Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 by Andrew Mertha (review)

This is a welcome addition to the literature on Chinese-Cambodian entanglements during the Cold War. Drawing primarily on interviews with Cambodian cadres and Chinese technicians who worked together during the Khmer Rouge period, Andrew Mertha provides an in-depth analysis of the implementation of China’s aid program to Democratic Kampuchea. He uses three cases (the Krang Leav airfield, the Kampong Som oil refinery project, and commerce between China and Cambodia) to demonstrate how bureaucratic fragmentation in China and differences between the Chinese and Cambodian institutions contributed to the ineffectiveness of Beijing’s financial aid and technical assistance. He argues that in a markedly asymmetrical partnership, China failed to translate its large-scale aid into leverage over the Khmer Rouge.

Although Mertha’s treatment of the Cambodian side of the story, especially his chapter on the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy and Pol Pot’s work style, is highly revealing and instructive, his discussion of Chinese policymaking leaves much to be desired. Mertha’s conclusion that “China’s provision of vast quantities of cadres, guns, and money had brought precious little” (p. 9) is not persuasive. When Mao and his successors measured the return of their assistance to the Pol Pot regime, they were not looking at tangible material gains and benefits. Instead, they concentrated on the political support and loyalty they received from the Khmer Rouge in the common opposition against Moscow-backed Vietnamese influence in Indochina. This was in line with China’s imperial “Central Kingdom” tradition of maintaining tributary relations with peripheral countries.

Even though Mertha has benefited from access to documents at the National Archives of Cambodia, his employment of Chinese-language sources is inadequate and unsatisfactory. His claim that “the period between 1960 and 1990 in Cambodia is off-limits even to those scholars with special access to classified Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents” (p. 14) is not true. From 2011 to 2012 when Mertha was conducting research for this book, the files on Sino-Cambodian relations for the period of 1960-1966 were open to scholars, both domestic and foreign, at the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives (CFMA). (In 2013, the CFMA reclassified many documents that had been available for research from 2005 to 2012.)

In addition, many published sources in China contain useful information on the interactions between China and Democratic Kampuchea. Mertha’s endnotes give no indication that he has carefully explored these publications. For example, he failed to consult the memoirs of Xiong Zhen, the wife of Shen Jian, who served as deputy director of the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1970s. The volume was published in China in 1995 under the title “The Footprints of a Diplomatic Couple.” According to Xiong Zhen’s account, on the eve of the Khmer Rouge’s assumption of power in Cambodia in 1975, Marshal Ye Jianying called a high-level meeting in Beijing to discuss China’s response to the change of government in Phnom Penh, and Shen Jian was responsible for carrying out the decisions made at the meeting. Two years later when Pol Pot visited China, Shen Jian accompanied him in touring Dazhai and Nanjing. Mertha also does not mention the official biography of Fang Yi, who was head of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations from 1970 to 1977. According to this authoritative account, which was published in Beijing in 2008, Fang Yi led a Chinese government delegation in December 1976 to Phnom Penh, where he formally signed agreements that committed China to helping Democratic Kampuchea rebuild or establish 34 industrial, railway, and port projects. Incorporating the information and revelations from these sources would have helped Mertha flesh out his sketchy and limited outline of China’s assistance to the Pol Pot regime.

Because Mertha made inadequate use of Chinese archival collections and is largely unfamiliar with secondary Chinese sources, his descriptions of Sino-Cambodian encounters are often simplistic and impressionistic. For...