The Sino-Indochinese conflict emerged into the open just nine months ago when Cambodia's central leader made a dramatic denunciation in Peking of Vietnam's "invasion" of his country. Since that time it has gotten sharper and sharper. War has become a permanent feature on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, while on Vietnam's northeastern frontier there are increasingly frequent clashes, some resulting in deaths.
In May 1978 Peking began a great hue and cry in defense of the Hoas (the Chinese in Vietnam), who had been hit hard by the measures taken in March against large-scale capitalist commerce. Chinese aid to Vietnam was cut off, political relations between the two countries deteriorated to an unprecedented low, and a new wave of refugees brought grief to a divided Indochina, as tens of thousands of Hoas returned to China.
The statements issuing from the various capitals became frantic. Pnompenh declared that in May it had uncovered a new "coup" plot, backed by Hanoi. Pro-Peking newspapers in Hong Kong openly speculated about the possibility of war. Wen Wei Pao, for example, remarked that "the possibility of its [Vietnam's] launching a partial invasion of China, relying on Soviet power, still exists." (Cited in the Far Eastern Economic Review of July 14.)
Hanoi ordered an unprecedented military mobilization of the population and used the September 2 independence celebrations to launch slogans calling for a "resolute struggle to achieve victory in the war on the southeastern frontier" with Cambodia, and for "readiness to fight and defeat a major war of aggression" by the Chinese.
There is no doubt that the "Hoa problem" between China and Vietnam is real, since the two countries have drastically different interpretations of the written and oral agreements made in the past concerning the legal status of Chinese in Vietnam. But the vicious turn relations in the region have taken cannot be explained simply by reference to this legal question—any more than the Vietnam-Cambodia conflict can be reduced to the problem of defining the border.
Nor can the conflicts be explained simply on the basis of the traditional national hostilities that have marred relations between Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodians through the ages. The "Hoa problem" and the border disputes are not so serious that they could not be resolved through negotiations. After several decades of common struggle against imperialism, it should have been possible to avoid this rebirth of narrow nationalism. Regional Impact of Sino-Soviet Conflict
The crisis in relations between China and Indochina shows first of all how the Sino-Soviet conflict has become a central factor in Southeast Asian politics over the last few years. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review of July 7, it is commonly held in Peking that the question of the Hoas in Vietnam became explosive only because the Chinese leadership was convinced there was a "Soviet conspiracy" behind the trouble.
Hanoi made a good point when it contrasted Peking's silence on the fate of the Chinese in Cambodia to the official outrage expressed when blows were dealt to the large-scale commercial capitalists of Chinese origin in the Cholon district of Ho Chi Minh City. The abolition of capitalist trade was not an act of racial discrimination but rather a measure necessary to safeguard the revolution. This was confirmed by the measures taken in April to curtail small-scale private trade and to move toward socialization of agriculture in south Vietnam. Both the latter measures directly affected the native Vietnamese population.
Hua Kuo-feng's trip to Romania and Yugoslavia, Peking's support for French military intervention in Zaïre (described as an example of unity between "the second and third worlds"), the dispatching of Chinese military instructors to help the Mobutu regime, the scandalous support Hua Kuo-feng extended to the bloody dictatorship in Iran while the shah was being challenged by unprecedented mass mobilizations—all this is further proof, if any is needed, that the struggle against the "social-imperialist" danger outweighs everything else for Peking.
Now the Peking leadership has started describing Southeast Asia as one of the hot spots of the Sino-Soviet conflict. They complain because the Soviet bank Novotny is active in the area. When they call for protecting the coastal straits from a strengthened Soviet fleet in the Pacific, they are obviously calling for the United States to maintain and even to build up its military strength in the region. Peking hails the consolidation of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as an "ascending force." It extols the strengthening of ties between the dictatorial regimes of this thoroughly reactionary bloc and Japanese imperialism.
This is the context in which Peking accuses Hanoi of making Vietnam into "an Asian Cuba," and warns that the new physical threat in the southeast while Soviet armies are massed on the northern frontier, is a move toward encirclement of China.
More specifically, Peking accuses Hanoi of turning over the old U.S. naval base at Camranh Bay to Soviet warshipssomething extremely unlikely given the lack of confirmation by Western intelligence services.
