along or even work with. China’s decision to go to war with Vietnam was certainly affected by his perception of the Soviet threat, which was both genuine and perilous, as well as his perception that the US was too soft in dealings with the Soviet Union. Deng always possessed and exhibited an underlying toughness in pursuing China’s national interests.
Deng neither ordered the PLA to cease military operations on Vietnam’s northern border nor approved the Vietnamese leadership’s visit to China until after the collapse of the Eastern European communist bloc in 1990. The winding down of the Cold War in Europe placed Hanoi in an awkward position, and it became increasingly concerned about the survival of communism in Vietnam itself.
Shared causes and conflicts hardly render nations and people immune from rivalries and differences that can lead to subsequent discord. In 1754, American colonists joined in common cause with the forces of the British Empire, fighting steadfastly over the next nine years against the French and their allies. But by 1776, the pronounced differences between those colonists and their ostensible mother country erupted into an open revolt in which the American revolutionaries triumphed in no small measure thanks to the assistance of the same French they had so recently fought.
The document accused China of betraying Hanoi’s unification hopes at Geneva in 1954 and of preventing Vietnamese communists from stepping up their armed struggle against the Saigon regime, allegedly effectively giving a green light for America’s subsequent intervention in Vietnam, with all the attendant misery that endeavor entailed. Beijing authorities repudiated all these allegations through their official media, vehemently condemning that they saw as Hanoi’s deliberate distortion of China’s assistance to Vietnam. Problems between China and Vietnam at the time can be described by an ancient Chinese proverb: “It takes more than one cold day for the river to freeze three feet deep.” To outside observers, these allegations and repudiations clearly indicated that serious problems had existed in the oft-touted “comrades in arms” relations between China and Vietnam from the very beginning.
Historian William Duiker notes that conflict between nations “is often motivated by a complex amalgam of emotions, assumptions, and expectations, many of them are the product of experience.” Studies since the end of the Cold War generally argue that the military confrontation between China and Vietnam was not merely a response to contemporary events, as people initially thought. Instead, China’s involvement in Vietnam had been complicated since the 1950s, filled with frustrations, dissatisfactions, disappointments, and long-standing ill will — even hatred — between the two countries.
“The seeds for the destruction of the Asian communist alliance” were sowed throughout the years of China’s involvement in Vietnam. They were not planted in a particular year by a particular event.
Further complicating the relationship were the inequalities inherent within the international communist movement, which effectively dictated a top-down centralized control and management system relegating the lower-level newer communist powers to a subordinate status in which they had to accept authoritative guidance from the higher-level older ones.
In early 1950, when Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh visisted Moscow, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin advised the Vietnamese Communist Party leader that his party’s request for assistance should be fulfilled by China. The Soviet leader did so for reasons that had more to do with his desire not to be bothered with such revolution than it did with his desire to see Mao play an active leadership role in the region.
Chinese leaders were sensitive to the appearance of displaying big-state chauvinism toward their neighbors, repeatedly exhorting PLA troops serving in Vietnam during the First Indochina War to maintain “respect” for their Vietnamese counterparts and avoid being “complacent and arrogant.” Nevertheless, General Chen Geng, the top Chinese military leader in Vietnam, confided to his diary his abhorrence of Giao, describing the Viet Minh military leader as “slippery and not very upright and honest.” Chen further observed that “the greatest shortcoming of the Vietnamese communists was their fear of letting other people know their weaknesses,” which, he judged, made the Vietnamese leadership not truly “Bolshevik.” In his memoirs published in 2004, Giap, in turn, makes no mention of General Chen’s significant contribution to the Viet Minh’s earlier military victories in the First Indochina War.
Le Duan perhaps ignored the fact that although China, the Soviet Union, and the Viet Minh had been allies, all of them could certainly be expected to proceed to negotiations based on how they calculated their own interests.
Neither Chinese nor Vietnamese leaders appeared to understand that their revolutionary ideologies might not remain congruent (and thus consistent) with their national security interests.
China envisioned itself in a continuing military confrontation with the US, one that dated back to Korea and extended through the Taiwan Strait confrontations of the later 1950s. However, as much as the US perceived itself as victorious in those conflicts, China believed that the US had failed to achieve its strategic goals. Now, the Chinese leadership saw America as expanding its historical animus against the Chinese communist regime into Vietnam. Mao stated that the Chinese must be prepared for a large and possibly nuclear war. China’s leaders viewed US escalation in Vietnam as the prelude to such an attack.
