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New Cold War History
China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975
In the quarter century after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Beijing assisted Vietnam in its struggle against two formidable foes, France and the United States. Indeed, the rise and fall of this alliance is one of the most crucial developments in the history of the Cold War in Asia. Drawing on newly released Chinese archival sources, memoirs and diaries, and documentary collections, Qiang Zhai offers the first comprehensive exploration of Beijing's Indochina policy and the historical, domestic, and international contexts within which it developed. In examining China's conduct toward Vietnam, Zhai provides important insights into Mao Zedong's foreign policy and the ideological and geopolitical motives behind it. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he shows, Mao considered the United States the primary threat to the security of the recent Communist victory in China and therefore saw support for Ho Chi Minh as a good way to weaken American influence in Southeast Asia. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, when Mao perceived a greater threat from the Soviet Union, he began to adjust his policies and encourage the North Vietnamese to accept a peace agreement with the United States.
304 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 16, 2022
Taking advantage of newly accessible archival materials in China, Qiang Zhai chronicles Chinese policy-making and the complex and changing relationship between Beijing and Hanoi in the years of American involvement in Vietnam. His book is remarkable for its wealth of evidence that answers unresolved questions regarding the Vietnam conflict. Most importantly, it proves that the support China offered to North Vietnam was much greater than most historians consider it to have been.
A large part of the book confirms what historians before Zhai has hinted at but could not prove. For instance, he demonstrates that Chinese leaders were eager to get the French out of Indochina without provoking American intervention and wanted to enhance China's role as a peacemaker in Asia. This is why they worked with the Soviet Union at the 1954 Geneva Conference to force the Vietnamese to accept the division of their country. Similarly, he confirms the connection between China's Vietnam policy and the increase in tensions between China and the Soviet Union. He shows that in the early and mid-1960s, Mao eagerly cooperated with North Vietnam to promote his image at home and abroad as an eager supporter of revolutionary activism in the Third World and to chastise Moscow for its hopeless passivity.
Zhai also argues that Mao shifted to a policy of containing North Vietnam's ambitions as he came to see the Soviet Union, not America, as his chief enemy, and began to fear a possible alliance between North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. According to the author, this policy shift led Vietnam and China down the road toward the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese conflict. However, in his book Vietnam And China 1938-1954, King C. Chen observes the opposite: while in 1954 China was one of the main advocates of peace in Indochina, in 1968 Beijing switched to rejecting any peace talks on Vietnam. In April, it dismissed President Lyndon B. Johnson's March 31 proposal for a peace talk as a "new fraud" and urged the Vietnamese people to "fight on to the very end." Such pronouncements can hardly be characterized as containment of Hanoi's amibitions.
Furthermore, Zhai's conclusion on this matter is in conflict with the notable discoveries in his book. For instance, he shows that the Chinese government responded to escalating American involvement in Vietnam by steadily increasing support for its Vietnamese allies, sending so much assistance in 1965 – everything from weapons and rice to volleyballs and toothbrushes – that it quickly overwhelmed Hanoi's transport capabilities.
Zhai also chronicles the deployment of Chinese antiaircraft, railroad-repair, engineering, mine-sweeping, and logistics troops to help defend North Vietnam as it came under sustained American attack. In his assessment of China's role, the author points out that "Beijing sent some of its most capable generals," who helped Vietnam "professionalize and politicize its army, reorganize its administrative structure, establish a sound financial policy, and mobilize the masses." The Chinese advisers actually planned and often helped direct Viet Minh operations, and there was a direct transmission of strategy and tactics from China to Vietnam. His statistics show that Chinese assistance to North Vietnam far exceeded the estimates of American policy-makers at the time and of historians later: more than 320,000 Chinese troops served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking in 1967 when 170,000 Chinese were present. When the last Chinese troops withdrew in 1973, 1,100 had been killed and 4,200 wounded.
