Vietnam's Bloody Defeat of China

The Chinese invaders did not succeed in achieving a military victory against the battle hardened Vietnamese forces. Photos: SinoVietnameseWar.com and Global Times

Oct-24-2010
Tim King
Salem-News.com

Flashback in time to a war most Americans aren't familiar with.

(SALEM, Ore.) - China lost a significant war in 1979 against Vietnam, though many people in the west do not realize this important history. This side of Vietnam that is rarely recognized involves the country's willingness to defeat the barbaric Khmer Rouge neighbors in Cambodia after the U.S. war in SE Asia. For this China invaded Vietnam, only to lose and retreat after 29 days, ultimately abandoning their military aggression.

VN troops on captured Chinese tank

Let's back up to 1970, when the U.S. was six years into the Vietnam War; the year that American forces invaded Cambodia, which borders both North and South Vietnam. Communist forces fighting American military units; North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerrillas, used Cambodia as a refuge and passageway. They would enter this country from the north, and show up in the U.S. controlled southern areas.

In 1973 a cease fire was called in Vietnam. In 1975 the last U.S. forces pulled out of the country for good, leaving behind only POW's and MIA's.

At this point all of Vietnam was under the control of Communist Hanoi and it has remained that way ever since.

What is interesting is that Vietnam was primarily supported by the USSR during the U.S. war, not by neighboring China as might reasonably be expected. China was a big supporter of Vietnam right until the start of the U.S. war; that is the year China's support of Vietnam ceased.

As Wikipedia states, the Chinese Communist Party and the Viet Minh had a long history. When Vietnam was fighting France in 1950, the recently founded communist People's Republic of China and the Viet Minh enjoyed close relations. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the 'Chinese Military Advisory Group' under Wei Guoqing played an important role in the Viet Minh's defeat of the French military.

Relations between the Soviets and Chinese began to dissolve after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin- who was responsible for the Murder of millions of Russians. Mao Zedong said Nikita Khrushchev made a serious error in a 'Secret Speech' that denounced Stalin. What really got Chairman Mao heated was Khrushchev's support of peaceful co-existence with the west.

The hostilities increased and led to what is known as the 'Sino-Soviet split'.

At this point, just prior to the start of the U.S. Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese still supported China, mainly due to China's support of North Vietnam's re-unification policy; something the Soviet Union had so far remained indifferent to.

China withdrew support from North Vietnam the same year the U.S. war began, in 1964, when Khrushchev's party sent him packing. He was replaced with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.

Beginning in 1965, Vietnamese communist loyalty shifted toward the Soviet Union; with both the Soviet Union and China now supplying arms to North Vietnam in their war against South Vietnam and the U.S.

Fallout with Khmer Rouge

The Vietnamese Communists and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge worked together in the beginning, but the relations unraveled when the Cambodian regime demanded that Vietnam return certain parcels of land to Cambodia that had been "lost" several centuries earlier. Vietnam wasn't interested, and Pol Pot responded by laying waste to ethnic Vietnamese in a massacre inside Cambodia.

Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge

It is important to note that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against people of different races including ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodians.

The Soviets ultimately backed the Vietnamese in a war to defeat Pol Pot in Cambodia, following the tragic notorious period of genocide. The People's Republic of China's (PRC) support of Pol Pot caused the USSR to see it all as an opportunity. They backed the seasoned battle forces of the Vietnamese army which easily defeated the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

The Vietnamese knew there could be a reprisal from China, but they chose to take the Soviet support and hoped the show of force would keep the Chinese at bay. In the long run they lost their gamble.

The official Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia happened late in 1978. The Khmer Rouge was inexperienced in combat; their experience was in bullying and murdering the local civilian populace, not in actual military engagement.

By 7 January 1979, Cambodian forces backed by the Vietnamese government, seized the capital Phnom Penh, terminating the Khmer Rouge regime. Pol Pot fled into the jungle and lived for many years. Until 1997 he and a remaining remnant of the Khmer Rouge operated in the border region of Cambodia and Thailand.

The 29 Day War

The only thing missing from China's invasion of Vietnam on 17 February 1979 was aircraft. China rolled across major sections of the Vietnam border with infantry, armor, and artillery. Their 29 day war achieved no substantial victory and failed as a show of force against the Soviet Union.

