Vogel, Ezra F., 2013. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Harvard University Press

Chapter 9.  The Soviet-Vietnamese Threat 1978– 1979

pp 266-276  

In mid-1977, when Deng once again became responsible for China's national security and foreign affairs, he faced two overriding concerns: defending China against threats from the Soviet Union and Vietnam, and laying the groundwork to enlist foreign help for China's modernization. To reduce the danger from the Soviet military, he sought to firm up relations with China's neighbors and to block Soviet advances. For help with modernization, he turned to Japan and the United States. In pursuing these goals, for fourteen months beginning in January 1978 Deng undertook a whirlwind tour of more countries than he had visited in his entire lifetime. During these trips he improved relations with China's continental neighbors, opened China far more widely than it had been opened at any time since 1949, and set China on an irreversible course of active participation in international affairs and in the worldwide exchange of ideas. In five trips abroad, he visited Burma (renamed Myanmar after 1989), Nepal, North Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States. During these fourteen months, Deng also concluded a Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Japan, negotiated the normalization of relations with the United States, and led China into a war in Vietnam.  

Deng Inherits the Foreign Policy Mantle  

When Deng returned to party work in the summer of 1977, he did not seek responsibility for foreign affairs. At one point he even said that he preferred not to take on the job because it was taxing. But China needed Deng to manage foreign affairs. Not only had he been at Mao's or Zhou Enlai's side in meeting foreign leaders for almost three decades, but he himself had been in charge of foreign affairs from mid-1973 to the end of 1975, under the tutelage of both Mao and Zhou. His colleagues recognized that after Zhou Enlai's death, no other leader could compare with Deng in terms of knowledge of foreign affairs, strategic thinking, personal relationships with foreign leaders, and skill in building goodwill abroad while firmly defending China's interests. Diplomats like Huang Hua, who replaced Qiao Guanhua as foreign minister in December 1976, had extensive knowledge of other countries and of past negotiations. But China's diplomats lacked the confidence to make important political judgments and the stature to meet top foreign leaders as equals.  

Foreign policy had long been a central focus of the top Communist Party leaders. Mao and Zhou in particular had been towering world-class strategists, confident in dealing with the world's other leaders as equals. Though China remained relatively closed before 1978, Mao and Zhou gave foreign affairs a great deal of attention, and they both took personal responsibility for guiding policy. When Mao met foreigners, he exuded imperial confidence and talked of philosophy, history, and literature, as well as of the raw dynamics of world power. When Zhou met with foreigners at home and abroad, he was erudite, elegant, charming, nuanced, considerate of his guests, and ready to discuss details as well as to paint the big picture.  

Like Mao and Zhou, Deng possessed an instinctive national loyalty, a strategic vision, and an underlying toughness in pursuing national interests. When meeting foreigners, Deng, like Mao and Zhou, not only covered an agenda, but also tried to size up his visitor's character and objectives. Deng, however, was more systematic— as well as more direct and straightforward— than Mao or Zhou in focusing on the major issues of concern to China. Before meeting a foreign guest, he did not receive an oral briefing; he wanted to read a memo from his staff about the visitor, the purpose of the trip, and what topics should be covered. As with Mao and Zhou, the foreign visitors often met a Chinese diplomat first, and the diplomat could pass to Deng a memo about the visitors' concerns before Deng met them.  

Foreign diplomats in Beijing respected Deng greatly and saw in him someone with whom they could work. He became a favorite of foreign visitors for his wit, intensity, disarming frankness, and desire to solve problems. George H. W. Bush, who saw him often in 1975 when he headed the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, once said, “He had an intense demeanor and talked with a bluntness that left no doubt about his meaning.” Huang Hua, who sat in on many sessions with Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng when they met foreign leaders, said of Deng, “He was good at grasping major issues, understanding and expounding briefly the essence of a problem in a profound way, and making judgments and decisions in a resolute and straightforward way.”   

Unlike Mao, who harbored visions of grandeur for China that exceeded its power and leverage, Deng remained realistic in acknowledging China's weaknesses and backwardness. But Deng also had an underlying confidence: he knew that he was representing an enormous country with an extraordinarily long history as a great civilization, and he drew strength not only from his own success in overcoming personal challenges, but also from his broad knowledge of domestic and international affairs. Unlike some Soviet leaders, he did not attempt to impress foreigners from more modern countries, even if they towered over him. Instead, Deng engaged foreign leaders as partners in solving problems and soon got down to the issues at hand. Lacking any psychological hang-ups, he could firmly resist, without becoming defensive or nasty, any foreign pressures that he judged were not in keeping with China's interests.  

