Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (99 page)

Many high Chinese officials, military and civilian, had doubts about the wisdom of attacking Vietnam. Some were concerned that just as China was beginning its modernization drive, it would be unwise to divert China's scarce resources, which were sorely needed for building modern industries. Some worried that Chinese troops were not properly prepared. Others opposed in principle an attack on a fraternal Communist country. Some worried that an attack would heighten long-term Vietnamese hostility to China.

Other officials feared that the Soviet Union and its massive military forces might be drawn into the conflict. Deng personally believed that because the Soviets were then in the final stages of negotiating the Startegic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) II with the United States, they would be reluctant to disrupt the negotiations by engaging in a land war in Asia.
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But the risks were great and Deng solicited the views of other senior Chinese leaders about possible Soviet intervention. After a careful assessment of the issue, Chen Yun noted that the Soviet divisions along the northern Chinese border, the most likely locus for attacking China, were seriously undermanned; any attack on
China would require diverting forces from Europe, which would take more than a month to complete. Chen concluded that if the war were very brief, the chance of Soviet intervention was extremely low.

After hearing Chen Yun's assessment, Deng announced that the Chinese attack would last no longer than its attack on India in 1962 (thirty-three days). It would be a ground war and no aircraft would be used.
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Deng knew that Vietnamese pilots were then much better trained than Chinese pilots and that the Chinese did not have airfields close to Vietnam. Furthermore, avoiding an air war reduced the chances that the Soviets might be drawn in. But Deng was still sufficiently concerned about a possible Soviet response that an estimated 300,000 Chinese civilians were pulled back from Yili in the north near the Soviet border, and intelligence officials were ordered to monitor closely all Soviet troop movements.
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Deng encountered widespread opposition from other members of the CMC who felt that Chinese troops were not prepared for the war. The PLA had not yet recovered from the Cultural Revolution disruptions; discipline was poor and training inadequate. Except for the more than 1,100 border skirmishes by 1978 with Vietnam, no Chinese had fought in a war since the Indian border clashes of 1962. The Vietnamese troops, in contrast, were battle hardened from decades of war against the French, the South Vietnamese, and the Americans. They also possessed modern Soviet military equipment, and the Soviets had been providing Vietnam with significant economic aid for construction since the Americans were defeated in Vietnam in 1975.
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In the end, Deng's authority and his conviction about the need for a strong response to the Soviet-Vietnamese threat won out over those who had doubts about attacking Vietnam. Some officials in Beijing are convinced that Deng launched the attack and provided detailed direction during the war so he could personally gain tight control over the military as he was coming to power. Others believe that Deng, aware that the United States had supplied technology freely to Japan and South Korea because they were allies, wanted to show the United States that in invading Vietnam, China had drawn a sharp line against the Soviets and was in no danger of restoring close relations with the Soviets. Although there is no firm evidence to prove exactly how Deng weighted these various considerations, Deng was clearly passionately upset at Vietnamese ambitions and deeply concerned about the risks of Soviet expansion in the region.

The Guangzhou and Kunming military regions and the Chinese General
Staff had been discussing the possible need to expand their forces along the border, but they did not begin planning for the attack on Vietnam until the CMC meeting in September 1978.
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The CMC meeting opened with briefings by the intelligence department of the General Staff on the increasing number of skirmishes between Chinese and Vietnamese forces along the border. The two nearby military regions, Guangzhou (Guangdong) and Kunming (Yunnan), were directed to prepare scenarios for an attack on Vietnam. On November 23, senior officers from the air force, navy, and General Staff operations and intelligence departments convened a week-long meeting. After this meeting, all commands in the Northeast, North, and Northwest went on a full-scale alert to watch for possible Soviet military reaction.

