The surprise Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 shocked the international community. The two communist nations had seemed firm political and cultural allies, but the twenty-nine-day border war imposed heavy casualties, ruined urban and agricultural infrastructure, leveled three Vietnamese cities, and catalyzed a decadelong conflict. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaoming Zhang traces the roots of the conflict to the historic relationship between the peoples of China and Vietnam, the ongoing Sino-Soviet dispute, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's desire to modernize his country. Deng's perceptions of the Soviet Union, combined with his plans for economic and military reform, shaped China's strategic vision. Drawing on newly declassified Chinese documents and memoirs by senior military and civilian figures, Zhang takes readers into the heart of Beijing's decision-making process and illustrates the war's importance for understanding the modern Chinese military, as well as China's role in the Asian-Pacific world today.

Why did the People's Republic of China and Vietnam, two "comrades and brothers," engage in such a tragic war?

In February 1979, China launched a full scale attack on Vietnam bringing to the surface the deep tension between the two socialist neighbours. The importance of the resultant war is often overlooked. Millions of people throughout the region were affected, and the frictions that remain in the wake of the war threaten the prospects for peace not only in Southeast Asia, but also the whole Asia-Pacific region as well. This is a full scale examination of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War - the events that led to it, the Cold War aftermath, and the implications for the region and beyond.

This well-researched volume examines the Sino-Vietnamese hostilities of the late 1970s and 1980s, attempting to understand them as strategic, operational and tactical events. The Sino-Vietnamese War was the third Indochina war, and contemporary Southeast Asia cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge that the Vietnamese fought three, not two, wars to establish their current role in the region. The war was not about the Sino-Vietnamese border, as frequently claimed, but about China’s support for its Cambodian ally, the Khmer Rouge, and the book addresses US and ASEAN involvement in the effort to support the regime. Although the Chinese completed their troop withdrawal in March 1979, they retained their strategic goal of driving Vietnam out of Cambodia at least until 1988, but it was evident by 1984-85 that the PLA, held back by the drag of its ‘Maoist’ organization, doctrine, equipment, and personnel, was not an effective instrument of coercion. Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War will be of great interest to all students of the Third Indochina War, Asian political history, Chinese security and strategic studies in general.

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.

In 1979, under Deng Xiaoping's leadership, China launched a ground war against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. After three weeks of combat using mainly ground forces, the Chinese secured their operational objectives, then quickly withdrew. For what purpose and with what goals? The author reveals some possibilities.

This book covers the chronological development and operational experience of the Chinese Army's intervention in the Vietnam War against the U.S. in 1968-1973. Based on communist sources and interviews, it examines China's intentions, decision-making, war preparation, training, battle plan and execution, tactical problem solving, political indoctrination, and combat assessment.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975, they inherited a war-ravaged and internationally isolated country. Pol Pot’s government espoused the rhetoric of self-reliance, but Democratic Kampuchea was utterly dependent on Chinese foreign aid and technical assistance to survive. Yet in a markedly asymmetrical relationship between a modernizing, nuclear power and a virtually premodern state, China was largely unable to use its power to influence Cambodian politics or policy. In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha traces this surprising lack of influence to variations between the Chinese and Cambodian institutions that administered military aid, technology transfer, and international trade. Today, China’s extensive engagement with the developing world suggests an inexorably rising China in the process of securing a degree of economic and political dominance that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Yet, China’s experience with its first-ever client state suggests that the effectiveness of Chinese foreign aid, and influence that comes with it, is only as good as the institutions that manage the relationship. By focusing on the links between China and Democratic Kampuchea, Mertha peers into the “black box” of Chinese foreign aid to illustrate how domestic institutional fragmentation limits Beijing’s ability to influence the countries that accept its assistance.

This is the first systematic study of modern China's military campaigns and the actual fighting conducted by the People's Liberation Army since the founding of the People's Republic. It provides a general overview of the evolution of PLA military doctrine, and then focuses on major combat episodes from the civil war with the Nationalists to the last significant combat in Vietnam in 1979, in addition to navy and air operations through 1999. In contrast to the many works on the specifics and hardware of China's military modernization, this book discusses such topics as military planning, command, and control; fighting and politics; combat tactics and performance; technological catch-up and doctrinal flexibility; the role of Mao Zedong; scale and typologies of fighting; and deterrence. The contributors include scholars from Mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States, who draw from a wealth of fresh archival sources.

In this unique study of China s militarism, Andrew Scobell examines the use of military force abroad - as in Korea (1950), Vietnam (1979), and the Taiwan Strait (1995 1996) - and domestically, as during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and in the 1989 military crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Debunking the view that China has become increasingly belligerent in recent years because of the growing influence of soldiers, Scobell concludes that China s strategic culture has remained unchanged for decades. Nevertheless, the author uncovers the existence of a Cult of Defense in Chinese strategic culture. The author warns that this Cult of Defense disposes Chinese leaders to rationalize all military deployment as defensive, while changes in the People s Liberation Army s doctrine and capabilities over the past two decades suggest that China s twenty-first century leaders may use military force more readily than their predecessors.