Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991 by Zhang Xiaoming (review)

Once upon a time the idea of Communist China going to war against Communist Vietnam would have seemed nearly absurd even to most knowledgeable observers. Beijing and Hanoi were seen as the closest comrades-in-arms, locked in a life-or-death common struggle against U.S. encroachments in Asia. Did not their revolutions—the Chinese and the Vietnamese—share a common past and a common fate? In 1979 these preconceptions were shattered by a development that had seemed implausible a few years earlier: Chinese and Vietnamese troops were shooting at and killing each other with a passion and hatred usually seen only among the most implacable enemies. Even today, many years later, the brief but intense Sino-Vietnamese border war of 1979 retains an aura of the grotesque, which is why the renowned Chinese historian Chen Jian has called it “one of the most meaningless wars in world history.” Zhang Xiaoming’s book is a valuable effort to add meaning to this story.

The book is important for several reasons. First, it is an attempt to spell out the rationale behind the war. Many wars appear pointless and unnecessary in retrospect, but the case of China and Vietnam is more intractable than most, simply because Beijing and Hanoi, unwilling to indulge in unhappy reminiscences, have kept the relevant archives safely out of public reach. Zhang makes the best of this paucity of evidence, offering the most detailed account thus far of what exactly Deng Xiaoping had in mind when he resolved to “teach Vietnam a lesson.” He favors a multicausal explanation: Deng wanted to check Soviet expansion (Vietnam had been Moscow’s ally), obtain Western support for China’s “four modernizations,” and mobilize the Chinese people for reform and integration into the world economy. Deng also sought to establish his control over the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and give the Chinese military a chance to prove itself in a real war. Evidently, then, what Deng had in mind was much more than to punish Vietnam for its invasion of Cambodia or force it to withdraw. Did Cambodia have anything to do with this war? Zhang offers a contradictory interpretation, arguing in one place that “China ... engineered the border conflict to coerce Hanoi to withdraw from Cambodia” (p. 141) and claiming elsewhere that the PLA planned to strike even before Vietnam’s invasion (p. 43).

Second, the book is an account of the actual fighting, primarily as seen from China. This, too, is a useful contribution in that it adds much-needed detail and nuance to our knowledge of the war. One thing I found particularly interesting is Zhang’s surprising conclusion that China achieved “overwhelming victory” over Vietnam (p. 114). Most Western commentary on the war suggests it was at most a pyrrhic victory for the Chinese and that, if a lesson was taught, it was a lesson Vietnam taught China, not the other way around. Zhang argues, however, that these generalizations are inconsistent with the evidence and, moreover, miss the broader picture. In that broader picture, painted in the fuzzy style of the Chinese strategic culture, Beijing won a victory even if the war did not exactly go as well as one might have hoped it would. (Dressing up defeat as victory is, I hasten to add, not a trait unique to the Chinese strategic culture.)

The book is marred by some shortcomings. In places, Zhang’s logic is hard to follow. For example, in discussing the longer trajectory of Sino-Vietnamese relations, he argues that their alliance “was formed largely because at the time they shared a common enemy: the United States. The alliance was doomed to collapse beginning in the late 1960s, when Beijing came to regard the Soviet Union, not the United States, as the greatest enemy” (p. 4). Yet, careful observers will note that close Sino-Vietnamese relations (“alliance,” a legal term...