Deng had not always displayed such confidence. When he first visited New York in 1974 to speak to the United Nations, Deng sounded cautious and uncomfortably formal, for he knew that his staff would report back to Mao what he said and did. Deng continued to be careful during 1975, because on all important foreign policy issues he still needed to obtain Mao's final approval. As even Deng acknowledged, Zhou Enlai's knowledge and experience far surpassed his own. After Mao and Zhou died, however, Deng could negotiate with foreign leaders without worrying about the views of others. When he returned to take charge of foreign affairs in mid-1977 Deng continued the policies he had been carrying out in 1975. But foreign officials who met Deng after July 1977 found him more spontaneous and confident, more willing to express his opinions on a broad range of foreign policy issues.  

From July 1977 until late 1979, in his conversations with foreign leaders Deng spoke respectfully of “Chairman Hua.” But from the time Deng returned in 1977, these foreign guests harbored no doubts that Deng was the one in charge of foreign policy. He functioned not only as China's negotiator, but also as its grand strategist. And although he read the reports from diplomats, for important decisions he relied more heavily on his own seasoned judgment. Deng could be relaxed, with a sure-footed understanding of how the topic at hand related to overall strategy and confidence in his own ability to deal with his counterparts. Over time Deng developed his own characteristic style in conducting meetings with foreigners. He would begin with a few witty remarks to welcome his foreign guests and then shift to focus on the main issues he wanted to address, making his points directly, clearly, and forcefully.  

The Soviet Union as the Main Enemy

In his strategic analysis, Deng's starting point was the same as Mao's: identify the main enemy, cultivate allies against the main enemy, neutralize the enemy's allies, and draw them away from the enemy. By 1969, it was clear that the Soviet Union had replaced the United States as China's main enemy. In July of that year, President Nixon, in Guam, announced that the United States would not become involved in a land war in Asia. Also, following border clashes between China and the Soviet Union in March and August, Sino-Soviet relations remained very tense.  

After the U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, the Soviet Union and Vietnam took advantage of the opportunity to fill the vacuum created by the U.S. troop withdrawal, and in Deng's view, increasingly threatened China's interests. Deng concluded that the Soviet Union was determined to replace the United States as the dominant global power, and that the Vietnamese were aiming to become the dominant power in Southeast Asia. Therefore, China should form a “single line” (yi tiaoxian), uniting with other countries at the same latitude— the United States, Japan, and northern Europe— against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, China would also endeavor to pull other countries like India away from the Soviet Union's side.  

When Deng returned to work in 1977, the Soviet Union and Vietnam appeared increasingly menacing to him as they cooperated to extend their power in Southeast Asia. Vietnam had allowed the Soviet Union to use the ports that the United States had modernized and left behind at Danang and Cam Ranh Bay. This cooperation would give the Soviet Union the freedom to move its ships into the entire area, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Missile bases in Vietnam were also constructed and held Soviet missiles aimed at China, with Soviet personnel and electronic equipment on the bases to provide technical assistance. And the Soviet Union kept massive numbers of troops along China's northern border, a situation that seemed more threatening because, to the west, India was cooperating with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was poised to invade Afghanistan. Meanwhile Vietnam had already taken over Laos and was preparing to invade China's ally, Cambodia. Deng, like players of the Chinese board game weiqi (in Japanese, go), thought of these developments in terms of countries staking out different locations and winning by surrounding the enemy. To Deng, China was in danger of being encircled.  

Of all of these developments, the alliance between Vietnam and the Soviets appeared to Deng to be the most threatening to China, and Vietnam appeared to be the location where bold Chinese actions could have the greatest impact in preventing Soviet encirclement. Deng said that Vietnam, after expelling the American troops, was beginning to act like a proud peacock showing off its tail. In May 1978, when Brzezinski met with Deng to discuss plans for normalization, he was surprised at Deng's vehemence in denouncing Vietnamese perfidy. Other diplomats who met Deng Xiaoping in 1978 observed that whenever the topic of Vietnam came up, he became viscerally angry.

