First Published: The Call, Vol. 8, No. 8, February 26, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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After two years of Vietnamese provocations against China’s border region, troops from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army launched a counter-attack last week, dishing out a strong lesson that socialist China will never appease or tolerate aggression.
The swift strike followed several stern warnings from Chinese leaders against Vietnam’s shelling of Chinese villages and other hostile acts. Vietnam has also launched a full-scale invasion against neighboring Democratic Kampuchea, occupying its capital of Phnom Penh and other areas.
On his recent visit to the U.S., Chinese Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-ping) stated: “The role the Vietnamese will play will be even worse than the Cubans. We call the Vietnamese the Cubans of the Orient. If you don’t give them some necessary lessons, it just won’t do.”
China was as good as its word. The counter-strike involving more than 100,000 troops, backed with airpower and armored vehicles, successfully pushed the Vietnamese forces out of Chinese territory and well into their own country to secure the border.
By Feb. 19, Chinese forces had penetrated six miles into Vietnam. Contrary to ’Vietnam’s claims that Vietnamese troops “repelled the invaders,” the Chinese temporarily halted the drive on their own accord. On Feb. 20, reports indicated that fighting had resumed with Chinese troops reaching 10 miles inside the border.
The Chinese paper, People’s Daily, stated in an editorial Feb. 18, “After hitting back at the aggressors as far as is necessary, our frontier forces will turn to guard strictly the frontier of our motherland.”
A Chinese government statement also made it unequivocally clear that they “do not want a single inch of Vietnamese territory.” At the same time they declared that they would not “tolerate wanton incursions into Chinese territory.” The Chinese statement also called for negotiations between the two sides to solve major border questions.
In the past six months alone, the Vietnamese troops have crossed the border over 700 times – laying mines, opening fire on villages and building defense works on Chinese soil. More than 300 Chinese have been killed or wounded in these incidents.
“Such acts of aggression,” warned the Chinese, “if allowed to go unchecked will no doubt endanger the peace and stability of Southeast Asia and even those of the whole of Asia.”
Already the effects of the Chinese strike are being felt. Press reports indicate that the Vietnamese aggressors in Kampuchea were forced to withdraw a significant number of their occupying troops on Feb. 20, diverting them against the Chinese.
The Soviet Union responded to the Chinese strike with loud warnings that they would honor the so-called “friendship treaty” with Vietnam, which is in fact a Soviet-Vietnamese military alliance signed just before the invasion of Kampuchea.
Another treaty signed last week between Vietnamese leader Pham Van Dong and the Kampuchean puppet regime in Phnom Penh gave Vietnam a 25-year right to intervene in Kampuchean affairs.
Whether or not the Soviet Union will attack China is a question left unanswered as we go to press. Soviet troops along the Chinese border have been put on “alert,” and the USSR has threatened to attack.
The Soviet leaders have already shown they will attack an ill-prepared, small country as they have done in Czechoslovakia, Zaire and elsewhere. China, however, presents a more difficult problem for the Soviet social-imperialists. This is especially true in the wake of the recent Soviet-Vietnamese political defeats in the United Nations where Pol Pot’s government, now fighting a guerrilla war against Vietnamese invaders, was given backing by a majority of countries. Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the U.S. and Japan also served to isolate the USSR.
The U.S., as it has been prone to do, took a vacillating and self-contradictory position on the current fighting. Ignoring the Soviet thrust in Asia and its threat to Europe, a U.S. State Department spokesman claimed that the China-Vietnam fighting was “none of our business.“ A statement by National Security Advisor Brzezinski “warned” China while’ also criticizing Vietnam’s attack against Kampuchea.
The U.S. appears bent on placating the Soviet-Vietnamese aggressors, while at the same time protecting its newly-established relations with China. On the other hand, China’s forthright actions were posed as an example to the appeasers, showing that a country which firmly and militantly defends itself has a better, chance against Soviet aggression than one which apologizes for the new czars and encourages them onward.
Another U.S. State Department spokesman claimed that the U.S. opposed “any use of force outside one’s own territory.” But China’s actions were clearly distinguishable from the aggressive imperialist intervention in Indochina perpetrated by the U.S. in the ’60s.
The U.S. aggressors of yesterday have not changed their colors, but simply find it difficult to oppose the USSR which acts today like the U.S. did a decade ago. This accounts for the new-found “opposition to war” on the part of the U.S. imperialists.
China’s successful counter-attack against Vietnam with its limited aims was in no way an “invasion” as it is billed in the U.S. and; Soviet press. It is precisely a “lesson” both to the Vietnamese and to all those who support or appease Soviet aggression in the world today.