China and Vietnam had a similar relationship in the three decades following Mao Zedong’s 1949 triumphal ascension to power. Ostensibly an ally and even mentor (a PRC term that is often resented by others as Chinese condescension) of a fellow communist partner dedicated to spreading Marxist-Leninist thought and society (and popularly perceived as such in the simplistic Cold War shorthand of both the East and West), Beijing’s relations with Hanoi were far more complex and nuanced, reflecting centuries of Chinese-Vietnamese interaction. Allied in common cause against the anticommunist South and its Western (and Asian) supporters, the two fell out after 1973, their parting so volatile and acrimonious that it broke into open warfare in 1979.

China’s conflict with Vietnam constituted an outgrowth (if not seemingly logical conclusion) of its twenty-five-year involvement in the latter’s struggles against the French and the Americans. China certainly had been a major supporter of Vietnam, supplying men, material, and military expertise to its southern neighbor. Thus, many in the West were surprised when the SRV’s foreign ministry issued a 1979 white paper offering a skeptical, even acerbic, interpretation of the Chinese-Vietnamese relationship. The review of Vietnamese-Chinese relations over the previous thirty years offered surprising revelations about the contentious interactions between the two countries. The document accused China of betraying Hanoi’s unification hopes at Geneva in 1954 and of preventing Vietnamese communists from stepping up their armed struggle against the Saigon regime, allegedly effectively giving a green light for America’s subsequent intervention in Vietnam, with all the attendant misery that endeavor entailed.¹ Beijing authorities repudiated all these allegations through their official media, vehemently condemning what they saw as Hanoi’s deliberate distortion of China’s assistance to Vietnam. Problems between China and Vietnam at the time can be described by an ancient Chinese proverb: “It takes more than one cold day for the river to freeze three feet deep” (bingdong sanchi fei yiri zhihan). To outside observers, these allegations and repudiations clearly indicated that serious problems had existed in the oft-touted “comrades in arms” relations between China and Vietnam from the very beginning.

Historian William Duiker notes that conflict between nations “is often motivated by a complex amalgam of emotions, assumptions, and expectations, many of them are the product of experience.”² Studies since the end of the Cold War generally argue that the military confrontation between China and Vietnam was not merely a response to contemporary events, as people initially thought. Instead, China’s involvement in Vietnam had been complicated since the 1950s, filled with frustrations, dissatisfactions, disappointments, and long-standing ill will—even hatred—between the two countries.³ Faced with one common enemy (the United States), two not-always-friendly neighboring nations (China and Vietnam) formed an alliance during the early years of the Cold War. Beijing’s ideological disagreement with the Soviet Union and ensuing anti-Soviet positions not only pulled the two ostensible allies further apart but also set a course for conflict between the two countries.

An overview and analysis of China’s involvement in Vietnam following the founding of the PRC in 1949 provides a useful background for understanding how and why China and Vietnam became mutual adversaries by the late 1970s. Three contributing issues served as root causes for the unavoidable direct conflict between Beijing and Hanoi: (1) the inherent unequal characteristics of Sino-Vietnamese relations, (2) the influence of Mao’s radicalism on China’s foreign and security policy, and (3) growing concern about the Soviet threat after Beijing’s split with Moscow in the early 1960s. “The seeds for the destruction of the Asian communist alliance” were sowed throughout the years of China’s involvement in Vietnam. They were not planted in a particular year by a particular event.⁴

In early 1950, when Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh visited Moscow, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin advised the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) leader that his party’s request for assistance should be fulfilled by China. According to Thomas Christensen, the Soviet leader “did so for reasons that had more to do with his desire not to be bothered with such revolution than it did with his desire to see Mao play an active leadership role in the region”⁷ Indochina, however, traditionally held great importance for China’s national security. Moscow’s lack of geopolitical interest in Indochina created a leadership vacuum that the new Chinese regime was more than happy to fill. The PRC’s assumption of the mantle of Asian communist leadership elevated China’s political and strategic status on the world stage. More important, it allowed China to continue its historical role as the guardian and protector of smaller and weaker neighboring states.⁸ But with this position came significant challenges for the Chinese leadership. In its relationship with the VCP (as well as with the post-1954 government of North Vietnam and with the Vietnamese government as a whole after the forcible unification of North and South in 1975), China would manage not only a normal state-to-state relationship but also an ideologically committed party-to-party relationship, which, in China’s view, meant Vietnamese obedience to a single authoritative Beijing-centered leadership. Given the history of Chinese-Vietnamese relations and Vietnam’s historical tendencies toward independence (buttressed after 1973 by the popular perception that it had confounded the United States, the world’s greatest superpower), conflict between the two countries and two parties became inevitable.