Deng's Relationship with Vietnam

Toward Vietnam, Deng felt a sense of personal as well as national betrayal because China had sacrificed for Vietnam during the American attacks, and because he had had deep personal ties with Vietnamese for five decades. Half a century earlier, when Deng was a worker-student in France, he had worked with Vietnamese allies in the anti-colonial struggle against France. There is no evidence that Deng met Ho Chi Minh in France even though both were there at the same time, but he definitely met Ho in Yan'an in the late 1930s. Zhou Enlai did know Ho in France, and also as a colleague at the Whampoa Military Academy in the mid-1920s. When Deng was assigned to Guangxi in the late 1920s, he passed through Vietnam several times, where he was aided by underground Vietnamese Communists. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Deng and Vietnamese Communists were fellow revolutionaries fighting for Communist victories, but after 1954, they were fellow government officials striving to protect their national interests.  

The connections with General Wei Guoqing, one of Deng's former underlings, also ran deep. Wei had served under Deng in Guangxi and in the Huai Hai campaign, and was a member of the Zhuang minority from the area of Guangxi where Deng had established his revolutionary base in 1929. Deng explained to Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew that in 1954 when the Vietnamese were fighting the French, the Vietnamese lacked experience in large-scale combat and General Wei Guoqing from China had played a key role in guiding the fighting at Dien Bien Phu; the Vietnamese had wanted to retreat, but Wei Guoqing refused. Air defenses in the northern part of Vietnam, too, were manned by Chinese fighters.  

Deng understood the complexities of the relations between China and Vietnam as national interests shifted and were reinterpreted through new lenses. He knew that over the centuries, Vietnamese patriots had regarded the Chinese as their main enemy because of Chinese invasions and occupation. He understood that Vietnam was trying to maximize aid from both China and the Soviet Union at a time when each endeavored to pull Vietnam closer. He also realized that although China considered the contributions of General Wei Guoqing and the Chinese volunteers to have been critical to the victory at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese were still bitter about China's failure to support their efforts to unify their country at the 1954 Geneva Peace Treaty discussions. Deng was acutely aware that Ho Chi Minh, in his last will and testament written in 1965, declared that Vietnam should be the dominant power in Indochina, a statement the Chinese did not agree with. And he knew that Vietnam had been upset that China, starting in 1972, had begun to sacrifice its relations with Vietnam in order to gain better relations with the United States.  

But China had also been very generous in helping North Vietnam fight the United States. When Vietnam's party secretary Le Duan visited Beijing from April 18 to April 23, 1965, seeking help during the stepped-up U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam, President Liu Shaoqi told Le Duan that whatever the Vietnamese needed, the Chinese would attempt to supply. During that visit, Deng met Le Duan upon his arrival at the airport, joined Liu Shaoqi in meetings with him, and then saw him off at the airport. 8 Afterward, the Chinese set up a small group under the State Council to coordinate China's aid to North Vietnam; it represented some twenty-one branches of government, including military, transport, construction, and rear services. According to Chinese records, from June 1965 to August 1973 China dispatched a total of 320,000 “volunteers” to Vietnam to help with anti-aircraft weaponry, machinery repair, road and railway construction, communications, airport repair, mine sweeping, rear services, and other activities. At their peak, there were 170,000 Chinese troops in Vietnam at one time. China reported some four thousand Chinese casualties during the war, but some Chinese scholars estimate that this figure is in the tens of thousands. In 1978 Deng reported to Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew that while the Americans were in Vietnam, China had shipped goods to Vietnam that were worth over US $ 10 billion at the time, even more aid than China had provided to North Korea during the Korean War. As the Chinese expanded their support for Vietnam, they sent in their own engineering and construction troops, anti-aircraft artillery, and additional supplies.

In 1965 Deng, on behalf of the Chinese government, offered to greatly increase China's aid to Vietnam if the Vietnamese would end their relationship with the Soviets, but Vietnam refused. Instead, when U.S. bombing attacks in Vietnam increased, Vietnam turned increasingly to the country with the high technology and modern weapons it needed for defense— the Soviet Union— and the Soviets, in turn, used their increasing leverage to pressure Vietnam to lean to the Soviet side in the Sino-Soviet dispute.  