Peking's attitude is important. It signifies that the Sino-Vietnamese conflict is not going to be resolved in a lasting way unless there is a profound change in the foreign policy of the Chinese leadership. The Soviet leadership bears most of the historic responsibility for the emergence of the Sino-Soviet split, and it continues to play an actively counterrevolutionary role in world politics. But this does not lessen the current responsibility of the Chinese leadership. Its decision to cut off aid to Vietnam, just as Moscow cut off aid to China twenty-five years ago, dealt a harsh blow to a revolution in difficulty. Similarly, Peking has not balked at frequently supporting foreign policy efforts of Washington in the interests of fighting against the "main enemy," namely "social imperialism."
The Sino-Vietnamese Conflict
The political conflict between the Vietnamese and Chinese regimes is a long-term factor in Southeast Asian politics, and even world politics. This was shown at the recent conference of "non-aligned" nations in Belgrade, where supporters and opponents of the struggle against Soviet "hegemonism" squared off against one another.
And the Sino-Soviet split is not the only reason for trouble between China and Vietnam, which gives us even more reason to believe the Sino-Vietnamese conflict will be around for a while. As tensions mount in the area we are getting a clearer picture of how relations between the two countries developed during the second Indochinese war.
We should explore why the Chinese CP has allowed relations with Hanoi to deteriorate. By its intransigence Peking has pushed the Vietnamese leadership more and more into the arms of the Soviets, when Hanoi's evolution in that direction was not at all predetermined. In the mid- 1950s, for example, Hanoi was ideologically much closer to Peking than to Moscow, and the Vietnamese leadership showed on more than one occasion that it could take political steps that went counter to the pressures being exerted by the Soviet Union. The most notable example was in 1959 and 1960 when Hanoi decided to renew the armed struggle in South Vietnam.
Peking also opposed the launching of armed struggle at the time, even though the logic of the Sino-Soviet split would seem to indicate that they should have supported the Vietnamese CP. Peking's position in those days was to advocate the renewal of national liberation movements and to support anti-imperialist movements around the world.
To clear up this apparent paradox, it is necessary to look again at the history of relations between the two regimes, as well as at the history of relations between Cambodia and Vietnam.* Both sides are now tending to place the origins of the conflict in the distant past. Hoang Tung, a member of the Central Committee of the Vietnamese CP and editor-in-chief of the party daily Nhan Dan, asserted at a news conference that "as a whole the best elements [within the Chinese CP leadership] were those who opposed Mao." He also said that it was during the Liu Shao-chi period that China carried out "a truly socialist policy" (reported in the August 8 issue of Le Matin). If this citation is to be believed, then the Vietnamese leadership seems to be rethinking the history of the Chinese CP and of the struggles that developed within it, in terms more or less along the lines of those used by the Soviet leadership.
In 1954, Hanoi stood alone at the Geneva Conference in opposing partition of Vietnam. Both Moscow and Peking were pressuring Hanoi to accept partition. The Vietnamese leadership reluctantly accepted this measure-a decision it now regrets.
At the time Peking was angry about the adventure Stalin had plunged China into in Korea, and was trying to carry out a policy of "détente" with the West as far as China's frontiers were concerned
In spite of China's role at Geneva, the Vietnamese CP remained ideologically close to Peking. Two unfortunate experiences caused a deterioration in relations: first the catastrophic mistakes of the 1956 land reform and then the position the Chinese leadership took towards its responsibilities to support Vietnam during the second Indochinese war.
In 1960 Peking opposed the renewal of
*See "Origins of the Conflict Between Hanoi and Pnompenh" by Pierre Rousset in Intercontinental Press/Inprecor, February 27, 1978, p. 240.
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Washington Post armed struggle in the South. In 1963-64 Krushchev's actions led Vietnam to look more toward Peking, but then in 1964-65 Peking refused to join in a united front with the Soviet Union in defense of the Vietnamese revolution, a front to which the Vietnamese attached great importance.
During 1966 and 1967 while the Cultural Revolution was in progress, Peking continued and even stepped up its aid to Vietnam, but allowed the rail transport of Soviet aid through China to be seriously disrupted, just when the Americans were carrying out a brutal escalation of the war. After a slight improvement in relations during 1969, the Chinese developed a foreign policy based on regarding the Soviet Union as the "main enemy," which led to visits by Kissinger and then Nixon to Peking (and later to Moscow) in 1972, despite the unprecedented U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.
Chinese aid was desperately needed in Vietnam. As for Soviet aid, it was doled out at least as sparingly as that of Peking. This is one more area in which the historic betrayal of Stalinism will not be forgotten.
