Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (100 page)

But within party circles and in visits with foreigners, Deng explained that the Chinese had accomplished their announced military goals—the capture of the five provincial capitals—and, more importantly, their overall strategic aim. That is, they had shown both the Soviet Union and Vietnam that the
costs of additional Soviet expansion in the region would be unbearably high. As Lee Kuan Yew commented, “The Western press wrote off the Chinese punitive action as a failure. I believe it changed the history of East Asia. The Vietnamese learned that China would attack if they went beyond Cambodia on to Thailand. The Soviet Union did not want to be caught in a long drawn-out war in a remote corner of Asia.”
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As it turned out, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan nine months later quickly proved to be such a burden on the Soviet Union that the risk of Soviet expansion into Southeast Asia after that would have been very low, even if China had not attacked Vietnam.

Chinese military officials tried to downplay the costs of the campaign, but the total budget for defense expenditures in 1979 was 22.3 billion yuan, much higher than the previous year or the next year; the burdens on local areas near the Vietnamese border made the costs of the war even higher. Western analysts estimated that the cost of matériel alone was 5.5 billion yuan.
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Diplomats were concerned about a different sort of cost: that the attack would make it difficult for China to take a principled stand when it complained of a Western country interfering in the internal affairs of another. Domestic criticisms about failure in Vietnam were not publicized, and in the early 1990s when China and Vietnam normalized relations they agreed not to discuss past conflicts.
³³
In the official three-volume collection of Deng's talks on military matters, there are twenty-six selections from his talks during 1978 and 1979, but only a few passing references to China's attack on Vietnam—not one of his talks deal with it directly.
³⁴
Some Chinese have called the attack on Vietnam “China's last war.” Given the lack of public discussion, it might better be called “China's forgotten war.”

There is no record of Deng expressing any doubt about the wisdom of the attack on Vietnam. But after the war, Deng did use the army's poor performance to fortify the efforts he had been making since 1975 to retire ineffective senior officers, strengthen discipline, expand military training, and recruit better-trained officers. He also directed the PLA to analyze carefully the weaknesses that had become apparent during the war. The PLA would eventually point to many of the issues noted by U.S. military analysts: the poor quality of Chinese intelligence before and during the war, the lack of communication among units, the poor quality of equipment, and the inability of the PLA leadership to provide overall coordination.
³⁵

After the war, Deng directed that the Chinese army keep large numbers of troops along the Vietnamese border to skirmish with the Vietnamese. As Deng told visiting U.S. officials such as Senator Henry M. (“Scoop”) Jackson,
he was wearing the Vietnamese down to reinforce the lessons he had taught them about their excessive ambitions.
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Over the next several years, selected units from at least fourteen Chinese armies (at the corps level) were rotated through the Laoshan area on the Chinese side of the border.
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At times as many as 800,000 Vietnamese soldiers were stationed in the north to be ready for a Chinese assault. Given the relative populations of China and Vietnam, roughly twenty to one, Vietnamese efforts to protect their border over that next decade were a heavy drain on resources.

Meanwhile, China used these continuing border skirmishes—and occasional larger conflicts involving entire Chinese divisions—to train its troops. By the 1980s units from most of the infantry armies in China had been rotated to the Vietnam border to take part in the border skirmishes. As military analysts noted, assigning Chinese troops to fight against some of the most experienced ground troops in the world provided excellent combat training. The presence of large numbers of Chinese troops also made the Soviets cautious about sending additional aid to the Vietnamese.

Vietnam's threat to the weaker Southeast Asian countries reinforced their willingness to cooperate with China to reduce the threat. Vietnamese aggressive behavior led Southeast Asian countries to strengthen the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
³⁸
In 1984 when the Vietnamese seized a critical pass leading from Cambodia into Thailand that could have endangered Thailand, the Chinese launched their biggest attack since 1979 and the Vietnamese retreated.
³⁹
Deng's thrust into Vietnam in 1979 and his continuing harassment of Vietnamese along their common border gave other Southeast Asian countries greater confidence to resist Vietnam's ambitions, knowing that the Chinese would help them as they had helped Cambodia and Thailand.

As in the board game of
weiqi
(
go
in Japanese), Deng tried to prevent the Soviets and Vietnamese from controlling space and encircling China, while trying to gain control himself over key locations. In 1984 he fought hard to control the key area that would block Vietnam from entering Thailand and continuing on to the key Straits of Malacca. In Deng's view, by the early 1980s the danger of encirclement had been removed.

Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia and the continued skirmishes with China along the border did lead the Vietnamese to become overstretched. Deng had already seen this possibility when he welcomed Vice President Mondale to Beijing. He explained to U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale in August 1979, “Vietnam is not yet in enough of a difficult position to accept a
political solution. Perhaps later, when the difficulties the Vietnamese are facing increase to an unbearable extent, then the time would be appropriate for them to accept.”
⁴⁰
He told Mondale that Vietnam had a double heavy burden of occupying Cambodia while supporting 600,000 to one million troops near the Chinese border and that sooner or later, the Vietnamese would realize that the Soviet Union could not meet all their requests.

Deng's comments proved prescient: by 1988, Vietnam had withdrawn half of its troops from Cambodia, and the next year it pulled out its remaining forces. Vietnam had failed to achieve its ambitions to dominate Southeast Asia. By the time Deng retired, Vietnamese no longer threatened Southeast Asian countries and instead began pursuing friendly ties with them. In the early 1980s Vietnamese threats to the region had led Southeast Asian countries to strengthen ASEAN, but paradoxically, by the early 1990s Vietnam itself was seeking better relations with ASEAN and was welcomed as a member in 1995.

