China Invades Vietnam

Date February 17-March 16, 1979

Objecting to Vietnam’s harassment of ethnic Chinese, alliance with the Soviet Union, and preparations for war against Cambodia, leaders of the People’s Republic of China waged a short, punitive invasion of northern Vietnam that resulted in high casualties on both sides.

Also known as Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979; Third Indo-Chinese War

Locale Northern Vietnam

Key Figures

• Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p’ing; 1904-1997), paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China in a variety of top positions, 1977-1989
• Xu Shiyou (Hsu Shih-yu; 1906-1985), Chinese general in command during the invasion into Vietnam
• Yang Dezhi (Yang Te-chih; 1911-1994), Chinese general who served as deputy to Xu Shiyou
• Van Tien Dung (1917-2002), commander in chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1974-1980

Summary of Event

After the reunification of the former North Vietnam and South Vietnam as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on January 1, 1976, the relationship between that nation and the Communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) began to sour. The Chinese, who had supported the Communist Vietnamese against the French and later the Americans in South Vietnam from 1950 to 1975, perceived the Vietnamese as insolent and lacking in gratitude.

Vietnam acted against ethnic Chinese in southern Vietnam, who fled by the thousands in early 1978, and armed clashes took place along the border of northern Vietnam and southeastern China. Vietnam looked for a close alliance with China’s Communist rival, the Soviet Union, making China feel encircled. Vietnam also got ready to topple the murderous Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, a Chinese ally.

By July, 1978, Deng Xiaoping, vice premier of the State Council of the PRC, formed a leadership consensus for a limited attack on Vietnam that, in China’s view, would teach the Vietnamese a lesson. On November 3, 1978, Vietnam and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, further alienating the PRC. On November 23, the general staff of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) mobilized about 300,000 troops.

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam attacked the Khmer Rouge. Soon thereafter, on January 1, 1979, Deng appointed the commanders of the Chinese strike force against Vietnam, General Xu Shiyou and his deputy, General Yang Dezhi. The Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge from the Cambodian capital city, Phnom Penh, on January 7.

Deng chose February 15 to announce China’s imminent attack. The date was significant because it was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the 1950 Sino-Soviet friendship treaty, signaling trouble ahead to the Soviets, whom Deng warned not to intervene.

China’s attack into northern Vietnam began at 5:00 a.m. on February 17, 1979. The PRC called the event a self-defense counterattack. Roughly 70,000 Chinese soldiers from six to seven divisions participated in the first twenty-six strikes across the 480-mile-long border. Against this force, Vietnam had some 75,000 to 100,000 regular border and militia troops and many civilian volunteers. Deng reiterated that the punitive force was to advance no more than 31 miles into Vietnam and must withdraw after capturing key provincial cities. From west to east, the Chinese targets were the provincial capital of Lao Cai on the Red River, the mountainous provincial capitals of Ha Giang and Caobang, and the strategic town of Lang Son across the Friendship Pass from China to Vietnam.

Against Lao Cai, General Yang committed massive frontal attacks supported by tanks and artillery, while General Xu commanded the attacks against Caobang and Dong Dang just north on the road from Lang Son to China. General Van Tien Dung, commander in chief of the People’s Army of Vietnam, flew from Cambodia to Hanoi to direct the defense.

On February 18, the Soviet Union announced that it would honor its treaty obligations toward Vietnam by providing increased assistance but made it clear it would not attack China. The massed Chinese air force did not fly sorties over Vietnam, which was protected by a formidable air-defense system.

In spite of the Vietnamese leadership’s confusion about the true scope and aim of the Chinese attack, the Vietnamese defenders fought bravely and tenaciously. The mountainous terrain gave the defenders an advantage, and the Chinese troops could not advance as quickly as planned. After the first day, some Chinese spearheads had moved about ten miles into northern Vietnam, but the planned lightning attack against the provincial capital of Caobang stalled, and General Xu had to order a halt to the assault on the city. The strong defenses of Dong Dang and Lao Cai similarly thwarted Chinese plans.

The Vietnamese used ambushes on Chinese lines of support to slow down their attack, supported by artillery and tanks. Vietnamese forces were able to damage or destroy about eighty tanks and armored vehicles out of China’s attack force of about two hundred tanks. Nevertheless, the sheer force of the PLA attack gained ground at the cost of high losses on both sides.