As Zhai argues, those numbers could have been higher. Driven by Mao's personal dedication to the Vietnamese revolution, Chinese leaders were fully prepared to commit combat forces if the American government had launched a ground invasion of North Vietnam. The Johnson administration was correct to fear that expanding the war to the North would provoke Chinese intervention. Had Johnson heeded the advice of hawks who advocated such escalation, he would have created "a real danger of a Sino-American war with dire consequences for the world." Zhai effectively dispels the dangerous myth that Beijing tricked Washington into adopting a timid military strategy, which caused the American defeat in Vietnam.
It was after 1969 that China, fearing the increasing Soviet influence in North Vietnam, began looking for an ally to counterbalance the Soviet Union and found one in President Richard Nixon. This alienated Hanoi, which considered America its worst enemy. As Beijing and Washington continued their rapprochement into the 1970s, relations between China and North Vietnam deteriorated. In the eyes of the North Vietnamese, China was betraying them. Although Zhai insists in the final chapter of the book that the Chinese did not sabotage the Vietnamese struggle against the Americans and never abandoned that effort in order to advance China's own interests, it is clear that partnership with the Americans by both the Chinese and the Soviets undermined Hanoi's interests. When at last Vietnam got rid of the Americans, its disputes and regional rivalries with China turned the two former allies into enemies.
The chief weakness of the author's work is that he does not analyze the evidence he presents. For instance, he states that Johnson was wise to reject the suggestions of his hawkish advisers, such as further escalation of the American involvement, but he does not connect this to the proof of China's serious commitment to the safety of North Vietnam. While he defends his thesis that Chinese assistance was crucial to the North Vietnamese war effort, he does not analyze the possibility that the Chinese assisted the Viet Cong purposefully to keep them in high morale. He does not elaborate on his suggestion that the assistance might have been a reaction to American escalation. Was Mao so dedicated to helping his fellow Communists that he would have refused to negotiate in 1964 if the American government had reached out to him? Zhai leaves these important questions unanswered.
CHINA AND THE VIETNAM WARS is a great work, though. Zhai was the first one to work with Chinese sources, which revealed previously unknown facts. This book is a valuable contribution to Vietnam scholarship, and it provides Vietnam historians with a solid foundation on which to step while researching in-depth the topics that he has outlined. I highly recommend this book to those interested in the Cold War as seen from a perspective different than the American and the Franco-Vietnamese and Franco-American conflicts.
A large part of the book confirms what historians before Zhai has hinted at but could not prove. For instance, he demonstrates that Chinese leaders were eager to get the French out of Indochina without provoking American intervention and wanted to enhance China's role as a peacemaker in Asia. This is why they worked with the Soviet Union at the 1954 Geneva Conference to force the Vietnamese to accept the division of their country. Similarly, he confirms the connection between China's Vietnam policy and the increase in tensions between China and the Soviet Union. He shows that in the early and mid-1960s, Mao eagerly cooperated with North Vietnam to promote his image at home and abroad as an eager supporter of revolutionary activism in the Third World and to chastise Moscow for its hopeless passivity.
Zhai also argues that Mao shifted to a policy of containing North Vietnam's ambitions as he came to see the Soviet Union, not America, as his chief enemy, and began to fear a possible alliance between North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. According to the author, this policy shift led Vietnam and China down the road toward the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese conflict. However, in his book Vietnam And China 1938-1954, King C. Chen observes the opposite: while in 1954 China was one of the main advocates of peace in Indochina, in 1968 Beijing switched to rejecting any peace talks on Vietnam. In April, it dismissed President Lyndon B. Johnson's March 31 proposal for a peace talk as a "new fraud" and urged the Vietnamese people to "fight on to the very end." Such pronouncements can hardly be characterized as containment of Hanoi's amibitions.
