Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War: the Last Maoist War (review)

This book represents an ongoing effort to add to the new scholarship on the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China with a focus on China's military performance in the Third Indochina War from 1978 to 1991. Edward O'Dowd, a retired military officer, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University, contends that the poor and ineffective performance of the PLA in the conflict precluded China from achieving its national military strategic objective of "induc[ing] the Vietnamese to withdraw from Cambodia" (p. 6). He attributes the failure of the PLA as a national power instrument to its more than a decade long commitment during Mao's era to a strong political system with a de-emphasis on professionalism and technology. The effectiveness of the Chinese military is the center of this study rather than China's diplomacy, decision-making, and strategy concerning the Third Indochina War.

Nevertheless, in an earlier chapter, O'Dowd discusses how China and Vietnam went to war in February 1979, claiming that three developments in 1978 led to the Chinese attack: (1) the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia; (2) the deteriorating relationship between China and Vietnam and the latter's alliance with the Soviet Union; and (3) Deng Xiaoping's ascendancy to the central role in the Chinese leadership. He does not expound on how these factors contributed to Beijing's decision to go to war and, in particular, on what Deng's role was, other than referring to Vietnamese leader Le Duan's recollection, which asserts that the Chinese leader had opposed Vietnamese interests going all the way back to the Vietnam war period. Without any documentation or systematic analysis of Beijing's motivation, the author's assumption of China's war objective becomes questionable. My current research suggests that Deng's decision to wage war against Vietnam was closely associated to China's effort to establish a quasi-alliance relationship with the United States against the Soviet Union, while utilizing this alliance to facilitate China's reform agenda. Chinese attack on a Soviet ally would convince the United States that the two countries shared identical national interests.

Another disappointment is O'Dowd's treatment of the Chinese military campaign in 1979. He criticizes earlier studies of the conflict for relying too much on newspaper reports and interviews. The information drawn from fragmentary PLA documents does not seem adequate to sustain any new interpretation. Although the book is entitled Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War, it provides no exposition of how the Chinese truly perceived and planned the military actions in Cambodia and what their exact strategy was throughout the conflict. The analysis of the 1979 campaign unfortunately continues to be based on the limited sources that appeared in the early 1980s. The author inevitably repeats the same caveats about the PLA's order of battle, command organization, and operations. Despite the PLA's poor performance, contrary to the author's argument, Chinese military action in 1979 did achieve certain strategic objectives such as the revelation of the Soviet Union's inability and unwillingness to back Vietnam. A Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia following China's attack was desirable for the Chinese leadership, but they never anticipated an immediate withdrawal. Indeed, the Vietnamese did airlift an army (30,000 troops) immediately from Cambodia to reinforce their defenses between Lang Son and Hanoi. After the 1979 attack, the Vietnamese defense of the western section of the border increased from two divisions to seven.

The final three chapters are the best part of the book. O'Dowd uses the published PLA documents to reveal inherent defects in the command system and officer corps throughout the army on the eve of Chinese invasion. The PLA experienced a shortage of officers, who were both insufficiently educated and inexperienced after years of neglect of their military roles. The PLA approached the problem...