No documentation has surfaced about how Vietnamese leader Ho perceived Chinese involvement in Vietnam. Asian communists certainly seemed to have had doubts about and even a little scorn for China’s assumption of regional communist leadership despite the fact that both Vietnam and Korea had historically looked to China for models of and inspirations for coping with and adapting to Chinese systems while striving to maintain national identity and independence. Vo Nguyen Giap, the well-known People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) general, recollected after the Vietnamese revolution that the Vietnamese did not think China would be able to provide all they wanted at the time.⁹ Giap’s view might have been suggestive of a broader feeling within the Ho inner circle. In any case, his response was more polite than that of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung. When the Chinese leadership asked him what he needed for his invasion of South Korea in the spring of 1950, the North Korean leader “arrogantly” responded that he had already secured what he needed—from the Soviet Union.¹⁰

Although Ho shared the ideology of the Chinese communist leadership, he, like many other Vietnamese, never gave up on the idea that China posed a potential threat to Vietnam’s independence and freedom. A traditional Chinese (and more broadly Asian) strategic philosophy advocated maintaining friendly relations with distant nations and attacking (or maintaining vigilance against) those nearby (yuanjiao jingong). A longtime admirer of the Soviet system, Ho would have preferred direct Soviet intervention. But with his country so distant from Soviet security interests, the Viet Minh leader had no choice but to rely on China to support his revolutionary cause. The need for Chinese assistance placed him in the delicate and influential role of managing the special relationship between his emerging country and its giant neighbor to the north.¹¹

Chinese support was certainly crucial to the Viet Minh’s rejection of the French colonialism. But China’s involvement in the Viet Minh’s struggle against the French created a difficult relationship—by no means easy and trusting—between the two sides.¹² Chinese leaders were sensitive to the appearance of displaying big-state chauvinism toward their neighbors, repeatedly exhorting PLA troops serving in Vietnam during the First Indochina War to maintain “respect” for their Vietnamese counterparts and avoid being “complacent and arrogant.”¹³ Nevertheless, General Chen Geng, the top Chinese military leader in Vietnam, confided to his diary his abhorrence of Giap, describing the Viet Minh military leader as “slippery and not very upright and honest.” Chen further observed that “the greatest shortcoming of the Vietnamese communists was their fear of letting other people know their weaknesses,” which, he judged, made the Vietnamese leadership not truly “Bolshevik.”¹⁴ In his memoirs published in 2004, Giap, in turn, makes no mention of General Chen’s significant contribution to the Viet Minh’s earlier military victories in the First Indochina War. This absence may well have reflected lingering Vietnamese dissatisfaction with what Giap perceived as the Chinese general’s prejudice and arrogance.¹⁵

The rift between the Chinese and Vietnamese communists started as early as the 1954 Geneva Conference, when participants had reached an agreement to divide Vietnam temporarily along the 17th Parallel. In 1979, Le Duan, secretary-general of the VCP, revealed that Vietnamese leaders bitterly resented how Zhou Enlai, China’s premier and foreign minister and chief negotiator, pressured them to accept a comprised agreement at Geneva.¹⁶ (Le Duan perhaps ignored the fact that although China, the Soviet Union, and the Viet Minh had been allies, all of them could certainly be expected to proceed to negotiations based on how they calculated their own interests). The Viet Minh leadership had fought the French with the goal of unifying the country under communist rule; after the hard-won military victory at Dien Bien Phu, these leaders believed they were in an advantageous position to liberate the whole country from Western rule and influence. For its part, China saw the conflict in Vietnam as another chance to stand up to Western imperialism and assert leadership in the region’s revolution. Nevertheless, Beijing’s leaders did not want China’s involvement in Vietnamese affairs to jeopardize domestic rebuilding programs. Having just come out of the bitter and costly war in Korea, Chinese leaders were increasingly concerned about continuing conflict with the United States, which, in their calculation, loomed ever-larger after the Korean armistice in late July 1953. Moscow’s absence of interest in Indochina, made greater still by the death of Stalin in early 1953, increased markedly following the withdrawal of Soviet airmen from Korea; by the time of the Geneva talks, the new Soviet leadership was seeking a détente with the West and was distracted by the need to consolidate power in the emerging post-Stalin era. Overall, the Soviet leadership was generally inclined to support the Chinese, since what China advocated usually accorded with Soviet interests. Thus, the clash between the mutual interests of the larger powers (as expressed by the Chinese and Russians) and the “parochial” interests of the smaller power (the Vietnamese) worked to bring China’s and the Viet Minh’s positions into conflict at the negotiation table in Geneva.

Neither Chinese nor Vietnamese leaders appeared to understand that their revolutionary ideologies might not remain congruent (and thus consistent) with their national security interests. Le Duan, who had served as secretary of the Southern Region Party Committee during the First Indochina War, was one of the Vietnamese leaders who most resented the role played by Chinese leaders, especially Zhou, at Geneva. In 1979, a quarter century after the Geneva settlement, he argued that China’s willing division of Vietnam in 1954 caused great pain and suffering to the Vietnamese in the south, followed by what he termed an American “mass...