Russia is still proud of its Vietnamese client-state

Vietnam still proud of Chinese skulls in the jungle

05.03.2009
Sergei Balmasov
Source: Pravda.Ru

"Not so long ago, each Vietnamese student studying at local medical schools was supposed to fetch a couple of Chinese skulls from the jungle for practical classes." [KI-Media note: This is a hint for Cambodian medical school students. Numerous dead Bo-dois are still lying inside Cambodian jungle.]

Vietnam heroically repulsed China’s attack 30 years ago. The enmity between the two states continued for over 2,000 years. Vietnam’s territory was spreading to the Yangtze River 2,500 years ago. The Vietnamese proved 30 years ago that they could still wage war.

The war broke out in 1979 because of the tense relations between the USSR and China. The two communist regimes were fighting for the influence on the countries of the socialist camp. Beijing could not boast of any success: the sphere of its influence included only Albania and Kampuchea.

Pol Pot attacked Vietnam’s border territories in 1978. Hanoi responded with deploying its troops in Kampuchea in December 1978. China obtained a reason to interfere on Pol Pot’s side and occupy Vietnam in order to weaken the Soviet influence in the world.

The United States stood behind the conflict: the country was struggling against communism. The USA was setting China against the USSR’s allies promising its support to Beijing.

The 600,000-strong Chinese army attacked Vietnam along its entire 1,460-kilometer border. Vietnam had only two divisions to oppose China’s 44. About 85 percent of Vietnam’s troops were stationed in Cambodia, thousands of kilometers away. However, China failed to have a blitzkrieg: Vietnam did very well without the basic part of its regular forces.

Border guards and local militia men showed fierce resistance to the aggressor. The Chinese troops moved only 15 kilometers inside Vietnam during the first three days of the war. Only several thousands of Vietnamese border guards deterred a whole army.

The Vietnamese militia joined the war on the third day only. The Chinese troops were moving along narrow paths in the jungle - the surroundings were very convenient for entrapments. The Vietnamese soldiers eventually dismembered the enemy’s army into several parts.

A group of Soviet counselors arrived in Vietnam on February 19. Moscow set its Eastern troops on high alert and threatened to invade China. The USSR’s Pacific Fleet was approaching China’s coast. Soviet warplanes transported a group of the Vietnamese army from Kampuchea, which made it possible to organize a 100,000-strong group of Vietnamese military men.

China began to pull back its troops on March 5. The country declared its victory but never explained why it had failed to defend Pol Pot, its bloody ally. Vietnam pulled back from Kampuchea only ten years afterwards, having defeated the Khmer Rouge.

The Vietnamese troops were following China’s retreat for two weeks and killed 62,500 Chinese soldiers. They also destroyed over 50 percent of China’s military hardware that was involved in the aggression.

The vestiges of that war still echo today. Not so long ago, each Vietnamese student studying at local medical schools was supposed to fetch a couple of Chinese skulls from the jungle for practical classes. The incursion of 1979 proved that Vietnam has one of the best soldiers in the world, who definitely know how to defend their native land.

Sino-Vietnam ties continue to sizzle

February 19th, 2009
By Nazia Vasi
2point6billion.com (China)

This week marks the first of China’s four anniversaries - thirty years since China’s brief but bloody invasion of Vietnam which resulted in a victory for both sides.

As history goes, China attacked Vietnam to prove two points. and Firstly to teach its southerly neighbor a lesson for invading Cambodia in December 1978 and defaming genocidal tyrant Pol Pot and his Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge communist regimesecondly to assert its dominance in the region against Soviet Russia and prove to the U.S. that China was a reliable ally. The Sino-Vietnam war on 1979 lasted a month and was the last of the Indochina Wars of the twentieth century.

“It was a bleeding strategy to burden Vietnam while China was able to carry out economic reforms,” Xiaoming Zhang, an associate professor at the US military’s Air War College in Alabama told the AFP.

Although much water has flowed under that bridge and Sino-Vietnam ties are high again, suspicions between the two communist countries are still apparent.

One of the most apparent bones of contention however still exists between the two countries over occupation of the South China Sea a region rich in oil and marine life. Although China did sign the ‘Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea’ with ASEAN members in 2002 laying to rest disputes with Vietnam, Vietnamese suspicion of the Chinese remains intact as China’s influence in the region increases.

Disputes between Beijing and Hanoi are rife mostly over the Spratly and Paracel islands. An archipelago of more than 30,000 islands and reefs in the South China Sea that form part of the Coral Triangle and who are being tapped for their oil, gas, rich marine life and contain one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

The Geology and Mineral Resources Ministry of the People’s Republic of China has estimated that the Spratly area holds oil and natural gas reserves of 17.7 billion tons, as compared to the 13 billion tons held by Kuwait, placing it as the fourth largest reserve bed in the world.

In 1988, the South China Sea accounted for eight percent of the world’s total catch. The number has certainly risen in the last few years. The PRC has predicted that the South China Sea holds combined fishing and oil and gas resources worth one trillion dollars. Additionally, tanker traffic through the South China Sea is estimated t be over three times greater than that through the Suez Canal and five times more than through the Panama Canal. Twenty five percent of the world’s crude oil passes through the South China Sea.