Reducing the Soviet Threat

Mao had declared that war was inevitable, and Deng had on some occasions repeated Mao's words. But after the PLA returned from its attack on Vietnam, Deng had reason to be more optimistic: the risks of China going to war with the Soviet Union were low and he had lowered them further. Even earlier, in his December 1977 address to a plenary session of the CMC, Deng had said that because the Soviet Union was still working on extending its strategic deployments and because the United States was on the defensive, “it is possible to win a delay in the outbreak of war.”
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What had become clear during China's attack on Vietnam was that with China prepared to defend its interests in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union had become more cautious about risking a confrontation with China in Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union had enough to do in Eastern Europe, along its long border with China, and in Afghanistan where its involvement would lead to an invasion nine months after Deng's war with Vietnam. And because China had just normalized relations with the United States, a Soviet leader could not be certain that the United States would stand idly by if the Soviet Union were to attack China.

Having discouraged the Soviet Union from rushing to build bases in Vietnam by showing Chinese resolve, Deng moved next to further reduce tensions with the Soviet Union so that he could concentrate on economic development.
⁴²
Immediately after his brief war with Vietnam, Deng instructed Foreign Minister Huang Hua “to hold negotiations with the Soviet Union on unsolved questions and on improving the state-to-state relationships and to sign related documents.”
⁴³
Scarcely two weeks after the Chinese withdrawal from Vietnam, Foreign Minister Huang Hua met with the Soviet Ambassador Yuri Scherbakov in Beijing to propose a new series of discussions to normalize relations between China and the Soviet Union.
⁴⁴
From April through mid-October, 1979, there were five meetings between Chinese and Soviet deputy foreign ministers to help improve the climate between the two powers. During these meetings, China expressed its wish to discuss both obstacles to normal relations as well as trade and scientific and cultural exchanges between the two nations.
⁴⁵

On August 29, 1979, before a Chinese delegation was to leave for the Soviet Union, Deng directed that the delegation should convey to the Soviets that there were two requirements to improving relations: the Soviets should withdraw their troops from Outer Mongolia, and they should not assist Vietnam in the occupation of Cambodia. Deng also proposed that the two sides agree not to station troops in areas along the border. He directed Wang You-ping that the Chinese delegation should not show any weakness and should avoid being in a hurry to reach an agreement. Long-distance marathons, he said, are fine.
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From September 25 to December 3, 1979, the Chinese delegation carried on negotiations with its counterparts in Moscow. The Soviets did not budge on the two issues on which Deng insisted that the Chinese remain firm. Yet the discussions, the first series of talks between the Soviets and the Chinese in twenty years, were conducted in a friendly manner and the Soviets were cordial hosts. The two sides agreed that the Soviets would send a delegation to Beijing to follow up on the discussions.
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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that followed within weeks after the meetings in Moscow delayed the dispatch of the Soviet delegation to Beijing, but it also reduced even further the risk that the Soviets would attack the Chinese. Shortly after the Soviet invasion, Deng added a third requirement before China could normalize relations with the Soviet Union: the Soviets must withdraw from Afghanistan. It would take almost a decade before the overstretched Soviet Union was ready to agree to the three conditions for full normalization, but for that Deng was in no hurry. He had achieved his short-term goal of reducing the risk of conflict with the superpower that he now considered the most dangerous, thus allowing China to concentrate on civilian
economic development.
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In March 1980, in a major address on the military situation, he said, “After calmly assessing the international situation, we have concluded that it is possible to gain a longer period free from war than we had thought earlier.”
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Soon afterward, Deng became more specific, saying that China should be able to avoid the risk of war for a decade or two.
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Deng's efforts to reduce tensions made it easier for the Soviets to do the same. On March 24, 1982, Brezhnev gave a speech in Tashkent recognizing China as a socialist country and expressing a desire to improve relations. Deng responded quickly to this overture, directing Foreign Minister Qian Qichen to convey a favorable reaction to the speech.
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Deng concluded that the Soviet Union, which was burdened by its effort to match U.S. military advances and its occupation of Afghanistan, felt it was in its strategic interest to ease tensions with China. When Brezhnev died a few months later, on November 10, 1982, Deng instructed Foreign Minister Huang Hua to attend Brezhnev's funeral, in another gesture of fraternity with the Soviet Union.
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In addition to negotiating with the Soviet Union, Deng also sought to reduce the risk of Soviet and Vietnamese advances by involving the United States. Deng knew that the United States was then in no mood to engage in a land war in Asia; what better way to ensure that the Soviets would not dominate the seas near Vietnam than to have a large American oil company conduct oil explorations there? After January 1979, as part of its economic readjustment, China had cut back on its plans to work with international oil companies. A Chinese petroleum delegation visiting the United States signed only one contract, on March 19, 1979, with ARCO, the only U.S. firm that had proposed prospecting for oil between Hainan Island and Vietnam. China gave ARCO exclusive exploration rights in an area in the South China Sea, less than thirty minutes from Vietnam by air. With a major U.S. oil company prospecting in nearby waters, Deng had reason to expect the Soviet Union would be cautious about making use of port facilities in Vietnam. China signed the contract three days after Chinese troops withdrew from Vietnam.

Deng also made sure that U.S.-China security cooperation came to the attention of the Soviet Union. When U.S. planes carrying equipment to monitor nuclear weapons movements in the Soviet Union arrived for a stop at the Beijing airport, the Chinese had the plane dock next to a Soviet Aeroflot plane, making it clear to the Soviets what equipment was arriving; when the equipment was transferred and flown to Xinjiang near the Soviet border,
the Chinese also made no effort to camouflage it. The hope was that the Soviets would pause before risking a fight that might also involve the United States.