According to Wikipedia:

Within a single day, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) had advanced some eight kilometers into Vietnam along a broad front. It then slowed and nearly stalled because of heavy Vietnamese resistance and difficulties within the Chinese supply system. On 21 February, the advance resumed against Cao Bang in the far north and against the all-important regional hub of Lang Son. Chinese troops entered Cao Bang on 27 February, but the city was not secured completely until 2 March. Lang Son fell two days later. On 5 March, the Chinese, saying Vietnam had been sufficiently chastised, announced that the campaign was over. Beijing declared its "lesson" finished and the PLA withdrawal was completed on 16 March.

Vietnam's position in the wake of combat operations, was that Beijing had suffered a military setback if not an outright defeat.

According to GlobalSecurity.org:

The 1979 attack confirmed Hanoi's perception of China as a threat. The PAVN high command henceforth had to assume, for planning purposes, that the Chinese might come again and might not halt in the foothills but might drive on to Hanoi. The border war strengthened Soviet-Vietnamese relations. The Soviet military role in Vietnam increased during the 1980s as the Soviets provided arms to Vietnam; moreover, Soviet ships enjoyed access to the harbors at Danang and Cam Ranh Bay, and Soviet reconnaissance aircraft operated out of Vietnamese airfields. The Vietnamese responded to the Chinese campaign by turning the districts along the China border into "iron fortresses" manned by well-equipped and well-trained paramilitary troops. In all, an estimated 600,000 troops were assigned to counter Chinese operations and to stand ready for another Chinese invasion. The precise dimensions of the frontier operations were difficult to determine, but its monetary cost to Vietnam was considerable.

Vietnamese POW's

Chinese POW's

According to the Website SinoVietnameseWar.com, the legacy of the war is enduring, particularly in Vietnam. In this nation already devastated by two recent wars, the Chinese in all essence, implemented a "scorched-earth policy" as they retreated back to China, causing extensive damage to the Vietnamese countryside and infrastructure.

Villages were reduced to rubble, roads and railroads received damage at the hands of the Chinese.

In Gerald Segal's 1985 book Defending China, it was concluded that China's 1979 war against Vietnam was a complete failure: "China failed to force a Vietnamese withdrawal from [Cambodia], failed to end border clashes, failed to cast doubt on the strength of the Soviet power, failed to dispel the image of China as a paper tiger, and failed to draw the United States into an anti-Soviet coalition."

Still, as Wikipedia relates, Bruce Elleman argued that "one of the primary diplomatic goals behind China's attack was to expose Soviet assurances of military support to Vietnam as a fraud. Seen in this light, Beijing's policy was actually a diplomatic success, since Moscow did not actively intervene, thus showing the practical limitations of the Soviet-Vietnamese military pact... China achieved a strategic victory by minimizing the future possibility of a two-front war against the USSR and Vietnam."

China-Vietnam War from Vietnamese perspective

China-Vietnam War from Chinese perspective

"Border skirmishes continued throughout the 1980s, including a significant skirmish in April of 1984; this saw the first use of the Type 81 Assault Rifle by the Chinese," according to SinoVietnameseWar.com.

After years of unsuccessful negotiations, a border pact was finally signed between the two countries in 1999. The exact position of the border was kept secret, problems continued, and Vietnam eventually relinquished the property back to China.

On a positive note, it was announced in December 2007 that the Hanoi-Kunming highway; a landmark in Sino-Vietnamese relations, would be built. The road will cross the border that was once a battlefield for these countries. It should contribute to demilitarizing the border region, as well as facilitating trade and industrial cooperation between the nations, notes SinoVietnameseWar.com.

Sources:

Sino-Vietnamese War - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chinese Invasion of VietnamFebruary 1979 - GlobalSecurity.org

SinoVietnameseWar.com

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Tim King: Salem-News.com Editor and Writer

Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines.

Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Tim has several years of experience in network affiliate news TV stations, having worked as a reporter and photographer at NBC, ABC and FOX stations in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. Serving the community in very real terms, Salem-News.com is the nation's only truly independent high traffic news Website. As News Editor, Tim among other things, is responsible for publishing the original content of 65 Salem-News.com writers. He reminds viewers that emails are easily missed and urges those trying to reach him, to please send a second email if the first goes unanswered. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

Is Cambodia the future shelter for Vietnamese climate exiles?

