Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (52 page)

Prelude to the Sino-Vietnamese Conflict

Had Deng not been purged in late 1975, he might have been able to avoid the complete break between China and Vietnam. But when Deng returned to work in July 1977, he confronted a changed situation in which Soviet-Vietnamese cooperation had increased and China's relationship with both the Soviet Union and Vietnam had deteriorated badly.

In March and May 1977, a few months before Deng returned to work, Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap was in Moscow, where he concluded an agreement with the Soviets in which the two sides would expand military
cooperation.
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The Soviet Union had begun to send personnel to naval bases in Danang and Cam Ranh Bay, with the prospect that soon Soviet ships would have access to the entire Chinese coast. Furthermore, the clashes between Vietnamese forces and the Cambodians and Chinese along their respective borders had become larger in scale and more frequent. Vietnam had been hesitant about joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the trade organization of Communist countries, because it would require the Vietnamese to give up some of their cherished economic independence, but on June 28, 1977, the Vietnamese, with an economy badly in need of reconstruction and no other sources of economic help, agreed to join.
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Meanwhile ethnic Chinese had begun fleeing Vietnam. After taking over South Vietnam in 1975, the Vietnamese Communist leaders had begun the immense tasks of collectivizing and nationalizing its economy. In the process they began attacking the 1.5 million ethnic Chinese in South Vietnam, many of whom were small businesspeople opposed to collectivization. If Vietnam were to invade Cambodia or if border clashes with China were to become more serious, Vietnamese leaders feared that the ethnic Chinese might turn against them. The Vietnamese launched a huge campaign that rounded up massive numbers of ethnic Chinese and sent them to detention centers—causing many others to flee the country. The Chinese government demanded that Vietnam desist mistreating the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, but the Vietnamese officials paid no attention. By the time Deng had returned in July 1977, the campaign that eventually expelled an estimated 160,000 ethnic Chinese from Vietnam was well under way.
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In retaliation, in May 1978, after Deng had returned to work, China suspended work on twenty-one aid projects benefiting Vietnam.
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As Deng later explained, by that time China did not believe that more aid would have been enough to pull Vietnam away from the Soviet Union.
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Deng, like Mao and Zhou Enlai, thought in terms of decades. In 1978 the threat was not one of imminent invasion of China but the larger danger that if the Soviet Union were to continue to expand its use of bases in Vietnam, it could lead to Soviet and Vietnamese encirclement of China. In explaining the situation to Westerners, Deng referred to Vietnam as the Cuba of Asia—a base by China's side from which the Soviets could position their ships, their planes, and their missiles. Scarcely a decade earlier, in 1962, the Soviet Union had withdrawn its missiles from Cuba because the Americans had threatened to use their superior military power. But the Soviet Union's military was far
superior to China's. If the Soviets installed missiles in Vietnam, it would be difficult at best for China to force the Soviets to withdraw them. Deng believed that it was urgent to strengthen cooperation with other countries to resist Soviet-Vietnamese expansion before the bases became strong.

During his fourteen months of travel, Deng visited only one Communist country, North Korea, and seven non-Communist countries. He first visited several countries that had good relationships with China and that could help shore up China's security along its borders. Of his five trips abroad, the first three were made to countries along China's continental borders. Like traditional Chinese rulers, Deng sought to pacify China's borders but he also sought the cooperation of those countries in resisting Soviet and Vietnamese advances.

He then visited Japan and the United States, the two countries that could be the most helpful to China as it pursued the four modernizations and that also had great military strength to possibly help restrain the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Europe was another major area of the world that could help with modernization, but Europe's cooperation had already been assured with Deng's 1975 visit to France. Follow-up arrangements with Europe could be managed by Gu Mu's delegation; they did not require another trip by Deng.

Visits to Burma and Nepal, January and February 1978

Deng's first foreign visit after assuming responsibility for foreign affairs was to the two countries to China's south and west, both with long common borders, Burma and Nepal. China's common border with Burma extended almost 1,350 miles, and the border with Nepal almost 850 miles. Deng did not aim to sign any particular agreement with either nation. The wild Red Guards had frightened all of China's neighbors, so to develop good cooperative relations would first require some fence mending. With better relations, the countries on China's borders would be more likely to cooperate in resisting Soviet efforts to expand its influence in the region.

Despite recent memories of the Red Guards, Burma and Nepal already had relatively good relations with China. For his visit to Burma, for example, Deng could draw on almost two decades of friendly relations relatively unaffected by the Cultural Revolution. China and Burma had resolved their border issues in 1960. And after Ne Win's 1962 coup, Burma remained relatively isolated from most countries, but China had maintained close relations, which included helping Burma with the construction of electric power
plants and other infrastructure projects. Zhou Enlai had visited Burma no fewer than nine times, and by 1977 former general Ne Win, who ruled from 1962 until 1981, had visited China twelve times.
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In 1969, China and Burma signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, and in 1977, Deng Yingchao, Zhou Enlai's widow, visited Burma and Deng Xiaoping himself twice hosted Ne Win in Beijing. During one of those visits, Deng urged Ne Win to strengthen relations with China's client state, Cambodia, which was already under pressure from Vietnam. A week after Ne Win's visit to Beijing, Ne Win became the first head of state to visit Cambodia.

