Pedagogic War with Vietnam } 385
was open, was the final PLA operational objective for the offensive phase of
the war. General Xu Shiyou threw six divisions into the assault. The infantry
assault was preceded by intense bombardment. Again, fighting was fierce. By
March 2, PLA forces had taken the high ground on the north side of the city.
This was the date originally scheduled for the end of Chinese offensive opera-
tions, but Xu Shiyou and the CMC decided to continue operations for several
days to take the southern half of the city and push to the city’s outskirts. After
three more days of fighting, the southern half of the city was in PLA hands
and Beijing announced the end of Chinese offensive operations and the be-
ginning of withdrawal of Chinese forces from Vietnam. As Chinese forces
withdrew northward, they demolished a good portion of Vietnam’s transpor-
tation, communications, and governmental infrastructure. The point of the
invasion was, after all, to punish Vietnam. By March 16, three weeks and six
days after the beginning of the assault, Chinese forces had completed their
withdrawal. Beijing proclaimed the operation over.
Chinese casualties were heavy. Vietnam at the time claimed 42,000 Chinese
killed. Foreign scholars estimate 25,000 Chinese killed and another 37,000
wounded. More recent Chinese sources put PLA casualties at 6,900 dead and
15,000 wounded.^3 Keeping casualties low was not a major Chinese operational
objective. Xu Shiyou and the Central Military Commission (CMC—the PLA’s
top, collective command) were primarily concerned with whether the PLA
achieved its operational and strategic objectives—which they did—and with
whether the PLA held the initiative throughout the campaign—which was
also broadly the case. From the perspective of Beijing, the PLA’s 1979 opera-
tions in Vietnam, while exposing many serious shortcomings in the PLA,
were successful. Vietnam had learned the lesson, later voiced by a Vietnamese
general, that Vietnam “must learn how to live with our big neighbor.”^4 This
was a lesson voiced many times over the centuries by leaders of smaller king-
doms lying to the south of giant China.^5 As this book is being written in 2015,
it is a lesson mulled by Vietnam’s leaders as they ponder how to respond to
China’s island-building activities in the South China Sea.
In the decade after the 1979 war, China maintained constant military pres-
sure on Vietnam’s northern border. Chinese military presence there, com-
bined with frequent artillery shelling and occasional major border clashes,
kept alive the threat of another Chinese 1979-style lesson, forcing Hanoi to
maintain strong forces on its northern borders. Small-scale skirmishing along
the border was nearly constant. Six major clashes on the border occurred:
in July 1980, May 1981, April 1983, April–July 1984, June 1985, and December
1986–January 1987.^6 There were reports that the PLA cycled troops through
the border fighting with Vietnam to give them combat experience.
The 1979 war is perhaps best viewed as the opening move in a decade-long
campaign of attrition against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV),
as Vietnam was renamed upon unification in 1976. Parallel with China’s