Table Of ContentThe Third Indochina War
This book looks afresh at some of the key issues of the Third Indochina War,
fought between Vietnam, China and Cambodia. Although the wars that
erupted at the end of the 1970s redefined international relations in Eastern
Asia to a larger degree than any other set of events, few scholars have
attempted to revisit their causes and effects since Russian and Chinese arch-
ives were opened up in the early 1990s.
Drawing on these new sources, this volume reinterprets the causes of the
Vietnamese–Cambodian and Sino-Vietnamese conflicts, looking at the long-
term and immediate origins of the wars. It shows both the links between
policies and policy assumptions in the different countries that were involved
and the dynamics – national, regional and international – that drove these
conflicts towards war. Rather than explaining the conflicts in terms of age-old
resentments and suspicions, or seeing war between the former allies as the
necessary outcome of the conflicts of the 1970s, the contributors have set out
to look at the concrete causes for the breakdown in cooperation and the road
to war.
This book will be of much interest to all students of the Cold War, Southeast
Asian history, international relations and security studies in general.
Odd Arne Westad is convenor of the Department of International History at
the London School of Economics and director of its Cold War Studies
Centre.
Sophie Quinn-Judge is Associate Director of Temple University’s Center for
Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society and a Senior Lecturer in History
at Temple.
Cass Series: Cold War History
Series Editors: Odd Arne Westad and Michael Cox
ISSN: 1471–3829
In the new history of the Cold War that has been forming since 1989, many of the
established truths about the international conflict that shaped the latter half of the
twentieth century have come up for revision. The present series is an attempt to make
available interpretations and materials that will help further the development of this
new history, and it will concentrate in particular on publishing expositions of key
historical issues and critical surveys of newly available sources.
1 Reviewing the Cold War
Approaches, Interpretations, and Theory
Odd Arne Westad (ed.)
2 Rethinking Theory and History in the Cold War
Richard Saull
3 British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War
Marrku Ruotsila
4 Europe, Cold War and Co-existence, 1953–1965
Wilfred Loth (ed.)
5 The Last Decade of the Cold War
From Conflict Escalation to Conflict Transformation
Olav Njølstad (ed.)
6 Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War
Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations
Silvo Pons and Federico Romero (eds)
7 Across the Blocs
Cold War Cultural and Social History
Rana Mitter and Patrick Major (eds)
8 US Paramilitary Assistance to South Vietnam
Insurgency, Subversion and Public Order
William Rosenau
9 The European Community and the Crises of the 1960s
Negotiating the Gaullist Challenge
N. Piers Ludlow
10 Soviet-Vietnam Relations and the Role of China 1949–64
Changing Alliances
Mari Olsen
11 The Third Indochina War
Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79
Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge (eds)
The Third Indochina War
Conflict between China, Vietnam
and Cambodia, 1972–79
Edited by Odd Arne Westad and
Sophie Quinn-Judge
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2006 Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The Third Indochina War: conflict between China, Vietnam and
Cambodia, 1972–79 / edited by Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-
Judge.
p. cm. – (Cold War history ISSN 1471–3829; 11)
Includes index.
ISBN 0–415–39058–3 (hardback)
1. Indochina – History – 1945– . 2. Vietnam – Foreign relations –
China. 3. China – Foreign relations – Vietnam. 4. Vietnam – Foreign
relations – Cambodia. 5. Cambodia – Foreign relations – Vietnam.
6. Sino-Vietnamese Conflict, 1979 – Causes. 7. Cambodian–Vietnamese
Conflict, 1977–1991– Causes. 8. Vietnam – Foreign relations. I. Westad,
Odd, Arne. II. Quinn-Judge, Sophie. III. Series: Cass series – Cold War
History; 11.
DS550.T455 2006
959.704′4– dc22 2005034237
ISBN10: 0–415–39058–3 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–96857–3 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–39058–3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–96857–4 (ebk)
Contents
List of contributors vii
Introduction: from war to peace to war in Indochina 1
ODD ARNE WESTAD
1 The Sino-Vietnamese split and the Indochina
War, 1968–1975 12
LIEN-HANG T. NGUYEN
2 China, the Vietnam War, and the Sino-American
rapprochement, 1968–1973 33
CHEN JIAN
3 The changing post-war US strategy in Indochina 65
CÉCILE MENÉTREY-MONCHAU
4 The Paris Agreement of 1973 and Vietnam’s vision of the future 87
LUU DOAN HUYNH
5 The Paris Agreement and Vietnam–ASEAN relations in
the 1970s 103
NGUYEN VU TUNG
6 The socialization of South Vietnam 126
NGÔ VINH LONG
7 Vietnam, the Third Indochina War and the meltdown of
Asian internationalism 152
CHRISTOPHER E. GOSCHA
8 External and indigenous sources of Khmer Rouge ideology 187
BEN KIERNAN
9 Victory on the battlefield; isolation in Asia: Vietnam’s
Cambodia decade, 1979–1989 207
SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE
vi Contents
Appendix 1: The Third Indochina War: chronology of events
from 1972 to 1979 231
SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE
Appendix 2: Chronology of the Hoa refugee crisis in Vietnam 234
SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE
Index 238
Contributors
Chen Jian is Michael J. Zak Professor of the History of US–China Relations
at Cornell University. Among his many publications are China’s Road to
the Korean War: The Making of the Chinese–American Confrontation
(1994) and Mao’s China and the Cold War (2001).