Between 1965 and 1969, a total of 320,000 Chinese troops served in North Vietnam. The greatest number in country at any one time was 170,000, equivalent to more than ten divisions.
Le Duan noted that even though a small number of Chinese perished, their sacrifice might have saved 2M or 3M Vietnamese lives. But he apparently still feared China as a potential threat to Vietnam’s independence and freedom: he explained that the deployment of Chinese forces in North Vietnam was probably a Chinese scheme to assess the state of Vietnam’s defenses so that China could invade and occupy Vietnam and then use it as a base for expansion across Southeast Asia.
Hanoi leaders wanted Beijing and Moscow to resolve their differences through air-clearing dialogue. But Chinese leaders, especially Mao, believed that the Sino-Soviet dispute could not be resolved so easily and that a decade or more would pass before they could achieve an outcome “favorable to revolution and to a true solidarity.”
Recently uncovered Chinese sources indicate that the PRC’s military aid to Hanoi was far more extensive and substantial. As extensive as Soviet support was, China’s backing arguably represented a greater measure of dedication to the Vietnamese cause, since China had much less industrial capability than the Soviet Union.
The Chinese later discovered that Hanoi arranged for Soviet SAM units to redeploy to avoid US attacks but moved Chinese antiaircraft artillery units to into the positions previously occupied by the Soviets.
If it came to war, the Chinese calculated, Soviet mechanized units could reach Beijing in a ten- to fourteen-day blitz. Moscow’s August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia provided the Beijing leadership with evidence that the “socialist imperialist” Soviet Union might be more dangerous than the US to China’s security.
Chinese leaders found themselves in the unenviable position of needing to prepare their country to fight both superpowers in either a separate war or, as strange as it might seem, a joint war.
Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated so seriously that in October 1969, China placed itself on imminent war status with the Soviet Union, and Mao and senior Chinese leaders secretly left Beijing for southern China while the PLA’s central command went underground on Beijing’s western outskirts. From this point on, Chinese leaders showed less interest in promoting world revolution than in protecting their country’s security.
Vietnam, conversely, used the Soviet Union to gain leverage over China for more aid. The ironic tragedy was that as long as China’s perception of the Soviet threat continued to dominate its national security calculations, Beijing would not only lose Vietnam as a friends and ally but also inevitably set both nations on a course toward eventual confrontation.
Deng also ordered the use of force against Vietnam after so many years of “lips and teeth” solidarity between the two countries.
Unlike Mao and Zhou, Deng’s lack of a strong personal “attachment” to Vietnam provided an explanation for “why he had no qualms about launching an attack in 1979 to teach Vietnam a lesson.”
Surprisingly, given the acrimony of their exchanges, Le Duan apparently had great respect for Deng. According to Le Duan, Deng was the only Chinese leader he had met “with great understanding” of Vietnam. Stein Tonnesson argues that Le Duan’s positive attitude toward Deng probably reflected Le’s preference for the kind of “straight, hard talks” that were typical of the Chinese leader.
Even as conflict loomed, Hanoi continued to seek Chinese aid at a time when Beijing was facing serious domestic economic problems after years of agricultural and industrial stagnation.
Even more significantly, Mao took the same tone during his meeting with Le Duan the next month, saying pointedly, “Today, you are not the poorest under heaven. We are the poorest. We have a population of 800 million.”
Like Beijing’s relationship with Moscow, the relationship between China and Vietnam was from the beginning both characterized and overshadowed by a top-down, senior partner-junior partner, communist party-to-communist party relationship that required the subordination of the lower level to the higher level for doctrinal guidance and strategic leadership. This party-to-party relationship also established a “comrade plus brother” state-to-state relationship between China and the Soviet Union and between China and Vietnam. Under the terms of this unequal relationship, the bigger country was responsible for making policy and providing aid for the smaller nation. In return, the latter was required to subordinate its own national policy and strategic interests to the leadership of the former.
Unlike his military subordinates, who could afford to consider the issue simply in terms of military affairs, Deng had to ponder a series of more fundamental and weighty strategic issues before reaching any decision. These questions involved the rationale for China’s use of force against Vietnam, a former communist ally, and the possible international and domestic repercussions of such a decision. Deng had to contrive a thoughtful rationale that would convince the entire country that the use of force against Vietnam would improve China’s strategic position and advance domestic economic reform.
Chinese frustration continued during the early years of Jimmy Carter. Carter came to office vowing to give an even higher priority to American-Soviet detente. This approach did not please Chinese leaders, particularly Deng. He disliked the US tendency to try to ease international tension by negotiations.
