China downplays anniversary of Vietnam border war

Tue Feb 17, 2009
By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Tuesday sought to downplay the 30th anniversary of a short but bloody border war with one-time close Communist ally Vietnam, barely mentioning it in the media and seeking to deflect questions.

China invaded Vietnam on February 17, 1979, to punish Hanoi for toppling the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia one month earlier. China had previously given Hanoi steadfast support against U.S. forces in the Vietnam War.

The month-long border war in which some say 60,000 soldiers or more were killed is a memory both governments are happy to suppress.

Neither country, run by stability-obsessed Communist parties, wishes to stoke any expressions of strident nationalism among their people, and both are keen to expand trade bilateral trade, which last year grew to $21 billion.

"China and Vietnam have had a period of unhappiness in their past," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters.

"But what's important is that the leaders and people of both countries have a broad wish and consensus to create a bright future together. History has already reached its conclusions," she added, declining to say if China planned to mark the day at all.

Chinese media made little mention of the anniversary, though the website of the Global Times (www.huanqiu.com), an outspoken tabloid published by Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, carried a series of old pictures from the war.

The war was "forced" on China following Vietnam's mistreatment of ethnic Chinese and its invasion of Cambodia, all of which "seriously threatened and damaged China's modernisation and border security," it said.

The war "punished and taught a proper lesson to the Vietnamese invaders," the newspaper added.

"People say that a war between two socialist countries is the hardest to comprehend, and that war between two Eastern countries is the bloodiest," said the article on the "counter-attack in self-defense war."

Two comments by online readers of the piece, also carried on a Shanghai-government linked website, www.eastday.com, did not mince their words, though.

"China's old generation of leaders believed that struggle was necessary to protect territory. Today's officials should learn from that!" wrote one.

"I really don't understand why veterans of the war have to go to Hong Kong to get their books on the war published," wrote another.

Vietnamese newspapers did not mention the war at all, though at a small park near the Chinese embassy in Hanoi, about 40 Vietnamese police did marching drills.

The embassy has been the scene of a few protests over the years, including one with a few hundred youth when China reportedly set up a county-level government to administer the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

Both governments claim ownership of the islands, which are thought to sit on valuable oil and gas deposits.

Hanoi and Beijing have agreed not to upset the status quo, but both are firm in their claims of sovereignty.

Last July, China pressured Exxon Mobil Corp to pull out of an oil exploration deal with Vietnam that it saw as a breach of Chinese sovereignty. In May, BP Plc halted plans to conduct exploration work off the southern Vietnamese coast, citing territorial tensions.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang also defended China's ties with Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, saying it was part of normal diplomatic relations, as a trial began in Phnom Penh of the group's chief torturer.

(Additional reporting by John Ruwitch in Hanoi; Editing by Nick Macfie)

China aimed to ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’: Expert

2/17/2009
AFP

HANOI: On February 17, 1979, after months of verbal and armed clashes, China launched a massive offensive against Vietnam to teach its communist ally “a lesson” for becoming too independent for Beijing’s liking.

Known as the Third Indochina War, the roots of the brief but bloody conflict lay in the ideological rivalries between China and the Soviet Union.

During the war against the United States, Moscow supplied Vietnam with vital military aid. After the end of that conflict, Sino-Vietnamese relations were further strengthened when Hanoi rejoined the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), created by Moscow in 1949.

Conversely, relations with China, which was establishing contacts with the United States, deteriorated further. Initially, the Chinese said their offensive was “limited” and not a claim on Vietnamese territory.

Beijing’s declared objective was to punish Vietnam, whose troops had six weeks earlier invaded Cambodia to topple the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, who was supported by China.

The invasion of Cambodia was the final straw for Beijing, which decided it was time to put back in its place a Vietnam which was increasingly defying China’s authority in the region and had repressed its ethnic Chinese Hoa community, analysts said. Beijing also believed Vietnam had shown a lack of gratitude for valuable Chinese support during the war against the French and at the start of the conflict with the Americans.

Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched the Vietnam offensive “to teach them a ‘lesson’,” recalled Jean-Claude Pomonti, long-time regional correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde.

For China it was “a semi-success or semi-failure—the Vietnamese resisted well,” he said, but “it was no disgrace: Deng, who detested the Vietnamese, (meant to) put them on the right path.” “China wanted to attack us to force us to withdraw our troops from Cambodia,” said retired Vietnamese Lieutenant-General Vu Xuan Vinh. “But we were able to use many local forces. We did not fall into the trap.”

The Chinese operation was preceded by an intense artillery bombardment against several locations along the 1,400km frontier between the two countries.

Chinese troops then penetrated dozens of kilometres into northern Vietnam to take control of several towns, notably Lang Son, Cao Bang and Lao Cai, before withdrawing a month later on March 16. There is no reliable figure for the number of casualties, which varies according to source and country, but the war did claim tens of thousands of lives.

Both sides said they had won, but the Chinese People’s Liberation Army failed to deal a decisive blow in its attack against a much smaller adversary.