What Americans call the Vietnam War is known elsewhere in the world as the Second Indochina War. The First Indochina War was between France and Vietnam in the ’40s and ’50s. It functioned as a war of independence for Vietnam, previously part of French Indochina, and resulted in the creation of North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
After the last U.S. chopper left Saigon, Indochina continued to be overwhelmed with bloody conflict, now known as the Third Indochina War. The Cambodian genocide was under way, and Vietnam invaded Cambodia. In 1979, China invaded Vietnam.
That invasion is the last time China fought a land war, and it was senselessly brutal.
Both China and the Soviet Union aided the Vietnamese communists who fought the U.S. Despite the Sino–Soviet split, which was widening, they saw the U.S. as the bigger enemy and wanted a win for global communism. Once the U.S. left, however, that rationale for tentative cooperation evaporated. Vietnam aligned itself with the Soviet Union, which angered Deng Xiaoping, who was just rising to paramount-leader status in the late ’70s.
In his book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Ezra F. Vogel writes:
Toward Vietnam, Deng felt a sense of personal as well as national betrayal because China had sacrificed for Vietnam during the American attacks, and because he had had deep personal ties with Vietnamese for five decades. Half a century earlier, when Deng was a worker-student in France, he had worked with Vietnamese allies in the anti-colonial struggle against France.
Vogel speculates that had Deng not been purged in an intraparty struggle in 1975, he may have been able to maintain China and Vietnam’s relationship. But by the time Deng returned in the late ’70s, the damage had been done.
We have an image in the West of Deng as a more moderate Chinese leader because he pursued some economic liberalization, but his conduct during the Third Indochina War was anything but nice. He viewed Vietnam as a threat, a Soviet outpost on China’s southern border. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia, that outpost showed itself to be expansionary.
So China invaded Vietnam. Here’s Henry Kissinger in On China:
On February 17 [of 1979], China mounted a multipronged invasion of northern Vietnam from southern China’s Guangxi and Yunnan provinces. The size of the Chinese force reflected the importance China attached to the operation; it has been estimated to have numbered more than 200,000 and perhaps as many as 400,000 PLA [People’s Liberation Army] soldiers. One historian has concluded that the invasion force, which included “regular ground forces, militia, and naval and air forces . . . was similar in scale to the assault with which China made such an impact on its entry into the Korean War in November 1950.” The official Chinese press accounts called it the “Self-Defensive Counterattack Against Vietnam” or the “Counterattack in Self-Defense on the Sino-Vietnamese Border.” It represented the Chinese version of deterrence, an invasion advertised in advance to forestall the next Vietnamese move.
In a sense, it was a strategic success because the Soviet Union did not invade China in response. Deng called the Soviets’ bluff and proved that the Soviet–Vietnam alliance was not so strong after all. But it was at a tremendous cost. Kissinger writes, “By some analysts’ estimates the PLA suffered as many killed in action in one month of fighting the Third Vietnam War as the United States suffered in the most costly years of the second one.”
Deng was, in essence, willing to take those staggering losses to prove a point: not only that the Soviets wouldn’t back Vietnam, but also that the PLA was weak. The war made abundantly clear to any doubters within the Politburo that China’s military was incapable of winning a land war against Vietnam, and Deng’s military buildup as part of his “hide our strength, bide our time” strategy emerged as the way to go within the party.
In the aftermath of the war, Deng’s consolidation of power was completed, and he ruled as paramount leader until 1989 — the year in which he ordered the military crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Deng may have been an economic reformer, but he could be just as brutal as any other dictator when he wanted to be.
China has not fought a land war against a foreign adversary since 1979, which makes strategic planning with respect to China difficult. We simply don’t have recent data to work with. But the invasion of Vietnam proved that Chinese leadership was willing to take astounding losses to achieve its geopolitical goals. The brutal disregard for human life that characterizes Xi Jinping’s China is far from new.