536 { China’s Quest
the shortest period of time. This was formalized in the joint declaration issued
at the Gorbachev-Deng summit in Beijing in May the next year.^20
As Beijing succeeded in cutting off Soviet support for Vietnam’s
Cambodian occupation, China’s leaders decided it was time to begin direct
talks with Hanoi. Hanoi was simply no longer able to sustain its effort in
Cambodia. Twice during 1988, Hanoi had expressed a desire for talks with
China on Cambodia, but Beijing indicated the time was not yet right for
talks. Soviet assistance to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia was still con-
tinuing. By January 1989, Beijing judged the time propitious, and Vietnam’s
vice foreign minister arrived in Beijing to discuss Cambodia. In April, Hanoi
finally agreed to unconditionally withdraw its forces from Cambodia. Hanoi
had earlier insisted that cutoff of military aid to the three anti–Phnom Penh
anti-Hanoi Cambodian factions was a precondition for Vietnam’s with-
drawal. Now the two sides agreed on Vietnamese withdrawal but continued
to deadlock over how to guarantee peace after that. With Vietnam’s with-
drawal agreed on, the question of arrangements to prevent civil war among
the four Cambodian parties became urgent. A Paris conference of July 1989
had deadlocked over the issue of the role of the Khmer Rouge in the transi-
tional Cambodian authority after the withdrawal of Vietnam. Hanoi and its
Cambodian ally in Phnom Penh adamantly rejected a Khmer Rouge role.
Beijing, Bangkok, and the Khmer Rouge itself insisted on such a role.
In the estimate of Richard Solomon, a diplomat who was the US represen-
tative to the Cambodian negotiations, the tarnishing of China’s international
reputation by the bloodshed of 6-4 had significantly altered China’s approach
to a Cambodian settlement by strengthening Beijing’s incentive to unburden
itself of association with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.^21 When the Khmer Rouge
ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, that group had murdered, as noted
in an earlier chapter, perhaps 2.4 million Cambodians—roughly one-third
of that country’s population. In the 1980s, international awareness of the
murderous nature of the Khmer Rouge grew. The Hollywood film The Killing
Fields, released in 1984, brought that awareness to a much wider audience, as
did the opening of Khmer Rouge archives after 1978. China’s military assis-
tance to the Khmer Rouge continued throughout the 1980s on the grounds
that they constituted the most effective armed resistance to Vietnam’s occu-
pation. During both the Reagan and Bush administrations, the United
States had urged China to sever ties with the Khmer Rouge and shift its sup-
port to the two noncommunist Cambodian resistance groups, but Beijing
demurred. Many people, including some in the US Congress, believed that
Beijing’s objective was to return the Khmer Rouge to power in Cambodia.
The extremely negative impact of the Beijing Massacre on China’s interna-
tional reputation put continuing Chinese association with the Khmer Rouge
in a very different, far more negative, light. This created a strong incentive for
Beijing to sever all association with that odious group.