By November, Chinese troops, coming from ten of the eleven military regions but mostly from the Kunming and Guangzhou regions, had begun to position themselves near Vietnam. The Chinese border with Vietnam stretched 797 miles, roughly half of which was along the Yunnan border, under the Kunming Military Region, and half along the Guangxi border, under the Guangzhou Military Region. Chinese troops, deployed along the entire border, served under the leadership of General Xu Shiyou in a single front. The troops moved toward the Vietnamese border at night, as they had during the civil war and the Korean War, to catch the enemy by surprise. According to a U.S. estimate, as many as 450,000 Chinese troops took part in the war, including those who provided support on the Chinese side of the border; the Vietnamese estimated that 600,000 Chinese troops were involved.
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On December 8, the CMC ordered the Guangzhou and Kunming military regions to be ready for an attack on Vietnam by January 10, and on December 11 the commander of the Guangzhou Military Region, Xu Shiyou, prepared to deploy his troops. Soon thereafter, on December 21, Xu set up military headquarters in Nanning, Guangxi, close to Vietnam, where he and his staff worked out concrete plans for the attack.
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Meanwhile, the CMC, anticipating a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, called a forum on December 20 during which military leaders closely monitored Vietnamese developments and supervised planning for their attack. On December 25, as expected, the Vietnamese did invade Cambodia with an estimated 120,000 troops; twelve days later they captured Phnom Penh.

In addition to managing the military preparations for the attack on Vietnam, Deng also managed the diplomatic relations. He briefed Lee Kuan Yew in November and President Carter in January 1979 of his plans. On his way back to China in early February, Deng stopped in Japan to inform the Japanese
that he was planning to attack Vietnam and to discourage them from providing financial or other aid to Vietnam. While in Tokyo, he also told Ambassador Mike Mansfield, whom he knew influenced U.S. Congressional views, what he had told Lee Kuan Yew and Carter—that the Vietnamese and Soviets were planning to surround China and that China would attack to teach the Vietnamese a lesson.
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In the weeks before his attack on Vietnam, Deng had been busy with the Central Party Work Conference, the Third Plenum, the normalization of relations with the United States, and the assumption of responsibilities as preeminent leader, but he still took time to guide military and diplomatic preparations. Once the attack began, he was deeply involved in the daily military operations. John Lewis and Xue Litai, after reviewing the evidence on Deng's role in the attack on Vietnam, conclude, “The strategic thinking behind the assault was his as was the determination of the war's objectives and scale. He chose his top warriors as the field commanders, mobilized the relevant provinces to support the fighting, approved the details of the operation, and gave the order to launch the attack. This was Deng's war.”
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Deng continued to provide overall leadership throughout the operations; some said he was familiar with Chinese movements down to the platoon level.
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Like many Chinese commanders, Deng thought in terms of an annihilation campaign. Just as in the Huai Hai campaign when the troops aimed to annihilate Guomindang troops north of the Yangtze River, so in the quick thrust into Vietnam he hoped to annihilate a major part of the Vietnamese army in a quick, decisive campaign that would set back by many years Vietnam's ability to threaten China. This strategy came as no surprise to Vietnamese military officials, who had worked closely with the Chinese to fight American forces: they quickly pulled back their main forces from the Chinese border to the area around Hanoi, leaving in place their forces in Cambodia. To repulse the Chinese, the Vietnamese assigned local troops and militia who knew the terrain and the local people.

The Chinese would attack during the dry season in Vietnam but after the ice had begun to melt on the Ussuri River; that way, the Soviets could not use the ice bridge to cross the border to attack China from the north.
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During its February 9 to February 12 meeting, the CMC made the final decision to attack, and on February 13 Deng met with his Cambodian ally, Prince Sihanouk. On February 16, only seventeen hours before the attack was launched, Hua Guofeng chaired a meeting at which Deng informed high-level Beijing officials of the final plans.
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Since Hua Guofeng's footprint was clear in the
preparations for the war, he would be in no position to criticize Deng if serious problems were to arise.

