Forgotten War: How China Was Crushed By Vietnam in a 1979 Conflict

[mike2000 is back]

Funny enough it was a tragic war indeed. Former communist anti American allies turned on each other and fought a shirt but bloody war which sowed the seeds of hostility and distrusts which still lasts to this day.
So being allies is not about ideology (unlike what Mao used to believe ) , it's about shared interests. Reason a not so communist country like Thailand/Pakistan has always been friendly and had close ties with China unlike say Communist Vietnam or even better than say N.Korea.

 

[mike2000 is back]

We killed 100,000 Vietnamese civilians over merely three weeks in 1979... that's killed not including injured and missing... and not including the border skirmishes that continued until 1984 when we decisively routed the Vietnamese Army

War of the Dragons: The Sino-Vietnamese War, 1979

China determined that Vietnam, heady with its victory in the American War, must be taught a lesson. Deng Xiaoping, China’s diminutive leader, had good

www.historynet.com

Sino-Vietnamese conflicts (1979–1991) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

From your first link it says :
" For Deng, this situation – although ominous – was ripe with opportunities. A punitive strike against Vietnam would make the Vietnamese more reasonable, show Soviet patronage to be worthless, and expose the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leadership as hopelessly inadequate. Deng’s well-reasoned strategy to modernize China required the removal of obstructionist Maoist PLA cadres. He scandalized the Maoists by asking, “What does a dead 19th-century German Jew [Karl Marx] have to teach China?” Combat with the Vietnamese would be the PLA’s blood test."


That's a very interesting thing to see. Shows that Deng was indeed a visionary and a real statesman that knew how to run a country not just win it. Mao was good at winning/seizing power in a country but not good at running it. He should have step aside after a decade or so of reign and remain as a figure head/patron from the sides. Staying in power for too long corrupts and always leads to abuse of power , reason he made so many "mistakes" after a decade or so from power. Deng was more pragmatic and had a real plan on how to develop the country and bring it out of it's state of abject poverty . A real statesman.
Without him China will be just another bigger version of North Korea today. China was lucky to have a leader like Deng who ruled for over a decade to force reforms and uproot backward isolationists maoists who wanted the country to remain a backward sickman of Asia.

 

[redtom]

I am willing to believe all the propaganda about China.However, China is the biggest threat in the world, China has never won any war, China has been defeated all the time, China has been expanding.I don't know which one to believe.

 

[beijingwalker]

chines had to return back under heavy losses inflicted by vietnamese with black face in the eyes of the world

If we destroyed north India but suffered some causalties

From your first link it says :
" For Deng, this situation – although ominous – was ripe with opportunities. A punitive strike against Vietnam would make the Vietnamese more reasonable, show Soviet patronage to be worthless, and expose the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leadership as hopelessly inadequate. Deng’s well-reasoned strategy to modernize China required the removal of obstructionist Maoist PLA cadres. He scandalized the Maoists by asking, “What does a dead 19th-century German Jew [Karl Marx] have to teach China?” Combat with the Vietnamese would be the PLA’s blood test."


That's a very interesting thing to see. Shows that Deng was indeed a visionary and a real statesman that knew how to run a country not just win it. Mao was good at winning/seizing power in a country but not good at running it. He should have step aside after a decade or so of reign and remain as a figure head/patron from the sides. Staying in power for too long corrupts and always leads to abuse of power , reason he made so many "mistakes" after a decade or so from power. Deng was more pragmatic and had a real plan on how to develop the country and bring it out of it's state of abject poverty . A real statesman.
Without him China will be just another bigger version of North Korea today. China was lucky to have a leader like Deng who ruled for over a decade to force reforms and uproot backward isolationists maoists who wanted the country to remain a backward sickman of Asia.

Many Vietnamese believe that Vietnam was tricked into a war with China set up by Deng and unknowings became a paw in Deng grand strategy about China's future. Deng sacrificed Vietnam to open the gate of the western market for Chinese goods.

 

[letsrock]

If so Vietnam suffered more, the whole north was destroyed, it took them a decade to rebuild the infrastructure.

Thats the language of an invader. If china started the war with an objective of separating cambodia from vietnam and failed then china was defeated. Gloating over destruction of common infrstrucutre and deaths of civilians is something savages do.