Neak Leung (Prey Veng, Cambodia). 16/11/2002: Storm near the Neak Leung pier, on the road from Cambodia to Vietnam (Photo: John Vink/Magnum)

22-06-2009
By Laurent Le Gouanvic
Ka-set

Will Cambodia collapse under the weight of thousands of starving Vietnamese exiles, fleeing fields devastated by roaring waves? Much dreaded by Cambodians, the invasion of their territory by the children of Uncle Ho may result not from aggressive territorial ambitions, but from the dramatic consequences of a global warming that would force farmers into a rural exodus as their lands were gradually lost to the sea. If the scenario of a sudden arrival in mass of Vietnamese migrants on the Khmer soil seems unlikely today, several recent reports point out the major environmental risks which people in the Mekong Delta may be faced with in the forthcoming decades. A new challenge for the two nations after a long common history of much turmoil.

Predicting the future with maps, that is what researchers from the United Nations University, the NGO Care International and Columbia University have endeavoured to do in a report published in May 2009, entitled “In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement”. Supported by documents and statistics, the three authors attempt to understand and explain “how environmental shocks and stresses, especially those related to climate change, can push people to leave their homes in search of ‘greener pastures’ … or just to survive.” On the eight maps intended to present regions of the world that are particularly vulnerable and symbolic of ongoing changes, two focus on the consequences of climate changes in the countries where the Mekong flows.

From the sources to the Mekong Delta
One of them features the enormous Himalaya chain, genuine “water towers of Asia” due to the presence of gigantic glaciers where mythical and vital rivers such as the Ganges, the Irrawady or the Mekong take their birth. The glaciers, which constitute natural water resources, are melting at a worrying pace, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The accelerated melting may jeopardise the survival of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and Vietnamese whose farming lands are subjected to the Mekong’s whims.

The fast melting of the glaciers of the Tibetan plateau, the authors stress, will likely provoke important flooding, mainly downstream first, that is in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam and Cambodia. In a second time, in addition to the disastrous floods, there may be the consequences of the construction of new hydropower dams upstream - which will temporarily benefit from important flows but may tend, with time, to deprive inhabitants downstream of diminishing hydraulic resources. A tragedy that is already unfolding, the report underlines.

Increasingly dramatic floods
If floods have long become an integral part of the daily lives of those living in the Mekong Delta, as their lives follow the river’s ebb and flow, their seriousness and frequency have been on the increase and become more and more problematic. “[E]nvironmental change (flooding in this case study) is shown to be a trigger for independent migration decisions [in the Mekong Delta] when livelihoods are negatively affected,” the authors claim, citing the testimonies of Vietnamese who settled in Cambodia, in Phnom Penh, and were interviewed for a field study carried out between October and December 2007 for the “Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios” (EACH-FOR) program.

“Disasters occurred so often [in my native region],” then explained one of the 32 Vietnamese migrants living in the Cambodian capital and interviewed for the study “[M]y family lost the crop [and] had to borrow money to spend. Now, my family is not able to pay off the loan so I have to come here to work to help my family to pay the loan.” Among the 32 people - a non-representative sample of the population of Vietnamese migrants in Cambodia -, three quarters of them spontaneously cited problems related to the natural environment as one of the causes that influenced their decision to leave their homes. Half of them even claimed that the environmental issues had been the reason for their departure. “[T]he floods and the storms occurred all the time, we decided to migrate to earn a living,” confided one of the respondents.

From climate change to human trafficking
In the same study, a Vietnamese doctor working in Phnom Penh reported even more tragic situations: some Vietnamese families allegedly sold their daughters to prostitution networks in Cambodia to ensure their survival, after their crops were destroyed by successive floods. Although this may not be made into a general statement, this observation seems to point to an unexpected consequence of climate change: the increase in human trafficking. The writers conclude that the link between the two phenomena is real, although it was not effectively measured.

Flooded worlds
In addition to the fears prompted by the melting glaciers in the Himalaya, there is another threat, which is more localised and addressed in another map of the report “In Search of Shelter”: the rising sea level. Here again, the researchers from the UNU, Care International and Columbia University echo the conclusions of a previous study made by the World Bank, which claimed that due to the density of its population and of threatened farming areas, Vietnam was one of the two countries at risk of suffering most seriously from a rising general sea level.

On the basis of predictions made in February 2007 by the experts mandated by the World Bank, the May 2009 report stressed that in the future, one Vietnamese out of ten would be faced with displacement due to a seal level rise in the Mekong Delta. Today, no less than 18 million people live in the Mekong Delta, that is 22% of the total population of Vietnam. Also and even more importantly, the region is Vietnam’s green belt, as it represents about 40% of the cultivated land in the country, which provide “half of its national rice production and 80% of its fruit production.”