But, to understand how the Sino-Soviet conflict was reflected in Indochina and why the Chinese leadership never tried to win the Vietnamese CP away from Soviet influence by making defense of the Vietnamese revolution one of the central themes of its foreign policy, we need to return to what Southeast Asia represented for Peking. If the Chinese CP leadership basically ignored the Vietnamese revolution during 1960 and again in 1965 and 1966, it was because Indochina was regarded as an immediate "buffer zone" for China, and
Southeast Asia was considered China's natural "zone of influence."
Here we find the same problem as in analyzing the Cambodian-Vietnamese conflict. The Asian Communist parties, whatever their level of combativity, have all been affected by the Stalinization of the international workers movement, the retreat from internationalist traditions, and the framework in which they carry out their wars of liberation. Thus they have all to one degree or another become tainted with profound nationalist deviations, which are reinforced by the process of bureaucratization after they take power.
This is particularly true of the Maoist faction-and of the whole leadership of the Chinese CP. Given China's considerable potential, it can play the role of a leading power in Asia-particularly if it develops its industrial power more. But from the bureaucracy's point of view, the dynamism, influence, and geopolitical role of the Vietnamese revolution represent a threat to consolidation of Chinese authority in the region. This is why it was out of the question for China to ward off the growing closeness of Moscow and Hanoi by extending generous aid to, and thus reinforcing, the Vietnamese regime. This is also why the Sino-Vietnamese conflict is not about to be resolved, especially since the Vietnamese CP as well thinks it has a role to play in Southeast Asian politics.
Indochina in Crisis
The interweaving conflicts in Indochina have repercussions in all the countries concerned. The situation seems particularly unstable in Cambodia.
In terms of food supply, Cambodia, with its richness and its natural advantages for rice growing, is probably in the best situa tion of the three Indochinese states. It escaped the series of natural catastrophes that hit Vietnam and Laos last year. Laos is now again experiencing heavy floods, which destroyed a substantial part of its harvest. South Vietnam is apparently suffering an insect invasion that is also threatening part of its harvest. And the Mekong has been spilling over its banks, dangerously flooding the delta.
But in a political sense the Pol Pot government is none too stable. The negotiating terms suggested by the Vietnamese February 5 were remarkable in that they not only proposed a risky withdrawal of armed forces to five kilometers either side of the frontier but also agreed to international supervision of the cease-fire. The Cambodians did not even respond, except in the most perfunctory way.
Since spring, fighting has intensified along the border, and the Vietnamese seem to have stepped up air strikes into the interior of Cambodia. Cambodia has had to pull some of its troops from the border with Thailand because they were needed on the eastern front. Pnompenh has been receiving more Chinese military aid, especially in heavy artillery and perhaps aircraft. It is generally thought that there are between 5,000 and 20,000 Chinese advisers in Cambodia. In spite of all this, many observers think that the Khmer army has been seriously weakened by the last few months' fighting.
Even more important, pockets of Khmer opposition have appeared in the eastern provinces of Cambodia and perhaps also in the northwest. There is no way of knowing their exact strength, but there is talk of 20,000 to 25,000 guerrillas in the border areas nearest Vietnam. For a long time Radio Hanoi has been broadcasting calls for insurrection addressed to the Cambodian population and military. An April 3 broadcast said, "Fellow Cambodian soldiers... many in your ranks are laying down their arms. This is a sign that they are beginning to wake up." (Quoted in Le Monde, April 18.)
On August 29, Radio Hanoi denounced the fact that a thousand soldiers and officers had been massacred, on Pnompenh's orders, in Cambodian military zone 203, encompassing the provinces of Kompong Cham, Prey Veng and Svay Rieng. Then it broadcast a call to insurrection, signed by "the patriotic and revolutionary forces of front 203." According to the text of the call: "Since liberation, the clique [in power] has constantly and without hesitation destroyed the fruits of the revolution and committed countless crimes in our country. ... It has acted as a faithful satellite of the Chinese reactionaries, provoking a border war with Vietnam....
Vietnamese sources indicate that this internal resistance is being led by So Phim, the former vice-president of Democratic Kampuchea and once the commander in chief of the liberation army. This is not impossible, since the leadership of the Cambodian CP has gone through many internal crises. Just last May the sixth attempted "coup d'etat" was uncovered. The names of several well-known leaders are not heard on Pompenh radio any more. According to refugees, a vast purge is under way in several provinces, involving a number of intermediate cadres. Finally, the large number of refugees who have fled to Vietnam (estimated in June at 132,000 Khmers, 18,000 Cambodian Chinese and 170,000 Vietnamese who had previously lived in Cambodia) is proof that there exists a mass base for such a resistance movement.