The gap between China and Vietnam widened in the mid-1960s when Vietnam stopped criticizing “Soviet revisionism,” and when China showed its displeasure with Vietnam's closer ties with the Soviets by pulling a military division out of Vietnam. In 1966, when Zhou Enlai and Deng met Ho Chi Minh, Deng and Zhou were keenly aware of Vietnamese complaints that Chinese troops were acting like the arrogant Chinese invaders who had appeared frequently in Vietnam's long history. Deng argued that the 100,000 troops were there solely to guard against the possibility of a Western invasion, and Zhou offered to withdraw them. But Vietnam did not request their withdrawal, and China continued to supply substantial amounts of ammunition, weapons, and equipment.  

Ho Chi Minh, who spoke excellent Chinese and had spent many years in China, worked hard to maintain good working relations with China as well as with the Soviet Union. But after his death in September 1969, Sino-Vietnamese relations deteriorated, Chinese aid was reduced, and China eventually pulled its troops out of Vietnam. When the Chinese improved relations with the United States after Nixon's visit in 1972.

After the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, the Soviets were generous in supplying large-scale aid to rebuild the war-torn country. In contrast, on August 13, 1975, a few months after the Americans left Vietnam, Zhou Enlai, hospitalized and pale from cancer, told the top Vietnamese planner, Lê Thanh Nghi, that China would not be able to give much aid for Vietnam's reconstruction. China was exhausted from the Cultural Revolution and its economy was not in good shape. “You Vietnamese,” Zhou said, “should let us have a respite and regain our strength.” But in the same month, other Chinese officials welcomed the Cambodian deputy premiers and promised them US $ 1 billion of aid over the next five years. By then, the Soviet Union was working closely with Vietnam and China was working with Cambodia to prevent Vietnam from dominating all of Indochina. Deng later told Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew that China had stopped giving aid to Vietnam not because it was difficult to match the amount of Soviet aid, but because Vietnam sought hegemony in Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union stood ready to support and profit from Vietnam's ambitions, whereas China did not.  

One month later, in September 1975, Vietnam's highest official, First Party Secretary Le Duan, led a delegation to Beijing with the hope of avoiding a complete break in relations with China. Vietnamese leaders wanted to receive some Chinese aid, in part to achieve a measure of independence from the Soviet Union. Deng, hosting the visit under the watchful eyes of Mao, shared Le Duan's goal of avoiding a rupture in their relationship. Deng met the Vietnamese delegation at the airport, spoke at the welcoming banquet, continued discussions with Le Duan, and sent the delegation off at the railway station. He was able to sign an agreement on September 25 that provided Vietnam with a small loan and a modest amount of supplies. Had Deng then remained in office after 1975, he might have been able to patch over the long history of Vietnamese hostility toward China and the current differences, but after Deng was weakened, the Gang of Four took a much tougher stance, demanding that Vietnam renounce Soviet “hegemonism.” Such demands by the Chinese radicals proved too much for Le Duan, who refused to sign a joint communiqué and left Beijing without giving the customary return banquet.

A month later, Le Duan landed in Moscow where he received the promise of long-term aid that he was seeking. Vietnam would have preferred not to be overly dependent on the Soviet Union, but it badly needed help to rebuild the country. Le Duan, lacking leverage from China (or elsewhere) to resist Soviet demands, signed agreements supporting Soviet foreign policy positions. These Soviet-Vietnamese agreements further polarized Vietnamese relations with China and led China to strengthen its relations with Cambodia.  

In early 1977 the Vietnamese ambassador in Beijing said that if Deng were to return to power, he would approach issues more pragmatically and relations between China and Vietnam would improve. To the extent that China had a foreign policy after Deng was removed in 1975, it was filled with revolutionary slogans, lacking in perspective, and delivered without finesse. The radicals had virtually broken Chinese ties with Vietnam and pushed Vietnam closer to the Soviet Union. On November 9, 1975, shortly after Deng lost control of foreign policy, Vietnam announced a political consultative conference to prepare for reunification of North and South Vietnam. Other Communist countries sent congratulatory messages, but China did not. Three days after the conference, China's Guangming Daily, reversing Deng's prior acknowledgment that the dispute over the Spratly Islands remained unresolved, published a strong statement declaring that the Spratly Islands were part of the “sacred territory” of China.  (After Deng was formally dismissed in April 1976, one of the criticisms against him was that he had supported negotiations with Vietnam over the Spratly Islands. ) And in 1976, in response to Vietnamese requests, the Eastern European countries, North Korea, and the Soviet Union all promised aid to Vietnam, but China did not. The radicals had undone the efforts by Deng and Le Duan to keep the relationship alive.  

After Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, there was a brief interlude when Chinese and Vietnamese leaders explored the possibility of improving ties. On October 15, 1976, just days after the gang was arrested, Vietnamese officials, hoping that China might now pursue a more fraternal policy and offer some help for their next five-year plan, sent a request to Beijing for economic assistance. But the request went unanswered, and in December 1976, when twenty-nine fraternal Communist parties sent delegates to Hanoi for the Vietnamese Party Congress, China, under Hua Guofeng's leadership, did not even reply to the invitation to attend. In February 1977, five months before Deng returned to power, Beijing simply reiterated to a visiting Vietnamese delegation that no aid would be forthcoming.

Prelude to the Sino-Vietnamese Conflict

Had Deng not been purged in late 1975, he might have been able to avoid the complete break between China and Vietnam. But when Deng returned to work in July 1977, he confronted a changed situation in which Soviet-Vietnamese cooperation had increased and China's relationship with both the Soviet Union and Vietnam had deteriorated badly.

In March and May 1977, a few months before Deng returned to work, Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap was in Moscow, where he concluded an agreement with the Soviets in which the two sides would expand military cooperation. The Soviet Union had begun to send personnel to naval bases in Danang and Cam Ranh Bay, with the prospect that soon Soviet ships would have access to the entire Chinese coast. Furthermore, the clashes between Vietnamese forces and the Cambodians and Chinese along their respective borders had become larger in scale and more frequent. Vietnam had been hesitant about joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the trade organization of Communist countries, because it would require the Vietnamese to give up some of their cherished economic independence, but on June 28, 1977, the Vietnamese, with an economy badly in need of reconstruction and no other sources of economic help, agreed to join.

 Meanwhile ethnic Chinese had begun fleeing Vietnam. After taking over South Vietnam in 1975, the Vietnamese Communist leaders had begun the immense tasks of collectivizing and nationalizing its economy. In the process they began attacking the 1.5 million ethnic Chinese in South Vietnam, many of whom were small businesspeople opposed to collectivization. If Vietnam were to invade Cambodia or if border clashes with China were to become more serious, Vietnamese leaders feared that the ethnic Chinese might turn against them. The Vietnamese launched a huge campaign that rounded up massive numbers of ethnic Chinese and sent them to detention centers— causing many others to flee the country. The Chinese government demanded that Vietnam desist mistreating the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, but the Vietnamese officials paid no attention. By the time Deng had returned in July 1977, the campaign that eventually expelled an estimated 160,000 ethnic Chinese from Vietnam was well under way. In retaliation, in May 1978, after Deng had returned to work, China suspended work on twenty-one aid projects benefiting Vietnam.  As Deng later explained, by that time China did not believe that more aid would have been enough to pull Vietnam away from the Soviet Union.

Deng, like Mao and Zhou Enlai, thought in terms of decades. In 1978 the threat was not one of imminent invasion of China but the larger danger that if the Soviet Union were to continue to expand its use of bases in Vietnam, it could lead to Soviet and Vietnamese encirclement of China. In explaining the situation to Westerners, Deng referred to Vietnam as the Cuba of Asia— a base by China's side from which the Soviets could position their ships, their planes, and their missiles. Scarcely a decade earlier, in 1962, the Soviet Union had withdrawn its missiles from Cuba because the Americans had threatened to use their superior military power. But the Soviet Union's military was far superior to China's. If the Soviets installed missiles in Vietnam, it would be difficult at best for China to force the Soviets to withdraw them. Deng believed that it was urgent to strengthen cooperation with other countries to resist Soviet-Vietnamese expansion before the bases became strong.

During his fourteen months of travel, Deng visited only one Communist country, North Korea, and seven non-Communist countries. He first visited several countries that had good relationships with China and that could help shore up China's security along its borders. Of his five trips abroad, the first three were made to countries along China's continental borders. Like traditional Chinese rulers, Deng sought to pacify China's borders but he also sought the cooperation of those countries in resisting Soviet and Vietnamese advances.   He then visited Japan and the United States, the two countries that could be the most helpful to China as it pursued the four modernizations and that also had great military strength to possibly help restrain the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Europe was another major area of the world that could help with modernization, but Europe's cooperation had already been assured with Deng's 1975 visit to France. Follow-up arrangements with Europe could be managed by Gu Mu's delegation; they did not require another trip by Deng.