Countering the United States in Vietnam } 251
tactics. They wish that you would order your regular forces to fight
so they can destroy your main forces. But you were not deceived.
Fighting a war of attrition is like having a meal: [it is best] not to have
too big a bite.^36
Mao and Zhou Enlai felt that offensives to seize cities were premature.
As Zhou told Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap during the April 1967
discussions, the war in South Vietnam was still in the second stage of stra-
tegic equilibrium. Attacks on big enemy-held and fortified cities would
fail while producing heavy casualties that would demoralize revolutionary
forces.^37 For Mao and Zhou, the successive big offensives launched by Hanoi
in 1968, which shattered the main revolutionary forces in the south exactly
as Mao had predicted, were evidence that the VWP was leaning danger-
ously toward acceptance of incorrect Soviet, rather than correct Chinese, ad-
vice. By the end game of the war in 1974–1975, PAVN’s strategy was entirely
conventional—fast-moving massed armor with mobile artillery and mech-
anized infantry, a very long way from Mao’s model of protracted guerrilla
war. Hanoi’s embrace of Soviet-style warfare raised the question of how a
united VWP-led Vietnam would align vis-à-vis the PRC and the USSR once
America was defeated.
Regarding the issue of peace negotiations, Moscow supported and Beijing
(at least up to December 1970) was deeply skeptical of Hanoi negotiating
with Washington. Soviet leaders felt that it might well be possible to secure a
negotiated US exit from Vietnam. Negotiations would also help prevent the
Vietnam War from escalating into a great-power war, possibly involving the
Soviet Union. Diplomacy was also an arena in which the USSR had vast ex-
perience and assets—in contrast to China with its isolation and seemingly
irrational militancy in the middle of its Cultural Revolution. Beijing, on the
other hand, adamantly opposed negotiations. Such negotiations would con-
fuse and demoralize the revolutionary forces sapping their strength both in
Vietnam and beyond, Beijing insisted. Negotiations would become a mech-
anism in which Moscow could bargain away Vietnam’s revolutionary victory
for some Soviet gains with the United States. Negotiations would become a
route to Soviet betrayal of the Vietnamese revolution.^38 Unstated but clearly
paramount in Chinese minds was the reality that the USSR had substantial
global influence, including with the United States, while the PRC did not.
Up to 1968, VWP leaders Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, like Beijing, rejected
negotiations. Most importantly, they believed that negotiations would derail
the all-out war to take over the south that they advocated. They also understood
that negotiations would alienate Beijing, whose support was vital. Thus, in
1967, Le Duan presided over an extensive purge of pro-peace, pro-negotiation
advocates within and without the VWP. One of the intentions and results of
this purge was to reassure Beijing that there would be no negotiations and, by