With the Vietnamese splitting into small battle groups that counterattacked the Chinese relentlessly, the plan for a quick strike by large Chinese forces along the major roads and toward their targeted Vietnamese cities came to a halt. Chinese troops broke into smaller units that left the major roads to search for and destroy resisting Vietnamese units in close combat, as in the Trung Khanh pocket north of Caobang.

As his defense held tenaciously, General Van decided to keep back his best regular Vietnamese troops to avoid giving the Chinese the prestigious targets they had hoped for. The Chinese attack slowed down over the period February 22-24 as the Chinese troops rested and resupplied. The slow tempo of the punitive strike worried the Chinese leadership, and orders came for decisive assaults.

On February 27, Chinese troops took fighting into Caobang, but they could not secure the city until March 2. Also on February 27, General Xu launched a major artillery attack against the defense of Lang Son. With heavy fighting, Chinese troops finally entered the northern part of the city on March 2. By that time, Lao Cai had fallen to the Chinese.

On March 2, as the Chinese force had grown to about 80,000 soldiers drawn from twenty-five divisions and had conquered most of its targets, the PRC began a withdrawal. However, because Vietnam publicly insisted that Lang Son was still in its hands, General Xu ordered a full-scale assault from the Chinese-controlled northern outskirts. For three days, Lang Son suffered fierce urban combat before the Chinese took the city completely by capturing Hill 413 at 2:40 p.m. on March 5. A few hours later, China announced its withdrawal from Vietnam. On March 16, 1979, the last PLA soldiers left Vietnam.

Both sides in the conflict had suffered high casualties. Most historians accept estimates of about 26,000 Chinese and 20,000 Vietnamese military fatalities in the course of the Chinese invasion, with many more wounded. Vietnamese claims of civilian fatalities dropped over the years after the conflict from 100,000 to 10,000, with a corresponding increase in military losses. It appears not unlikely that military and civilian losses on both sides reached about 75,000.

Significance

The 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War revealed a deep split in the world’s Communist camp, proving that those who had argued that the Communist nations were not one monolithic block were right. In China, the war strengthened the position of Deng Xiaoping, which helped him to promote his “four modernizations” program. Deng became chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party in 1981.

Because China reached its military objectives in Vietnam less quickly than planned and at much higher cost than expected, owing to a surprisingly tenacious Vietnamese defense, many observers outside China viewed the war as a Chinese failure. China, however, viewed the war as a strategic victory: The PRC had punished Vietnam, and Vietnam’s ally, the Soviet Union, had not dared to intervene militarily. At least one American historian asserted that the Sino-Vietnamese War signaled the end of the Soviet Union as a superpower. However, given that both the Soviet Union and the PRC had nuclear arms, it is probable that the Soviet Union restrained itself as long as the war remained limited, just as the PRC publicly declined to save the Khmer Rouge in January, 1979.

Chinese-Vietnamese relations remained severely damaged by the Sino-Vietnamese War. From July, 1980, to January, 1987, six major border clashes took place between the two nations. Vietnam bore a high economic cost as it continued to maintain military preparedness against China. It was not until after the Tiananmen Square incident of June 4, 1989, that Vietnam and the PRC began talks on normalization of their relationship, on August 11, 1989. In 1999, the PRC and Vietnam signed a border pact whereby China gained some slivers of Vietnamese territory.

Bibliography

Bakshi, G. D. “The Sino-Vietnamese War, 1979: Case Studies in Limited Wars.” Indian Defense Review 14 (July-September, 2000). Focuses primarily on the military events of the war. Discusses the theory of limited war and compares Chinese and Vietnamese patterns of operations. Includes select bibliography.

Chen, King C. China’s War with Vietnam, 1979. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1987. Standard resource on the war covers the events in context and comprehensively. Includes bibliography and index.

Elleman, Bruce. Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795-1989. New York: Routledge, 2001. History of China’s military actions from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century covers the Sino-Vietnamese war in detail in chapter 17. Argues that China successfully proved the Soviet Union lacked the power to protect its ally Vietnam and that the war can be seen as a first step toward the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. Includes bibliography and index.

Jencks, Harlan. “China’s ’Punitive War’ on Vietnam: A Military Assessment.” Asian Survey 19 (August, 1979): 801-815. Presents an immediate academic response to the war. Covers China’s reasons for waging it and what was learned of China’s military capabilities. Includes map.

Zhang, Xiaoming. “China’s War with Vietnam: A Reassessment.” China Quarterly 184 (December, 2005): 851-874. Covers events of the war from a Chinese viewpoint, making use of previously unavailable documents. Presents excellent discussion of China’s decision to go to war and lessons learned on the Chinese side. Includes map.