Brzezinski seriously misinterpreted Deng’s position, suggesting that his anti-Soviet posturing was merely “rhetorical.” Likely astonished at this misreading, Deng strongly disagreed, explaining that China had always done things within the compass of its power.
In the meantime, the Chinese leader underscored to American visitors that normalization of relations with the PRC “would do more for American security than any number of arms control treaties signed with Moscow.”
China needed a safe, reliable environment if it were to undertake its Four Modernization. The PRC could not allow itself to be “wedged in” by the Soviet Union from the north and Vietnam from the south. China, he believed, should expose the hollowness of Vietnam’s boast of being “the world’s third-strongest military power” and of “being ever victorious.” A Chinese failure to act, Deng claimed, would simply fuel Vietnamese aggression and might encourage the Soviet Union to move from the north.
The specter of conflict with Vietnam imposed an order and unity on the PLA that it sorely lacked in the post-Lin Biao era. Without the war with Vietnam, this turmoil among senior military officers might have continued.
Even though Deng was increasingly seen as the supreme leader akin to Mao, he remained obliged to consult trusted senior colleagues before making a decision. They were mindful of several key risks — that the Soviet Union would launch a retaliatory attack on China; that the US would seek to profit from the situation; that world opinion would condemn the PRC; and that the war with Vietnam would impede China’s drive for economic modernization.
Conventional wisdom holds that “since war plans to tend to cover only the first act, the national leadership, in opting for war, will in fact be choosing a plan without an ending.” To preclude being entrapped in a prolonged conflict, the Chinese leadership implemented restraints to both the means and ends of warfare.
Officials also stressed that if Soviet forces invaded, Chinese troops must “hold out firmly while not giving the impression of weakness.”
He acknowledged that international reaction might be divided but remained confident that opinion would favor China in the long run. The potential international backlash would not deter the Chinese leader because he would yield to nothing after having made up his mind.
More important, the Chinese leader believed that he made it clear before the Americans that “what China said is reliable; China has given careful consideration to its actions; and China will not act impulsively.”
They also do not elucidate why Deng was so eager to inform the Carter administration of Beijing’s decision to attack Vietnam, something that normally would only have happened between two closely allied countries. However, Deng’s 1979 assessments of the Soviet threat was extraordinary. First, he believed that Moscow would wage war in 1985 as a consequence of its sustained military expansion and the deteriorating economic condition and intensified ethnic problems between Russians and ethnic minorities at home. Second, the Chinese leader worried about the decline of US strength and influence and concluded that the Soviet Union could act even more recklessly after its invasion of Afghanistan.
Chinese leaders found it imperative to show that ignoring Chinese statements had serious consequences. For Beijing, Vietnam’s dismissal of repeated Chinese warnings not to invade Cambodia had challenged Chinese credibility, both in the West and in the ASEAN countries.
Finally, whatever the rationale for the war, Deng’s dictatorial leadership style allowed him to dominate Beijing’s decision making, allowing no serious debates on the decision to go to war. It is understandable, therefore, that historians and policy analysts focus on Deng when considering the wisdom of China’s decision to attack Vietnam.
Chinese forces were undermanned, underequipped, and poorly trained. The most serious difficulty was the lack of enthusiasm among the rank and file. Many soldiers did not understand why they would attack a country that seemed like — and had often been compared to — China’s “little brother.”
He advocated embedding the party organization inside the army at all levels to guarantee that troops would comply with the CCP’s directions. He particularly stressed the importance of the party’s role at the company level. Because his army was very weak and experienced extreme hardship, Mao was convinced that only a politicized army could keep up morale and maintain solidarity among the rank and file.
The most critical components of the political work system were the party committee system and the political commissar system. Except in tactical and emergency situations, the party committees discussed and made all the important decisions.
Under the collective leadership of the party committee, a dual commandership system gave the military commander and the political commissar equal ranks. The former was responsible for all military affairs, while the latter, who usually served as the secretary of the party committee, was in charge of promotion, security, propaganda, public service, and ideological indoctrination.
The CMC apparently granted operational autonomy to regional commanders but kept the duration and space of the fight under the command of the central leadership in Beijing. Deng was determined to avoid having the invasion turn into a quagmire for China.
Nevertheless, the lack of personal connections between the rank and file and their commander would lead to complaints about Xu’s leadership style when operations did not go as expected.
To avoid escalating the conflict, the CCP leadership confined the use of air power to Chinese territory.
