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

Cold War China came to blows with the United States, the Soviet Union, India and Taiwan, but the PRC’s most curious and least understood military engagement of the era came with its southern neighbour, Vietnam. (One of this reviewer’s more vivid elementary school memories from the early 1980s was a visit from a People’s Liberation Army veteran guest speaker who came to denounce the Vietnamese as ungrateful backstabbers to an audience of nine-year-olds.)

Xiaoming Zhang, an associate professor in the Department of Strategy at the Air War College who has written extensively on PRC military history, explores the Sino-Vietnamese military conflict that ran from 1979 to 1991 in Deng Xiaoping’s Long War. Zhang was able to draw from an impressive range of Chinese sources for this work, but was predictably denied access to comparable documents in Vietnam. Still, there is plenty here to answer the questions of principal interest to Zhang: why China attacked Vietnam in 1979, what expectations Deng had of the war, and how the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War ultimately came to an end.

Mao Zedong provided vital aid to the Viet Minh in its struggle from French colonial rule in the early 1950s. Then a decade later he made a decisive contribution to Hanoi’s victory over the United States by deploying hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops to North Vietnam, sending $20 billion in aid, and threatening Washington with World War III if it dared send American troops across the 17th parallel. During this period, however, China’s relations with Vietnam’s other great communist patron, Moscow, deteriorated badly, and Beijing demanded Hanoi’s ideological support in the Sino-Soviet Split as the price for years of generous Chinese support.

Hanoi tried to maintain its neutrality, which prompted Beijing to withdraw its military aid and then eventually to take a hostile view of Hanoi as a Soviet proxy with expansionist ambitions in Southeast Asia. Zhang writes, “[t]he ironic tragedy was that as long as China’s perception of the Soviet threat continued to dominate its national security calculations, Beijing would not only lose Vietnam as a friend and ally but also inevitably set both nations on a course towards eventual confrontation” (33). The enmity between “brother and comrade” grew to the point that China threw a 150,000-person invasion force at Vietnam in the late winter of 1979 that destroyed three provincial capitals and scorched civilian infrastructure over an intense month of combat. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s paramount leader, was the catalyst for the euphemistically-titled “self-defensive counteroffensive,” which was supposed to be short and decisive. As Zhang writes, “[n]o one… seemed to anticipate that the 1979 war would trigger more than a decade of continuous military confrontations on the PRC-SRV border” (64).

The origins are straightforward: China and Vietnam had been rivals for over a millennia and the end of the American War removed the shared enemy that had temporarily united them. Vietnam’s close relationship with the Soviet Union — which had undertaken a massive military buildup along the Chinese border — convinced the PRC’s leadership that the country was being surrounded by hostile powers. Vietnam’s subsequent decision to invade Cambodia in December 1978 to topple the genocidal Chinese-aligned Khmer Rouge regime further contributed to Beijing’s fears of encirclement. A limited military intervention to “teach Vietnam a lesson” had the added benefit of signaling to Washington China’s realignment to the anti-Soviet camp following the landmark Nixon-Mao summit in 1972.

Zhang argues that Deng also saw the war as a means of furthering his economic modernization agenda. China’s anti-Soviet/anti-Vietnamese policy through the 1980s was favourably viewed by Washington, which permitted the expansion of trade ties and technology transfers that facilitated the PRC’s rapid economic growth. In...