Two-meter increase, 14 million migrants
The authors speculate that, should the global sea level rise of two meters, nearly 14.2 million Vietnamese - a figure higher than the total population of Cambodia, which currently stands at 13.4 million people - would lose their land to the waters. A frightening prospect. Especially when the figures are read in light of the introduction of the report: “[…] societies affected by climate change may find themselves locked into a downward spiral of ecological degradation, towards the bottom of which social safety nets collapse while tensions and violence rise. In this all-too-plausible worst-case scenario, large populations would be forced to migrate as a matter of immediate survival.”

Vietnam, but also the whole region, including Cambodia, would therefore be faced with an unprecedented migratory and humanitarian crisis that may have economic and political consequences. The Khmer Kingdom, itself subject to draught, in areas that already suffer from it, and to periods of flooding, would then also be faced with the arrival in mass of unwanted Vietnamese farmers ready for everything to save their lives.

Unpredictable consequences
However, the catastrophic scenario, which is based on a two-meter rise of the sea level, represents a hypothesis that not everyone agrees upon. The various patterns selected by the IPCC in the 2007 report, which serves as the reference on this issue, foresees that global warming will increase between +0.6oC and +4oC by 2099. According to the various envisaged predictions, the increases would result in the sea level rising from 0.18 to 0.59 meter by the end of the century. The IPCC warns that these figures are to be taken with a pinch of salt, as the Panel is issuing here scenarios that exclude “future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow”: “[T]he upper values of the ranges given are not to be considered upper bounds for sea level rise,” it stresses. “The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993-2003, but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.” Increase? Decrease? Under these circumstances, it is difficult to predict what the state of farming lands in the Mekong Delta will be in the next fifty years.

Prompting governments to react
The most pessimistic predictions therefore offer at least one interest: that of prompting governments of concerned countries to react in order to anticipate and adapt – if not to fight on their own against climate change. Thus, Vietnamese authorities have decided to set up a programme aimed at controlling population movements related to the new environmental phenomena, entitled “Vietnam Disaster Prevention”, which consists in relocating families living in vulnerable areas. The challenge is significant: the relocations are heavy operations as they require not only to find available land but also to make sure that the displaced families will have access to new means of subsistence and social, health and education structures.

In Cambodia, since 2006, the government drafted a “National Adaptation Programme of Action to Climate Change” supposed to coordinate the various operations and information in this area. However, the Kingdom appears as one of the Asian countries least prepared, according to the “Climate Change Vulnerability Mapping for Southeast Asia” published in January 2009 by the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia. Cambodia is reportedly the country with the weakest “adaptive capacity” in South-East Asia. Although less exposed than other territories to storms and natural catastrophes, the country is, after the Philippines, most at risk of being affected by climate change, due to its weak adaptive capacities.

At the regional level, a lukewarm awareness
Finally, at the regional level, the issue of global warming and CO2 emissions has timidly started to appear at the top of the agenda. On June 16th and 17th, the Asian Development Bank sponsored a high-level meeting on climate change in Asia and the Pacific, while the institution announced the doubling, from 2013, of its investments in “clean energies.” However, a long way remains before the issue of internal and transborder displacements of population be tackled upfront.
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Climate “refugees” or “migrants”, fundamental issues behind the words

While some organisations refer to “climate refugees”, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) recalls that the word “refugee”, as defined in the 1951 Geneva Convention on the statute of refugees, legally concerns only the individuals who have left the country of their nationality due to persecution or founded fear of persecution. Following this official definition, individuals who have left their place of residence for economic or environmental reasons may not be considered as refugees. The terms “environmental migrants or displaced people” are therefore used in the official jargon. The International Organization for Migration therefore uses the following definition: “Environmental migrants are persons or groups of persons who, for reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to have to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their territory or abroad.” The issues involved in these terms and their definitions go beyond the linguistic dimension: a person benefiting from the statute of refugee has the right to be accepted on the territory of state parties to the Geneva Convention, a right that “economic” or “environmental migrants” may not claim currently. The UNHCR therefore demands a global discussion on the statute of the new migrants to ensure their global protection and, if required, to be entrusted with new responsibilities… and the funds necessary.

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.

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.