 

[beijingwalker]

If china started the war with an objective of separating cambodia from vietnam

No, many people are wrong about it, China couldn't care about cambodia the less, China's goal is to trick the west to open its market to China, Deng was a very smart and calculating guy and he won.

 

[letsrock]

No, many people are wrong about it, China couldn't care about cambodia the less, China's goal is to trick the west to open its market to China, Deng was a very smart and calculating guy and he won.

This actually makes it sound even worse - to trick west thousands of Vietnamese need to die ?

 

[beijingwalker]

This actually makes it sound even worse - to trick west thousands of Vietnamese need to die ?

It was not very glorious I admit, but politicians only take care of their own countries interests.

 

[khansaheeb]

We killed 100,000 Vietnamese civilians over merely three weeks in 1979... that's killed not including injured and missing... and not including the border skirmishes that continued until 1984 when we decisively routed the Vietnamese Army

War of the Dragons: The Sino-Vietnamese War, 1979

China determined that Vietnam, heady with its victory in the American War, must be taught a lesson. Deng Xiaoping, China’s diminutive leader, had good

www.historynet.com

Sino-Vietnamese conflicts (1979–1991) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Why you guys want to fight Vietnam , they were your allies?

 

[letsrock]

It was not very glorious I admit, but politicians only take care of their own countries interests.

Not usually by massacring hundreds of thousands of people. I think its time for china to come to world stage and lay out what it believes in as right or wrong - not just for chinese - but for humanity at large. I would be horrified if china thinks nothing of killing of hundreds of thousands of people just to trick this guy or that or increase gdp by 10 percent.

 

[Figaro]

Why you guys want to fight Vietnam , they were your allies?

The war was primarily due to two things : Vietnam siding with the USSR over China and the expulsion of the Hoa (ethnic Chinese people) by the Vietnamese government. After Ho Chi Minh's death, relations between both China and Vietnam deteriorated somewhat and after Mao's death a couple of years later, their relationship nosedived because of the above factors.

We killed 100,000 Vietnamese civilians over merely three weeks in 1979... that's killed not including injured and missing... and not including the border skirmishes that continued until 1984 when we decisively routed the Vietnamese Army

War of the Dragons: The Sino-Vietnamese War, 1979

China determined that Vietnam, heady with its victory in the American War, must be taught a lesson. Deng Xiaoping, China’s diminutive leader, had good

www.historynet.com

Sino-Vietnamese conflicts (1979–1991) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I'm pretty sure a huge portion of those 100,000 civilians killed were actually Vietnamese militia/guerillas. As the French, the Americans, and lastly the Chinese have experienced, it is basically impossible to identify the difference between Vietnamese civilians and guerrillas. There is no doubt probably a lot of civilians died during the conflict but most of the Vietnamese losses were personnel losses as opposed to civilian ones.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

Not usually by massacring hundreds of thousands of people. I think its time for china to come to world stage and lay out what it believes in as right or wrong - not just for chinese - but for humanity at large. I would be horrified if china thinks nothing of killing of hundreds of thousands of people just to trick this guy or that or increase gdp by 10 percent.

Deng was the product of an era where British or Japanese imperialists could execute 10 Chinese if 1 of them even looked at them wrong.

His policies and attitudes are a product of his times.

Hu Jintao and then Xi Jinping clearly care much more about preserving life as much as possible.

 

[nahtanbob]

What about the US-Vietnam war.
Who was crushed in that war?

Vietnam was destroyed

 

[Dungeness]

China‘s strategic goal of invading Vietnam was to prevent Vietnam from forming a "Greater Vietnam" by annexing Cambodia and Laos (aka Indo-China). From this perspective, China won the war as it eliminated the possibility of a potentially powerful adversary at its border, for good.

The war was never meant to occupy Vietnam or grab land from Vietnam, which was officially declared from the very begining of the war. So saying China was "crushed", simply because it withdrew its troop a month later on its own initiative, was a dishonest self serving statement.

 

[Pakistan Space Agency]

1. Vietnam invaded and overthrew the Chinese allied Cambodian Government.
2. China invaded Vietnam, taking a strategic mountain just 80 km from Vietnamese capital.
3. Vietnam announces to withdraw from Cambodia.
4. China withdrew from Vietnam.

Where is the Vietnamese victory in all of this?