Perry Anderson on the 1979 Chinese Invasion of Vietnam

By Reihan Salam
February 10, 2012
The National Review
New York, USA

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Perry Anderson’s latest review essay in the LRB is his extended discussion of the Chinese military intervention in Vietnam, which Henry Kissinger and others, including Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, describe as a crucial turning point in the Cold War. Having intervened in Cambodia to overthrow the brutal Pol Pot regime, many feared that Soviet-aligned Vietnam would invade Thailand and establish some kind of militarized suzerainty in Southeast Asia. Anderson takes a very different view:

How is this zenith of Sino-American collaboration, as Kissinger repeatedly calls it, to be judged? Militarily, it was a fiasco. Deng threw 11 Chinese armies or 450,000 troops, the size of the force that routed the US on the Yalu in 1950, against Vietnam, a country with a population a twentieth that of China. As the chief military historian of the campaign, Edward O’Dowd, has noted, ‘in the Korean War a similar-sized PLA force had moved further in 24 hours against a larger defending force than it moved in two weeks against fewer Vietnamese.’ So disastrous was the Chinese performance that all Deng’s wartime pep talks were expunged from his collected works, the commander of the air force excised any reference to the campaign from his memoirs, and it became effectively a taboo topic thereafter. Politically, as an attempt to force Vietnam out of Cambodia and restore Pol Pot to power, it was a complete failure. Deng, who regretted not having persisted with his onslaught on Vietnam, despite the thrashing his troops had endured, tried to save face by funnelling arms to Pol Pot through successive Thai military dictators.

Joining him in helping the remnants of the world’s most genocidal regime continue to maul border regions of Cambodia adjoining Thailand, and to keep its seat in the UN, was the United States. Vogel, who mentions Pol Pot only to explain that despite his negative ‘reputation’, Deng saw him as the only man to resist the Vietnamese, banishes this delicate subject from his pages altogether. Kissinger has little trouble with it. No ‘sop to conscience’ could ‘change the reality that Washington provided material and diplomatic support to the “Cambodian resistance” in a manner that the administration must have known would benefit the Khmer Rouge’. Rightly so, for ‘American ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic necessities and moral conviction. They decided that for their moral convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in the geopolitical struggle.’

The struggle in question was against the USSR. In these years, Deng continually berated his American interlocutors for insufficient hostility to Moscow, warning them that Vietnam wasn’t just ‘another Cuba’: it was planning to conquer Thailand, and open the gates of South-East Asia to the Red Army. The stridency of his fulminations against the Soviet menace rang like an Oriental version of the paranoia of the John Birch Society. Whether he actually believed what he was saying is less clear than its intended effect. He wanted to convince Washington that there could be no stauncher ally in the Cold War than the PRC under his command. Mao had seen his entente with Nixon as another Stalin-Hitler Pact – in the formulation of one of his generals – with Kissinger featuring as Ribbentrop: a tactical deal with one enemy to ward off dangers from another. Deng, however, sought more than this. His aim was strategic acceptance within the American imperial system, to gain access to the technology and capital needed for his drive to modernise the Chinese economy. This was the true, unspoken rationale for his assault on Vietnam. The US was still smarting from its defeat in Indochina. What better way of gaining its trust than offering it vengeance by proxy? The war misfired, but it bought something more valuable to Deng than the 60,000 lives it cost – China’s entry ticket to the world capitalist order, in which it would go on to flourish.

Some will dismiss Anderson, who is after all a Marxist historian at UCLA who is inclined to think well of America’s benevolent global hegemony. But I wouldn’t be so quick to do so, as Anderson has often been an effective, clear-eyed critic of the illusions of the left as well as the right.

And besides, those of us who are entirely comfortable with the U.S. as the self-appointed guarantor of the security of the global commons might find another aspect of China’s Vietnam incursion interesting: this was China’s last serious military engagement, whereas the United States has engaged in twice as many high-intensity military conflicts since the collapse of the Soviet Union as it did during the Cold War era. How effective is China’s fighting force? The Chinese military is increasingly sophisticated and capital-intensive, but that alone doesn’t mean that its doctrine and war-fighting capabilities are truly up to date. This might make China more strategically cautious than we’d expect from a rising revisionist power. Indeed, we might instead think of China as a status quo power that profits greatly from a U.S-led world order and would be extremely reluctant to jeopardize it.