Furthermore, Zhai's conclusion on this matter is in conflict with the notable discoveries in his book. For instance, he shows that the Chinese government responded to escalating American involvement in Vietnam by steadily increasing support for its Vietnamese allies, sending so much assistance in 1965 – everything from weapons and rice to volleyballs and toothbrushes – that it quickly overwhelmed Hanoi's transport capabilities.
Zhai also chronicles the deployment of Chinese antiaircraft, railroad-repair, engineering, mine-sweeping, and logistics troops to help defend North Vietnam as it came under sustained American attack. In his assessment of China's role, the author points out that "Beijing sent some of its most capable generals," who helped Vietnam "professionalize and politicize its army, reorganize its administrative structure, establish a sound financial policy, and mobilize the masses." The Chinese advisers actually planned and often helped direct Viet Minh operations, and there was a direct transmission of strategy and tactics from China to Vietnam. His statistics show that Chinese assistance to North Vietnam far exceeded the estimates of American policy-makers at the time and of historians later: more than 320,000 Chinese troops served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking in 1967 when 170,000 Chinese were present. When the last Chinese troops withdrew in 1973, 1,100 had been killed and 4,200 wounded.
As Zhai argues, those numbers could have been higher. Driven by Mao's personal dedication to the Vietnamese revolution, Chinese leaders were fully prepared to commit combat forces if the American government had launched a ground invasion of North Vietnam. The Johnson administration was correct to fear that expanding the war to the North would provoke Chinese intervention. Had Johnson heeded the advice of hawks who advocated such escalation, he would have created "a real danger of a Sino-American war with dire consequences for the world." Zhai effectively dispels the dangerous myth that Beijing tricked Washington into adopting a timid military strategy, which caused the American defeat in Vietnam.
It was after 1969 that China, fearing the increasing Soviet influence in North Vietnam, began looking for an ally to counterbalance the Soviet Union and found one in President Richard Nixon. This alienated Hanoi, which considered America its worst enemy. As Beijing and Washington continued their rapprochement into the 1970s, relations between China and North Vietnam deteriorated. In the eyes of the North Vietnamese, China was betraying them. Although Zhai insists in the final chapter of the book that the Chinese did not sabotage the Vietnamese struggle against the Americans and never abandoned that effort in order to advance China's own interests, it is clear that partnership with the Americans by both the Chinese and the Soviets undermined Hanoi's interests. When at last Vietnam got rid of the Americans, its disputes and regional rivalries with China turned the two former allies into enemies.
The chief weakness of the author's work is that he does not analyze the evidence he presents. For instance, he states that Johnson was wise to reject the suggestions of his hawkish advisers, such as further escalation of the American involvement, but he does not connect this to the proof of China's serious commitment to the safety of North Vietnam. While he defends his thesis that Chinese assistance was crucial to the North Vietnamese war effort, he does not analyze the possibility that the Chinese assisted the Viet Cong purposefully to keep them in high morale. He does not elaborate on his suggestion that the assistance might have been a reaction to American escalation. Was Mao so dedicated to helping his fellow Communists that he would have refused to negotiate in 1964 if the American government had reached out to him? Zhai leaves these important questions unanswered.
CHINA AND THE VIETNAM WARS is a great work, though. Zhai was the first one to work with Chinese sources, which revealed previously unknown facts. This book is a valuable contribution to Vietnam scholarship, and it provides Vietnam historians with a solid foundation on which to step while researching in-depth the topics that he has outlined. I highly recommend this book to those interested in the Cold War as seen from a perspective different than the American and the Franco-Vietnamese and Franco-American conflicts.
August 19, 2014
The material uncovered in this book is of such potential interest, it is a shame that the author contents himself with a rather general analysis and narrative - summarizing the insights from new evidence in a glancing fashion as he gallops through twenty five years of history. It is not often one gets the chance to say that a book could have benefited from an additional 100-150 pages, but possibly rarer still in the many thousands of pages published on the subject of Vietnam is there such potential for truly new insights...
January 15, 2018
An excellent piece of new Cold War history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews