Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (53 page)

In North Korea, Kim met Deng several times, both privately and publicly. Deng explained China's serious economic problems and its need to
modernize. At the time, North Korea's industrial development constituted a higher share of GNP than China's did, but Kim was beginning to fall behind South Korea's burgeoning industrial takeoff. As Deng told Kim, “The world's cutting-edge technology must be the starting point for our modernization. Recently, when our comrades have gone abroad to take a look, the more we have seen, the more we realize we are backward.” China needed access to the most modern technology to improve its industrial capacity. This was a message that Kim, who had modernized with the help of the Soviets and China, could well understand. Deng also explained how difficult it had been to get Japan to agree to an anti-hegemony clause directed against the Soviet Union, and he briefed Kim on the progress of his secret talks on normalization with the United States.
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He spoke, too, of the dangers of the Soviet Union, saying that to avoid war, one must prepare for war: in this way, the Soviets would remain more cautious. Deng cautioned that they must avoid appeasing the Soviet Union.
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Considering the policies that Deng was pursuing with the United States and Japan, his visit went remarkably well. Kim Il Sung would not join Vietnam in encircling China and instead would continue to maintain good working relations with the Chinese. In later years, Kim Il Sung assured others that Deng was his friend, and he even defended, to a group of Eastern European Communist leaders, Deng's policy of opening China economically and politically. On this 1978 trip, Deng succeeded in a very delicate mission, without which North Korea might have improved relations with the Soviet Union and distanced itself from China, which was turning to North Korea's enemies (United States and Japan).

Seeking Allies in Southeast Asia, November 5–15, 1978

Back in China, the epoch-making Central Party Work Conference was set to begin on November 10, 1978. But Deng regarded the imminent Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as sufficiently alarming that he put aside work conference participation and normalization discussions with the United States so that he could travel to Southeast Asia for ten days to gain their understanding for China's planned response, an attack on Vietnam.

By the summer of 1978, it appeared to the Chinese that the Vietnamese were planning to invade Cambodia, and the prospect of invasion became a tripwire for Chinese action. Cambodia had become China's client state just as Vietnam had become a client of the Soviet Union. China would come to the aid of an ally to whom it had been giving aid and assistance. What was especially
disturbing to the Chinese was that more Soviet “advisers” and equipment were arriving to assist the Vietnamese attack. U.S. officials estimated that between 3,500 and 4,000 Soviet advisers were in Vietnam by August 1978, and by mid-October it was reported that Soviet freighters were unloading aircraft, missiles, tanks, and munitions. By this point, Deng had had enough. He decided that first he must stand firm; the peaceful climate for modernization would have to wait. He would even cooperate with Pol Pot; Pol Pot had a terrible international reputation for his wanton killing, but in Deng's view, he was the only Cambodian with enough troops to be a useful ally against the Vietnamese.

In July, Vietnam began bombing Cambodia with as many as thirty sorties a day and in September the number increased to as many as one hundred a day.
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In November, Chinese leaders, observing Vietnamese preparations, concluded that Vietnam would invade Cambodia in December during the dry season when it could move its tanks.
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Deng believed a strong military response was absolutely necessary. Deng had warned the Vietnamese, saying that France and the United States did not have the will to remain involved after their forces had suffered such heavy losses in Vietnam, but that China, its neighbor, was there to stay. The Vietnamese, however, were not heeding the warning. Deng had told Kissinger and Ford three years earlier that Hitler had invaded the West because the Western leaders had not shown that they were ready to make a strong military response. Deng believed from his long experience in dealing with the Soviets that discussions would not work. He believed that to get the Soviets to desist from expanding in Southeast Asia, he needed to take strong military action. He was ready to “teach a lesson” to the Vietnamese about the high costs of ignoring China's warnings and of providing bases for the Soviets.

As the Vietnamese were extending their power into first Laos and then Cambodia, continental Southeast Asian countries were being pressured by the Vietnamese to accommodate to its power. Southeast Asians did not welcome Vietnamese dominance, but they felt powerless against a Vietnam supported by the Soviet Union and felt they could not easily resist further Soviet expansion in their region. Deng feared that the mainland Southeast Asian countries—Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore—would feel compelled to accommodate to Soviet-Vietnamese power to the detriment of China's long-term interests. In Deng's view it was essential to attempt to pull Southeast Asian countries away from Vietnam.

In September 1978, Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong traveled to Southeast Asia to seek the understanding of Southeast Asian countries as
Vietnam prepared to invade Cambodia. Although Pham failed in his effort to sign a friendship treaty with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Southeast Asian countries were beginning to accommodate to Vietnamese power for they saw no other choice. By November, Deng had decided he had to travel to those same areas to prevent their accommodation to the growing Soviet-Vietnamese threat.

By the time he left for his Southeast Asian trip, Deng had begun military preparations to respond to a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, but his plans were not announced to the public. Even if Vietnam penetrated deeply into Cambodia, China would not respond favorably to Pol Pot's request to send troops to Cambodia as it had during the Korean War to help North Korea. Deng feared getting bogged down. Instead Deng decided China should “teach Vietnam a lesson” by invading, taking several county capitals to show that it could penetrate further, and then withdrawing quickly. This would also reduce the chance that the Soviet Union might send in troops to assist Vietnam. The Vietnamese would learn that the Soviet Union would not always come to its aid and that Vietnam should reduce its ambitions in the region. And by attacking Vietnam, not the Soviet Union, China would show the Soviet Union that any effort to build up its forces in the area would be very costly. Deng displayed confidence that Chinese troops, despite the toll the Cultural Revolution had taken on military training and discipline and despite their lack of battle experience, would be adequate to achieve his political goals against a more experienced and better-equipped enemy. Once Chinese troops had withdrawn, they would continue to harass Vietnamese forces along the border.