Christopher E. Goscha is associate professor in the History Department at
the Université du Québec in Montréal. He has published several articles
and books on Southeast Asian international history as well as on the
colonization and decolonization of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia), including Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the
Vietnamese Revolution (1885–1954) (1999) and Vietnam or Indochina?
Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism (1887–1954)
(1995).
Ben Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History and professor of
international and area studies at Yale University. He is the founding
director of Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program (www.yale.edu/cgp) and
the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power and The Pol Pot Regime.
Luu Doan Huynh started as a soldier of the Vietnamese Liberation army. He
then worked in Vietnam’s foreign ministry from l948 to October l987, with
postings as a staff member of Vietnam’s delegation to the conference on
Laos in Geneva (l96l–l962) and as the political counsellor of the Vietnam
Embassy in Bangkok (l978–l983) and in Canberra (l984–l985). He was
also a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations.
His publications include The Vietnam War, Vietnamese and American
perspectives, co-edited with Jayne Werner (1993).
Cécile Menétrey-Monchau obtained her Ph.D. in historical studies special-
izing in US foreign policy from the University of Cambridge in 2003.
She now works as a consultant within the UN system. Her Ph.D. thesis
was recently published under the title American–Vietnamese Relations in
the Wake of War: Diplomacy after the Capture of Saigon, 1975–1979.
Ngô Vinh Long is professor of Asian Studies at the University of Maine,
viii Contributors
teaching courses on China, Japan, South Asia, Southeast Asia and
Vietnam. His specialties include social and economic development in Asia
and US relations with Asian countries.
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen obtained her Ph.D. from Yale University. Her thesis
is entitled “Between the Storms: An International History of the Vietnam
War, 1968–1973”. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the John
M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
Nguyen Vu Tung joined the Institute for International Relations in 1990 and
is now a lecturer in its Department of World Politics and Vietnamese
Diplomacy. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia Uni-
versity in 2003. His main areas of research include international relations
in Southeast Asia, and Vietnamese foreign policy and relations with the
United States and ASEAN.
Sophie Quinn-Judge is associate director of Temple University’s Center for
Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society and a senior lecturer in
history at Temple. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and
African Studies in London. She is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The
Missing Years (2003).
Odd Arne Westad is convenor of the Department of International History at
the London School of Economics and director of its Cold War Studies
Centre. He has written or edited a large number of books on contemporary
international history, the most recent of which are The Global Cold War:
Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005); Decisive
Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (2003); and, with Jussi
Hanhimaki, The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness
Accounts (2003).
Introduction
From war to peace to war in
Indochina
Odd Arne Westad
The wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China in 1978–1979 created
shock-waves within the international system of states. Not only was this the
first time that countries led by Communist parties had been at war with each
other, but these wars also happened in the immediate aftermath of the Second
Indochina War, during which the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian
Communists had been allies fighting the United States. For many, the world
seemed to have turned upside down. The certainties of the past – especially
the question of who was allied to whom – seemed to evaporate alongside the
hopes for stability and peace in Indochina. Those in the West who had sup-
ported the US intervention against Vietnamese Communism as a necessary
containment of China were in for a particularly rude shock. “These wars
exploded our world-view,” one of them said; “... they gave accepted truths a
real beating.”1
But, if the West was shocked, the shock in the Third World was perhaps
even greater. I was in Mozambique in December 1978, and remember how
many young activists in Maputo came to discuss the Vietnamese war against
Pol Pot. There was disbelief in their eyes when they read the news. To the new
post-colonial Mozambican elite, eager to ally itself with the socialist states
and build socialism in their own country, the fact that two declared socialist
states were now at war with each other was very hard to swallow. Even if
much was already known about the atrocities the Khmer Rouge had per-
petrated against the people of Cambodia, Cold War labels tended to obscure
this knowledge. Socialist countries simply did not fight each other, I was told
again and again. The war had to be an imperialist provocation, especially
since the peoples involved were the “heroic” peoples of Indochina, who had
provided so much inspiration for left-wing movements across the Third
World in the 1960s and 1970s. “After this,” I remember one young activist
telling me, “the world will never be the same again.”
But if December 1978 was bad enough for Third World socialism, matters
got worse the following year. The Chinese invasion of Vietnam added to the
sense of confusion, although most left-wing movements concluded rather
quickly that China had become an opponent rather than a supporter of social-
ism in the Third World. The worst shock, however, was the documentation of