In his presentations in Burma, Deng was careful to refer to Chairman Hua Guofeng respectfully; he even reiterated China's policy that class struggle was the key link, something that he would drop from his comments later in the year, as the mood in the party began to shift away from Maoism and as Deng's personal stature rose. Deng believed that when visiting other countries he should not only see political leaders, but also show appreciation for the country's culture and society as a way of forming deeper bonds. In Burma, he talked with key leaders of various social groups and showed respect for the local culture by visiting famous Buddhist temples and other sites. Since Buddhism was also widespread in China, there were obviously cultural links through Buddhism. His remarks stressed the long history of friendship between Burma and China, and he spoke of their common views about countering Soviet and Vietnamese influence in Southeast Asia.

Ne Win expressed concern about China's continuing ties with Communist insurgents in Burma and other parts of Southeast Asia, which China was not yet ready to break. This problem was to limit the extent of China-Burmese cooperation, but Deng's visit was followed by an increase in cultural exchanges and, in the following year, an agreement on economic and technical cooperation. Even more importantly, although appearing to maintain its policy of nonalignment, Burma tilted further toward China in the struggle against Soviet and Vietnamese hegemony.
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Like Burma, Nepal gave Deng a warm welcome. During the 1950s and 1960s Nepal had tried to maintain a neutral position between Indian and Chinese interests, but in the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi took a tough line toward Nepal, Nepal's King Birendra turned to China for support. China supported Nepal's efforts to establish a zone of peace, and it expanded aid to Nepal, opened direct air links, and agreed to exchange visits of senior officials. By June 1976, King Birendra had visited both Sichuan and Tibet.

In Nepal, Deng visited temples, museums, and various historical sites. He
spoke of the two millennia of Sino-Nepali friendship and reaffirmed support for King Birendra's zone of peace. Deng said that all nations desire independence, and he urged that countries in the third world cooperate in resisting imperialism, colonialism, and domination by outside powers. Deng asserted that the rivalry between the two superpowers had created serious instability in South Asia, but that conditions there still remained unfavorable to the superpowers, and China would continue to help Nepal safeguard its national independence. He not only avoided criticizing India, but also composed his message in Nepal in a way that might well appeal to India: China would assist all nations in the region trying to pursue an independent policy. Deng was paving the way for improved relations with India, which he hoped might help pull it away from the Soviet Union.
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In January 1978 Deng did not yet have a full mandate to depart sharply from Maoist thinking. As in Burma, he talked not only of rallying behind the party center, headed by Chairman Hua Guofeng, but also of implementing Chairman Mao's “revolutionary line” and his policies in foreign affairs.
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It would take some months before a new Beijing consensus would allow Deng to bid farewell to class struggle. But the visits to Burma and Nepal went well and helped to strengthen those countries' cooperation with China.

North Korea, September 8–13, 1978

Once Vietnam had aligned itself with the Soviet Union, it became even more important for China to maintain good relations with the other sizeable Communist country in Asia, North Korea, and not allow it to become another “Cuba in Asia.” Fluent in Chinese, Kim Il Sung had lived in China for a total of nearly twenty years before returning to Korea in 1945. After returning to North Korea, he continued to maintain close relations with Mao and Zhou Enlai who, during the Korean War, sent large numbers of troops (“volunteers”) to assist North Korea and to provide logistic support from Northeast China. North Korea, like Vietnam, had skillfully used the Sino-Soviet rivalry to get aid from both, although it generally leaned toward China.

In his relations with North Korea, Deng benefited from having helped, as finance minister in 1953, to launch an aid program for rebuilding North Korea after the Korean War, and from having hosted Kim Il Sung in April 1975.
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North Korea's capital was closer to Beijing than the capital of any other country, and North Korea's relations with China were closer than its relations with the Soviet Union. The first foreign official whom Deng received after returning to work in mid-1977 was the North Korean ambassador
to China.
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In 1978, Hua Guofeng visited four countries and Deng visited seven; only one country hosted both of them: North Korea. As two Communist powers, China and North Korea maintained both party-to-party and military-to-military relations, as well as government-to-government relations, and China made use of all those channels, The generals on the two sides who had fought together during the Korean War frequently met, and the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party kept up contacts with its North Korean counterparts.

China's decision to expand relations with the United States—the major power aiding its enemy, South Korea—would be deeply upsetting to the North Koreans. Deng's forthcoming visit to Korea's longtime enemy, Japan, which was also aiding South Korean economic development, would be a grave concern as well. Deng had wrestled with the question of how best to control the damage to relations with North Korea as he opened relations with Japan and the United States. Deng did not want North Korea to turn more to the Soviet Union. So he decided that it was better to give the North Koreans a full explanation beforehand than to surprise them later.

To warm up the relationship, Deng made a special effort to show respect to North Korea in the ways it appreciated most. North Korea was small, but it had visions of grandeur, and one way it measured its grandeur was by the number and rank of officials from abroad attending its National Day celebrations. As the Cultural Revolution was ending in China and foreign leaders resumed visits to Beijing, Kim Il Sung undertook “invitation diplomacy,” informing the heads of third-world countries scheduled to visit China that they would also be welcome to visit North Korea. In 1977 only four high-level visitors accepted Kim's invitation: Ye Jianying, representing China, and representatives from East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Cambodia.
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Kim received them royally. Prince Sihanouk from Cambodia was given his own palatial residence, and when East German leader Erich Honecker visited, he received the biggest welcome of his lifetime.
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For the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the North Korean government on September 10, 1978, Kim Il Sung went to great lengths to encourage high-level foreign leaders to attend the celebrations. Deng honored Kim by spending five days in North Korea. He was the highest-ranking official from any country to attend. In public gatherings during the week, Kim, pleased that such a high-level Chinese official had accepted his invitation, always placed Deng next to himself.
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