At dawn on February 17, some 200,000 Chinese troops launched their assault into Vietnam at twenty-six sites stretching out across the entire border. Before the attack, the Chinese had led raids at many points along the long border, forcing the Vietnamese to disperse their troops. The Chinese concentrated their forces where they had superior numbers and sought to gain control over the hills overlooking five provincial capitals—Lang Son, Cao Bang, Lao Cai, Ha Giang, and Lai Chao—which they expected to capture within several days.

Deng launched the invasion at a strategically opportune time for China: less than three weeks after concluding his triumphant tour of the United States and his stopover in Japan. Because of Deng's visit, the Soviets worried that the United States might be giving intelligence aid to China, and that if the Soviets were to act, the United States might support China. Brezhnev even phoned Carter to seek assurances that the United States was not giving tacit support to China's invasion of Vietnam. But even after Carter gave his assurances, Brezhnev's doubts were not eased.
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As soon as Chinese forces thrust into Vietnam, they found Vietnamese resistance to be unexpectedly effective. Chinese officers were unprepared and panicked. The invading Chinese troops had been given specific assignments, but they lacked the intelligence and communications from higher levels to adapt quickly. Coordination between troops was poor and Chinese supply lines were stretched so far that some soldiers had to be sent back into China to bring in supplies. The Chinese used artillery to support troop advances, and they tried to concentrate troops where they outnumbered the local resistance. But unlike during the anti-Japanese and civil wars, when the PLA could rely on assistance by local residents, in Vietnam the local people provided information and logistical support to the opposing Vietnamese forces.

The Chinese had expected to take all five provincial capitals in one week, but they did not capture Lang Son until three weeks after the fighting began. Indeed, the heaviest fighting took place around Lang Son, where the Chinese concentrated their forces to gain control of the mountain pass leading south to Hanoi, to show the Vietnamese they could threaten the Vietnamese capital. Chinese forces were sufficiently large and determined that they did indeed take all five provincial capitals, despite casualty numbers that were far higher than for the Vietnamese. Estimates are that as many as 25,000 Chinese were killed and 37,000 wounded during the fighting.
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As soon as the Chinese took Lang Son on March 6, the Chinese declared victory and began withdrawing. As they withdrew, they destroyed as much of the Vietnamese infrastructure as possible. Deng had pledged that the fighting would not last longer than the thirty-three days of attack on India in 1962, and the withdrawal from Vietnam took place on March 16, twenty-nine days after the invasion began.
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In the publicity that followed the invasion, both at home and abroad, Chinese called their assault a “defensive counteroffensive.” They argued that they were responding to the many Vietnamese incursions across the border in 1978 and that their thrust into Vietnam was a form of self-defense. For officers stationed along the border who had defended against the Vietnamese incursions, and for their military superiors, it was not difficult to understand the need to “counterattack.” Other Chinese officials shared Deng's anger at the Vietnamese for mistreating and expelling ethnic Chinese despite China's warnings. Yet some high Chinese military officials never expressed support for the war.

Deng claimed that China had taught the Vietnamese a lesson, but Western military analysts who examined the war reported that in fact it was the battle-tested Vietnamese who taught the Chinese a lesson.
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As the military analysts pointed out, the war exposed many weaknesses in the Chinese military, in addition to its lack of modern weaponry. China's rush to war between November and February meant that its preparations were inadequate. Command and control functions were weak. In particular, the command posts of the two military regions fighting in Vietnam were poorly coordinated, with lower-level units given targets but no knowledge of what other lower-level units were doing. The PLA was not proud of its military performance; some commanders complained they should have been allowed to go all the way to Phnom Penh to complete their victory. And although they didn't make their views public, many top Chinese military officials, including Marshal Ye and Su Yu, opposed the whole idea of the war, feeling that the danger of encirclement had not been so great as to warrant the attack.
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The public also had its doubts: some posters on Democracy Wall in Beijing pointed to the poor showing of Chinese troops, and some even criticized Deng for pursuing the war.
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