Fortunately for Deng's visit to Southeast Asia, on November 5, two days before he arrived, the Soviet Union and Vietnam cemented the pact they had been negotiating by signing a twenty-five-year treaty of peace and friendship.
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The treaty alarmed Southeast Asian countries and made them receptive to Deng's suggestions about cooperating to resist Soviet and Vietnamese expansion. Leaders in Southeast Asia had no doubt that Deng was in charge of Chinese foreign policy and that whatever he said about foreign policy would be accepted by the other Chinese leaders.

Thailand, November 5–9, 1978

When Deng arrived on November 5, he became the first Chinese Communist leader ever to visit Thailand. Thailand's prime minister Kriangsak Chomanan welcomed Deng warmly.

Deng chose to start his Southeast Asian trip in Thailand not only because Chinese forces would need to pass through the country in order to supply Pol Pot's forces in Cambodia, but also because China enjoyed better relations with Thailand than with any other Southeast Asian country. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia each had about five million ethnic Chinese, and leaders in all three countries feared that their ethnic Chinese populations might be more loyal to China than to their own country. The fear intensified during the Cultural Revolution when China began sending radio messages into those countries to encourage the local people to carry out revolution. At the time of Deng's visit, these radio appeals had not yet stopped. The problem was most acute in Indonesia, where local Chinese had joined in the resistance to Sukarno that had nearly toppled his government. (Indonesia, furious, did not normalize relations with China until 1990.) But in Thailand the ethnic Chinese were far more assimilated and the fear of ethnic Chinese becoming a fifth column was far less serious than in Malaysia or Indonesia. If Deng could successfully make his case there, then Thailand could prove helpful in persuading other Southeast Asian countries to cooperate with China and Cambodia in resisting Vietnamese expansionism.

Historically, Thailand had tried to preserve its relative independence by accommodating the wishes of stronger foreign powers—France, Great Britain, and Japan. Deng believed that if China did not assert its interests, Thailand might soon tilt toward Vietnam. Fortunately for Deng, at the time of his visit, Thai leaders—who were closely allied with the United States—sought to avoid accommodating Soviet and Vietnamese power and welcomed Chinese cooperation in resisting Vietnamese domination of the region.

To help prepare Thai public opinion before his trip and to help himself get up to speed about Thailand's concerns, Deng had several meetings with Prime Minister Kriangsak during his visit to Beijing earlier that year, and he met with a delegation of Thai journalists in Beijing in early October.
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During Kriangsak's visit, Deng had told the prime minister of his desire to work with ASEAN and to normalize relations with Indonesia and Singapore. The two leaders shared perspectives on world issues and agreed in principle to increase cooperation against Soviet and Vietnamese domination.
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Deng also agreed to support Kriangsak's efforts to enable ASEAN to remain a zone of peace and neutrality.
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Perhaps most important, when Deng hosted a Sino-Thai Friendship Association delegation to Beijing in June, he urged Thailand to settle its differences with Cambodia; one month later, it was announced that in principle Thailand and Cambodia had agreed to settle their long-standing border dispute and to exchange ambassadors.
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When Deng met Kriangsak in Thailand in November, he again told him of his desire to work with ASEAN and to normalize relations with Indonesia and Singapore. He presented his analysis of the global ambitions of the Soviets and the regional ambitions of the Vietnamese. Soviet bases in Vietnam, he asserted, threatened not only China, but the region and the world. In a private meeting, with only a note taker and an interpreter, Deng warned Kriangsak that Vietnamese troops were preparing to invade and occupy Cambodia. Thailand, with its long border with Cambodia, would soon come under threat. Kriangsak agreed to grant China air rights to deliver supplies to Cambodia.
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Deng also tried to reassure Kriangsak about the loyalty of the local ethnic Chinese in Thailand. He asserted that China encouraged Chinese living overseas to become citizens of the countries where they resided. Once they had chosen the Thai nationality, they would automatically forgo their Chinese nationality. He further expressed the hope that those who became Thai nationals would abide by Thai laws, respect local customs, and live in amity with the local people, while those who chose to remain Chinese nationals would contribute to Sino-Thai friendship and to the Thai economy, culture, and public welfare.
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Deng's confidence-building message provided a striking contrast to Mao's messages, delivered scarcely a decade earlier, encouraging people in Thailand to promote revolution. Within Thailand Mao's message appealed most to the ethnic Chinese. In his public press conference in Bangkok on November 9, Deng was less explicit about a likely conflict with Vietnam than he had been with Kriangsak in private. He stressed the necessity for Thailand and China to cooperate in dealing with those nations that seek to act like a hegemon, and especially the importance of strengthening Sino-Thai cooperation to ensure peace and security in Southeast Asia. He acknowledged that China's past relationship with the Thai Communist Party could not be ended overnight, but he said that it would not interfere with government-to-government relations. Privately, however, Deng had assured Kriangsak that China would end its support of the Communist Party of Thailand.
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He had also explained that he would stop the Chinese clandestine radio broadcasting encouraging revolution, as soon as he had a chance to prepare the local people who had worked with China and their supporters within China. Eight months later, on July 10, 1979, the radio broadcasts came to an end.
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As on his other foreign trips, Deng made public appearances and took an interest in the local culture. During the visit to Thailand, which is 90 percent Buddhist, Deng was shown on television attending a Buddhist ceremony. He
also met the Thai king and queen, visited sports contests and military demonstrations, and attended a ceremony supporting scientific and technical cooperation between the two countries.
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Malaysia, November 9–12, 1978