234 { China’s Quest
CPSU and the CCP over how to defeat “US imperialism.” They understood
that Moscow under Khrushchev was less enthusiastic, and Beijing under Mao
more enthusiastic, about supporting wars of national liberation in the inter-
mediate zone. US intelligence also followed as closely as possible CCP aid to
Southeast Asian revolutionary movements, and had at least a general idea of
the scale of such assistance. Communist China, US leaders concluded, was
still in the zealous ideological expansionist stage of its revolution, while the
Soviets had already left that stage and begun to mellow. Until China too out-
grew its revolutionary expansionist impulse, it had to be contained. To a sig-
nificant degree, US leaders decided for full-scale intervention in Vietnam to
contain what they perceived as Chinese communist expansionism.
US leaders during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations saw what
Moscow and Beijing termed wars of national liberation as a new, more sin-
ister type of communist expansionism. Under Stalin’s global leadership, com-
munists had relied on outright armed invasion—in Korea, for example. But
that had led to war with the United States. So, US strategists concluded, the
Chinese and Vietnamese communists had invented a new form of aggression:
pseudo-insurgency. Rather than crash across recognized borders with uni-
formed troops with tanks and artillery, communist forces dressed in civilian
clothing quietly infiltrated across borders, mixed with local residents, and
seized upon their resentments against the local government. These were cam-
ouflaged to look like purely domestic insurrections, but were in fact manifes-
tations of the strategic thrust of powerful states, like communist China. The
insurgency in South Vietnam was a test case for this new form of communist
aggression, US leaders felt. Just as the United States had learned to deal with
other, earlier forms of communist aggression, it needed now to learn how to
defeat this new form, externally supported wars of national liberation. This,
in any case, typified the thinking of the Kennedy and Johnson administra-
tions. Thus he PRC and the United States reciprocally matched each other in
escalating commitment to Vietnam.
From both the PRC and the US perspectives, what was at stake was the
broad path of development of many nations newly emerged from colonial-
ism. These independent nations were seeking modernization and develop-
ment. The communist powers—the USSR and the PRC, each in their own
ways—were attempting to guide the development of these countries along
the lines of Leninist socialism, the sort of system that existed in the USSR
and the PRC. US leaders believed that the spread of Leninist socialism in
Southeast Asia or elsewhere in the world did not comport with either US val-
ues or security interests, and decided to use the panoply of US power to guide
these countries along liberal democratic lines. At a fundamental level, what
was involved was a contest between China and the United States to shape
the future political-economic evolution of Southeast Asia. Both the PRC and
the United States were powerful states, governed by leaders confident of their