Nonetheless, it is not possible to evaluate the depth of the crisis the Cambodian regime is going through. We still do not know how Peking is going to react to this situation. The Chinese leadership is faced with a difficult choice, if in fact the Pol Pot team is in danger. Either it does nothing and loses an ally in a country with Cambodia's geopolitical importance in Indochina, or else it risks getting embroiled in supporting with force of arms a regime that is extremely isolated internationally.
New tensions have also appeared in Laos. The CP leadership has finally come out openly in support of Vietnam. It is possible, however, that a certain section of the leadership disagrees with this step. Chinese aid has been important, especially in the northern part of Laos, where thousands of Chinese workers and soldiers have been working since 1961 to construct a major road network. Now it appears that many of them have been called back to China, and the others are simply finishing up the work on one uncompleted segment. This region of Laos is inhabited by Montagnard minorities who make up 40 percent of the total population of Laos, and three-quarters of these Montagnards originally came from southern China.
Radio Hanoi has recently given a lot of coverage to Vientiane's charge that the Chinese leadership favors the construction of an "independent Meo kingdom" in Laos and Vietnam, and that General Vang Pao, the former chief of the CIA's secret army, was invited to Peking. Vietnam has also sent many workers and soldiers to Laos. If the Sino-Vietnamese conflict gets a little worse, or if Peking decides to try to shore up the Pol Pot regime by applying pressure in the northern border regions of Indochina, a new stage of confrontation could open up in Laos.
Tensions in Vietnam
In spite of the success Vietnam has had in the past in relations with its ethnic minorities, tensions are beginning to show up in this area. Three of the best-known Montagnard leaders of the Vietnamese CP have in effect been stripped of their responsibilities: the Tay and Nung generals Chu Van Tang, Le Hien Mai, and Le Quang Ba. They have been accused of "feudal practices" and corruption. The Nung are still one of the ethnic groups that furnish number of generals for the the largest Vietnamese army. There is no doubt that Peking and Hanoi are currently fighting for political and economic influence in these remote regions, rich in minerals and forests.
It is above all in the economic sphere that the impact of the Sino-Vietnamese conflict is being felt. Vietnam is getting ready for war. A significant section of the armed forces that was supposed to be turning toward production, especially to building up the country's infrastructure, is tied down in the border regions. Some of the areas where New Economic Zones were supposed to be established have had to be evacuated because of the fighting. More than 700,000 refugees have left the frontier provinces nearest Cambodia and resettled in the interior. It is significant that only 9,000 persons have left Saigon to resettle in the countryside, whereas the number was supposed to be much higher.
The withdrawal of Chinese aid meant that around eighty economic projects had to be put off. Some of them were extremely important to the national economy, such as the modernization of the Mao Khe coal mines, the expansion of the steel mill at Thai Nguyen, the construction of a bridge over the Red River and of a railway center near Hanoi.
Many of the 160,000 Hoas who left North Vietnam for China were workers with skills that are in short supply. For example, the Hoas make up 60 percent of the work force in the mines, and they play an important role in the fishing industry and in the operation of Haiphong port—in other words in sectors that are vital for exports and the accumulation of currency reserves.
In this emergency, the Vietnamese leadership has lowered its sights from what was projected in the second five-year plan. The priority of priorities is now agriculture-the goal is to reach a production of 21 million tons of foodstuffs in 1980.
The natural disasters that struck in 1977, plus the current crisis, have highlighted the social and political weaknesses of the Hanoi regime. The leadership now regards the fact that they waited so long to move against the bourgeois merchants of Cholon as a "right deviation," committed in the name of the ideology of "national concord." It admits that the consequences of the terrible weather in 1977 were worse than necessary, because of the carelessness and lack of training of too many cadres. It knows that the numerous examples of corruption, especially in the south, have dealt a blow to the regime's prestige. It has taken note of the results of the July 1977 municipal elections in Saigon, at the height of the rice shortage. These elections were a real protest vote, in which several official candidates were replaced by "rank and file" candidates.
It is likely that significant political differences are beginning to appear within the Vietnamese CP leadership, although it is impossible to tell exactly what they consist of. Several people have been removed from the Central Committee for the "errors" they committed in the area of economic development. A steady campaign is under way against corruption and "bureaucratism," and quite a few cadres have been dragged into court. The party press has become more critical in its style.
