It’s tough being an American. After the last eight years we…lack a certain moral standing in the world. Any comment or criticism directed at human rights or state behavior is met with the immediate response: “Yeah, but you guys invaded Iraq.” Nowhere, perhaps, is this witty rejoinder more commonly heard than in the PRC, with “China has NEVER invaded ANYONE” sure to follow.
Well, it does depend on what you mean by “invade” and “anyone,” but this isn’t a post about Τibet, it’s about Vietnam.
On this date in 1979, the PLA launched a massive invasion of Vietnam with 200,000 troops supported by artillery, and armor.* The assault was an attempt by Beijing to punish that country for toppling the PRC-backed Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia, developing closer ties with the Soviet union, and the treatment of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam.
The result was disaster. Fighting against battle-hardened guerrillas and having made a fateful decision to forgo air cover, PLA casualties were enormous with between 25,000 to 63,000 Chinese soldiers killed. Vietnamese figures range as high as 100,000 soldiers and civilian casualties. By comparison, the total number of US soldiers killed in action during the decade-plus American debacle in Southeast Asia was around 57,000. In any case, by the middle of March, the PRC had called it a draw, declaring Vietnam sufficiently chastened with the two countries engaging in low-level border skirmishes for the better part of the next decade.
The war is almost completely forgotten in China but in Vietnam it is remembered as the last in a series of brutal foreign invasions of their territory. In 1993 I traveled to the “War Crimes Museum” in Ho Chi Minh City and was surprised that almost as much wall space was devoted to the Chinese invasion as to the French and US occupation. Even ten years after the last foreign troops had left, the horrible scars of war still remained all over the country. Ideology aside, I think all can agree on the terrible tragedy suffered by the Vietnamese people during the long decades of occupation and conflict.
In The Guardian, D’arcy Doran interviews Chinese veterans of the conflict. They long for closure even as their government refuses to acknowledge the horrible mistakes and costs of the invasion.
After a year surrounded by death in Vietnam — gripping a machine gun between diving for cover from howitzer fire — Zhou Feng decided to spend the rest of his days protecting life, not ending it.
The former infantryman said the shame he felt at all the death pushed him to study animal medicine when he returned from the front.
Zhou, 45, now works at a veterinary clinic and at home he shelters 30 stray dogs — by coincidence one for each year since the war.
“In China, the government respects history about as much as they respect these dogs,” Zhou said.
Chinese academics are prohibited from studying the war, in part to avoid damaging relations with former foe Vietnam, said Xiaoming Zhang, an associate professor at the US military’s Air War College in Alabama.
Zhang is writing a book about the conflict that he hopes will be the closest thing to a Chinese account of what happened.
“It was Deng Xiaoping’s war,” Zhang said, adding study of the bloody and inconclusive war may also be banned to prevent it from becoming a “black stain” on the record of the father of China’s economic reform.
The United States of course had its own war in Vietnam and many American veterans have found it difficult to achieve the kind closure that Mr. Zhou also seeks. But the whitewashing of the past for political and ideological purposes does not heal history’s wounds, it simply covers them and causes them to fester.
UPDATE: Also see Benjamin Lim’s post at Reuter’s Changing China blog.
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*And before anyone starts, I freely admit that the US has invaded many more countries (including ones like Japan and Germany) than China has in the 20th century. We lead the world in building bombs and finding places to chuck ‘em. That said, given the catastrophic stupidity manifested by the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979, one could argue (tongue in cheek, of course) that it’s not that the PLA doesn’t WANT to invade other countries, it’s just that they really suck at it. Not that US strategy in recent years has been a whole lot better.