Vietnam tense as China war is marked

A Vietnamese guard stands next to a marker for the "Friendship Border Gate" on the Chinese-Vietnamese border. Neither Vietnam nor China seem to wish to repeat the bitter events of 1979

Monday, 16 February 2009
By Nga Pham BBC News

Vietnam is marking the anniversary of its border war with China with an uneasy quiet, as official channels avoid mentioning the events of 30 years ago.

But simmering nationalistic emotions are being brought to the surface by painful memories.

Hoang Thi Lich, 72, remembers vividly the morning of 17 February 1979, when she and her family woke to a suffocating sense of panic in the mountains of Cao Bang.

As dawn broke, China launched attacks on a number of positions in Vietnam's northernmost provinces with a staggering display of so-called "human waves" and artillery power.

Mrs Lich's family was quickly evacuated from her small hamlet in Hoa An district, along with a dozen other ethnic Tay families.

She recalls: "We were told to run southwards... I could hear loud gunfire. I was so frightened I froze for a long while, I did not know what to do."

Mrs Lich's family escaped to safety.

Just 18 days later, in the same Hoa An district, retreating Chinese soldiers reportedly hacked to death 43 people - mostly women and children.

Naive hopes

The Chinese attacks caught the Vietnamese off-guard, despite rumours of a war initiated by China's then-leader Deng Xiaoping circulating for months within Vietnamese political circles.

A former top official at Vietnam's embassy in Beijing, Duong Danh Dy, warned from early 1978 that the bilateral relationship between Hanoi and Beijing was worsening by the day.

In July 1978, after what Beijing considered mistreatment of ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, China halted assistance to its neighbour, prompting Hanoi to sign a "co-operation and friendship" pact with Moscow soon after.

Around the same time Hanoi intensified its efforts to topple Beijing's ally, the Khmer Rouge's ultra-Maoist regime.

The bloody Vietnam-Cambodia conflict marked the first ever war between two communist nations.

Chairman Deng vowed to "teach Vietnam a lesson".

Vietnam's Duong Danh Dy, referring to a televised news briefing by the Chinese leader in December 1978, recalled: "I would never forget his face when he described Vietnam as a 'hooligan'.

"At that stage, we all thought 'that's it, a war is no longer avoidable'," Mr Dy said.

"But deep down inside we still hoped, perhaps naively, that since Vietnam and China had been so close and brotherly, they [the Chinese] wouldn't turn on us so fast and so strongly."

Isolation

Instead, Beijing mobilised hundreds of thousands of troops and volunteers in its largest military operation since the Korean War.

Vietnam, meanwhile, was in a difficult situation having to deal with its Cambodian conflict and reconstructing a near-collapsed economy.

"We have been faithful to our promise not to bring up old events for the sake of the relationship between the two countries" - Duong Danh Dy, ex-official at Vietnam's embassy in Beijing

Vietnam's former first deputy foreign minister, who was in office when the border war began, said his country's isolationism had left it vulnerable.

"We were too dependent on our ideological allies, and by that time the only ally we had was the Soviet Union," said Tran Quang Co.

"Being a small country living next to a big country, we needed more friends. We needed to expand our ties and diversify our relations."

China's "pedagogical war" lasted just over a fortnight, with both Vietnam and China claiming victory.

Though disputable, estimates suggest that up to 60,000 lives were lost on both sides.

As well as the loss of life, the trust and fraternity that the two communist parties had struggled to build during the previous half a century suffered a severe blow.

In his memoir Memories and Thoughts, Tran Quang Co cited Vietnam's late leader Vo Van Kiet as saying in 1991 - the year the two countries normalised their relationship - that China "was always a trap".

'Too compromising'

The mutual distrust has lingered through the years, occasionally flaring when bilateral disputes occur.

Vietnam saw mass protests in December 2007, when China reportedly announced plans to establish an administrative unit to govern the Spratly and Paracel islands - territories claimed by Vietnam.

A smaller demonstration took place when the Beijing Olympic torch reached Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City.

However, such protests are uncommon.

Hanoi is trying hard not to jeopardise the warming ties with its giant neighbour. Neither Vietnam nor China seem to wish to repeat the bitter experience of 1979.

With bilateral trade rapidly growing and a land border agreement expected to be finalised soon after 35 years of negotiations, some say relations between the two are the best they have ever been.

The Vietnamese government is therefore keeping a close eye on what the media write about Vietnam-China relations - especially sensitive issues such as border or territorial claims.

"China is getting stronger so Vietnam needs to learn more [cleverly] how to co-exist with it," said senior diplomat Le Cong Phung.

Last week, the newspaper Saigon Tiep Thi published an article by well-known journalist Huy Duc on the 1979 border war on its website. The story was removed within hours.

"We have been faithful to our promise not to bring up old events for the sake of the relationship between the two countries," said Duong Danh Dy, who is now one of Vietnam's leading China experts.

The official stance has been condemned by the public as too soft and too compromising.

Internet forums and personal blogs are flooded with anti-China comments as the anniversary of the border war approaches.

In the Du Lich newspaper, a recent essay slipped past the state censors, praising the "pure patriotism and proud spirit" of the anti-Chinese protesters in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

As this nationalistic flame burns, the question of whether it will spread like wildfire depends on both governments' policies towards each other.