In his book, General Zhou Deli’s use of an expression, “Sharpen one’s sword only before going into battle — start to prepare for war only at the last moment” suggested that the PLA was in an embarrassing condition at the time.
Despite the urgent need for training, the PLA continued the tradition that Mao had advocated forty years earlier — that is, the idea that the war could not be won without political mobilization. One notable characteristic throughout the PLA’s history was that many of its soldiers were poor, illiterate peasants. The political indoctrination system had been instituted to mobilize them to fight against a strong enemy, proving its value repeatedly over the years.
To encourage troops to (if necessary) willingly sacrifice their lives in combat, the 13th Army political department organized rallies at which officers and soldiers took an oath together by holding their guns in the air and shouting slogans. In powerful, emotional scenes that ignited patriotic fervor, all the soldiers pledged to take on dangerous and difficult tasks.
This approach not only demonstrated the PLA’s commitment to continue Mao’s “people’s war” doctrine but also reflected the PLA’s unequivocal weakness. PLA leaders realized that they lacked a modern logistics system to sustain the war effort, and their standard solution was the mobilization of popular backing.
Within a few weeks, more than 100,000 military and militia soldiers swarmed into Hekou County, which had a population of 50,000.
The employment of nonuniformed militia soldiers in a hostile country along with the PLA units later created confusion during encounters with Vietnamese defenders, who were also dressed in civilian clothes on the battlefield. On a few occasions, PLA soldiers found themselves with no choice but to kill anyone not in a uniform, even some of those men might be Chinese comrades.
The mountainous terrain, dense jungle, lack of roads, and frequent PAVN ambushes gave rise to all sorts of unimagined difficulties. The 121st Division needed six days to arrive at its designated position at Khau Don, southwest of Cao Bang.
No detailed Vietnamese accounts of the conflict are available, though the unit history of the PAVN 3rd Division notes how fiercely troops defended their positions, with pages waxing lyrical about soldiers’ heroism in the face of Chinese attacks. However, it provides no details about Vietnamese losses.
All political and military measures taken by Hanoi were warranted at the time. But in the long run, Vietnam’s anti-China policy, built on the basis of Soviet support, was questionable, and actually worked against the national interest.
By the end of May, the PLA had reverted to its normal alert status. Vietnam, however, remained on guard, stationing a large number of PAVN troops (allegedly 300,000) along border with China at a time when the economy was “in a worse state than at any time since 1975.”
The Vietnamese leadership clearly failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and continued depending on the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor.”
Even Xu acknowledged that he had little knowledge of the challenges of fighting in a tropical, wooded mountain environment. They quickly realized that their combat experience in northern China did not apply to the battleground in Vietnam.
Was the punitive nature of the war a true objective, or was it just rhetoric and a reflection of Beijing’s anger toward Hanoi and the invasion of Cambodia? If teaching a lesson was China’s main objective, the PLA should have struck hard to achieve significant military results. But speaking to Japanese journalists in the middle of the war, Deng asserted that he did not “need military achievements.” He later explained, “Teaching Vietnam a lesson was not based on a consideration of what was happening between China and Vietnam or Indochina but was based on a contemplation of the matter from the angle of Asia and the Pacific — in other words, from the higher plan of global strategy.” His calculus was ultimately dominated by two priorities: improving China’s external security environment and reforming China’s economy and opening up the country.
Because the local government could only provide 2.5 kilos of meat per soldier per month, PLA units had to grow vegetables and raise hogs to consume even during their tours of duty at the front, taking them away from military-related duties.
According to a 2007 study, three border counties — Maguan, Malipo, and Hekou — remained among China’s most impoverished, with hundreds of thousands of dwellers living below the poverty line.
Not until the 1991 Gulf War shocked the PLA with a vision of a new air-driven, high-tech, precision-weapon, combined-arms war of rapid mobility did the Chinese military take seriously the challenge of readdressing the PLA’s many shortfalls, beginning with the frank realization that China had fallen far behind in military modernization. Most of the lessons that it had learned from the border conflict with Vietnam were irrelevant, because the border battles had been fought with no air power and with few high-tech weapons systems. What the PLA had found most useful, as Zhang Zhen recalled, was employing reconnaissance brigades, establishing a precedent for the creation of PLA special operations forces later.
Under the influence of traditional culture, military service was often ridiculed as inferior in Chinese society, a view evident in a popular proverb: “Good iron never turns into nails; good men never enlist as soldiers.” Since the founding of the People’s Republic, the PLA had been a social channel for peasant youth to move out of rural poverty by taking up other professions and eventually becoming urban residents.
In 1984-85, only officers above regimental level wanted to fight because they faced fewer hazards than officers at battalion and company levels.
One shocking disclosure was the surge in prostitution in the Laoshan war zone and the failure of the PLA’s traditional iron discipline to control soldiers’ sexual desire in the face of death.
Most of them came from poor rural families and died before their 20th birthdays. When they devoted their lives to the war with Vietnam, they were convinced that their sacrifice was equivalent to those who gave their lives in the anti-Japanese war, the liberation war against the Nationalists, and the war assisting North Korea against America and its UN allies.
Because the war was fought for political rather than military objectives, both belligerents ultimately had to return to diplomacy. The road to terminating hostilities between Beijing and Hanoi proved long and tortuous, and progress was slow.
China also stood firm in negotiations because its leaders believed that the Soviet geostrategic position had become less favorable and that the PRC thus had no need to make concessions.
The Chinese leader held a strong stance against the Soviet Union because he believed that China’s economic development did not require anything from Moscow; therefore, concessions at the negotiating table were the only thing the Soviets could offer China.
A major transformation in Hanoi’s policy toward China occurred after the July 1986 death of Le Duan. At the 6th Party Congress in December, several of Le Duan’s associates “retired from political life or fell from power.” Younger leaders now assumed leadership positions. The new leaders readily admitted that life in Vietnam was difficult. Hanoi consequently embarked on a new foreign policy course, departing from an almost exclusive dependence on the Soviet Union to a new strategy of “making friends with all countries in the world.” Accordingly, mending relations with China became the new Vietnamese leadership’s top priority. Anti-China rhetoric disappeared from party and state pronouncements, and Hanoi pointedly reaffirmed its appreciation for China’s earlier assistance and support. At the end of 1988, Hanoi unilaterally reopened its border with China to promote economic and trading activities and withdrew its troops from the border.
Jiang Zemin concluded the meeting by quoting a Qing poem: “Disasters are never powerful enough to separate true brothers; a smile is all they need to eliminate ingratitude and resentment.”
For their part, the Chinese people remained bitterly aware that their earlier sacrifices for Vietnam had not brought permanent friendship and gratitude and became even more annoyed with Vietnam’s unreliable behavior. They reproved Hanoi’s ingratitude by recalling an old Chinese expression, “Whoever suckles me is my mother.”
The conflicts between states which have usually led to war have normally arisen, not from any irrational and emotive drives, but from an almost superabundance of analytic rationality.
The side seeing itself as stronger demands more.
In response to the Soviet attempts to improve relations with China, Deng had been very practical if not snobbish, asking what Moscow could offer China. His answer was simple: nothing.
When the Hanoi leadership indicated that the Vietnamese Communist Party would again follow the CCP’s lead, Beijing may have thought that the former relationship between the two parties and countries had returned.
Terminating unsuccessful military ventures in Cambodia and a stalemated conflict with China was painful for Vietnamese statesmen, especially those who clung to the position that Vietnam must achieve a “peace with honor.” When Hanoi withdrew all troops from Cambodia, it portrayed the move as the PAVN ending its “international duties” there and triumphantly emerging from the Cold War.
Any effort by Hanoi to rejoin the world community would be of little avail should hostility between China and Vietnam continue. Vietnam was a proud nation with a history of resisting foreign interference and pressure while refusing to let anyone outside the country know its weaknesses. Perhaps more important was the idea that “Le Duan’s legacy lives on,” since many of his cronies became Politburo members.
Chinese leaders found themselves in an awkward position. Their support for national liberation movements in Asia, evidenced by the PRC’s close ties with all Indochinese communists, conflicted with their latest national security interests. When China’s Indochina policy had to defer to this reality, Hanoi saw a huge gap between China’s words and deeds despite China’s continued military and material support to the VCP. After many years of committing resources to Hanoi’s war effort, the Chinese had created a new enemy.
Deng Xiaoping’s temperament and personality also played roles in his decision to attack Vietnam. As a dictatorial leader, he believed that admitting mistakes could weaken his authority and credibility, particularly after he had formulated a decision. Therefore, he was not only decisive but also inflexible.
One conclusion is that Deng was simply unable to avoid the role that he was supposed (or that he believed it was reasonable) to play at the time — that, in effect, he was a hostage to history. Beijing’s decision to invade the border regions of Vietnam could be seen as both inevitable and sound as long as Deng believed that he needed to react to a very real Soviet threat and desired Western support for China’s economic modernization.