Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (51 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As the Chinese expanded their support for Vietnam, they sent in their own engineering and construction troops, anti-aircraft artillery, and additional supplies.
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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.
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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.
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When the Chinese improved relations with the United States after Nixon's visit in 1972 and then reduced aid to Vietnam, the Vietnamese viewed this as a sign of Chinese betrayal of Vietnam's war against the United States.
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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.
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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.
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He was able to sign an agreement on September 25 that provided Vietnam with a small loan and a modest amount of supplies.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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These Soviet-Vietnamese agreements further polarized Vietnamese relations with China and led China to strengthen its relations with Cambodia.
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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) 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.
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