The Strategic Triangle } 415
Cambodia was invaded it was likely that Thailand would be attacked.” In
Thailand, as in Japan in 1978 and in the United States in 1979, Deng employed
his remarkable human touch. Thailand’s monarch was so taken by the vice
premier’s simplicity and modesty that he invited Deng, along with the other
male members of the Chinese entourage, to attend the induction ceremony of
the crown prince’s entry into a Buddhist monastery for a period of time. This
was an extremely unusual invitation.^32
Joint supply of arms to the Khmer resistance to Vietnamese occupation
became one important dimension of Sino-Thai cooperation. Chinese ships
would deliver PLA arms to the Thai ports of Sattahip and Khlong Yai, where
they were unloaded and transported by the Thai army to Khmer resistance
camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. The Thai army was allowed to keep a
certain percentage of the shipments for its own use, and China paid a fee to
the Thai army for transporting the weapons. The PRC also transferred tech-
nology to Thailand, allowing a Thai munitions factory to begin production
of advanced anti-tank rockets, a portion of which went to the Khmer Rouge.
The PRC embassy in Bangkok also purchased via Sino-Thai merchants food
and medicine which went to the Khmer Rouge.^33 Again China and the United
States worked in tandem. Increasingly substantial US military assistance to
noncommunist Khmer resistance groups paralleled Chinese assistance to
the Khmer Rouge. Generous humanitarian assistance by the US-led interna-
tional community went to all Khmer refuge and resistance camps. US power
reinforced China’s in deterring Vietnamese and/or Soviet moves against
Thailand for its activities in Cambodia. Had the very substantial Soviet air
and naval presence established at Cam Ranh Bay in southern Vietnam by
1985, for instance, attempted to interfere with Chinese ships delivering weap-
ons to Sattahip port, the preeminent power of the US navy in that region
could easily have trumped the Soviet move.
US and PRC diplomacy generally worked in parallel in the United Nations
to defeat Soviet-supported Vietnamese efforts to have its Phnom Penh client
government installed as Cambodia’s representative. During the late Carter
administration and the period of the Reagan administration in which Al
Haig was secretary of state (January 1981–July 1982), the United States sided
with Beijing and against the ASEAN countries on keeping the Khmer Rouge
government occupying Cambodia’s seat in the UN General Assembly. Several
ASEAN countries were, as noted above, troubled by the prospect of a Khmer
Rouge return to power in Cambodia after a Vietnamese withdrawal, a pos-
sibility that that the US-PRC position seemed to bode. Thus, during 1981, the
ASEAN counties worked out a plan under which all Khmer factions would be
disarmed following an internationally supervised withdrawal of Vietnamese
forces from Cambodia. An international peace-keeping force would simul-
taneously be introduced into the country and an interim government set up.
Free and internationally supervised elections would then be held, and the