The current political tension and the state of military mobilization are being used to stimulate cooperatives, the socialization of agriculture in the south, and the "moral rearmament" of the party.
Another step the leadership has taken to try to bring things under control is to push aside, in the last year or two, elements judged too "pro-Chinese," such as former
Political Bureau member Hoang Van Hoa (they had already straightened out the "pro-Soviet" elements).
In early August the Vietnamese press began to issue warnings against "opportunist tendencies." Nhan Dan has several times reminded its readers that the history of every revolutionary party reveals "traitors" who "end up selling out to the enemy." An editorial in the August 18 Nhan Dan said these opportunists and traitors "cannot accept defeat and continue to conspire to carry out acts of sabotage, with the backing of international reactionaries and imperialists." (Quoted in Survey of World Broadcasts, August 23.)
The mass departure of the Hoas represents a setback for the Hanoi regime, spotlighting as it does one of the most serious shortcomings of the Vietnamese revolution, the absence of socialist democracy. It is easy to understand why the capitalists in the south and the former collaborators departed en masse, but Hanoi has not been able to explain adequately the flight of the northern Hoas, who were small shopkeepers, peasants, and urban workers.
It is true that the close family ties and clannishness of sections of the Chinese community in Southeast Asia mean that hysteria easily spreads in the kind of tense political atmosphere that exists today. This can produce panic and mass flight. It is very likely that Peking actively abetted this fear when Hanoi's anticapitalist measures started to affect and disturb the Chinese population and when Vietnamese security forces stepped up their activity, looking for "provocateurs."
But this only shows that the Vietnamese CP has not been successful enough at replacing family and clan cohesion with a clear identification on the basis of class interest. If this is true, it can probably be blamed on the absence of instruments of socialist democracy in the true sense of the term; that is, workers and peasants coun cils, the fundamental units of a workers state, a place where the masses can genuinely express themselves politically, carry out debate, and make decisions.
The way in which a party like the Vietnamese CP has been substituted for the political role that the masses should play, depriving them of any real power of discussion and decision making, can only weaken the general level of class consciousness. This makes it more difficult to combat the remnants of procapitalist attitudes, both petty bourgeois and neocolon-
Under these circumstances, the measures being taken to reestablish control run the risk of reinforcing the public security forces as well as increasing the power of the military hierarchy and party apparatus. The campaigns against "bureaucratism" cannot do any more than scrape the surface of the problem. They will not do away with the conditions under which corruption inevitably spreads: the granting of privileges, even on a limited basis, to those with particular functions; the setting of wage scales on the basis of political privilege; the abandonment of the
Russian revolutionaries' norm that no Communist should make more than a skilled worker; and the absence of any direct, large-scale, ongoing popular participation in state affairs.
Under the existing political and economic conditions of bureaucratic deformations in the regime and the pressure of a generalized scarcity of basic necessities, the Sino-Indochinese crisis tends to accelerate the process of bureaucratization, although not everywhere in the same way. This is true in spite of the real progress that has been made in the last few months, particularly with the collectivization and nationalization campaigns carried out in the south.
Peking may count this as one of the main achievements of its regional politics: that it has been able to aggravate the Vietnamese revolution's problems, as well as the resulting social and political tensions.
Finally, we should return to the effect the Sino-Indochinese conflict is having on Hanoi's regional policy and the rapid evolution of its diplomatic efforts to normalize relations with the United States and with the ASEAN nations now that Vietnam has joined Comecon [the East European trade bloc]. Vietnamese Príme Minister Pham Van Dong was asked at a
Bangkok news conference whether the normalization of relations with General Kriangsak's government meant that Hanoi would halt its aid to the Thai Communist Party and resistance. "That is the case," he answered. But there can be a big difference between the diplomatic statements of the Vietnamese and actual reality, as was shown several times during the Indochina war.
Just on the basis of "realpolitik" considerations, relations between the Thai CP- which follows Peking but is leading an important guerrilla struggle-and the Vietnamese CP pose very complicated problems. Too complicated for Pham Van Dong's response to really be true. If Hanoi expects some day to win the Thai resistance away from Peking's ideological control, it would be dangerous to jeopardize this potential development by cutting off the aid sent through Laos by Vietnam. If Hanoi gives up all hope of such a development taking place, then the logic of bureaucratic "realpolitik" may lead them to actually put into practice what they are saying in their diplomatic statements.
The question is posed. How it is resolved will be crucial both for the Indochinese revolutions and for the struggles now under way in Southeast Asia.