similar to the one concluded earlier with Burma. When Sihanouk
terminated the American aid program three years later, China
increased its assistance. Throughout the 1960s, Sihanouk maintained
close relations with the PRC. When he was deposed in 1970, he took
up residence in Beijing, from where he presided over a government-in-
exile. What is interesting about Sihanouk’s relations with the PRC is
that he saw China, communist though it was, as the long-term guar-
antor of Cambodian independence, not just from threats from
American-backed Thailand or South Vietnam, but also from a future,
reunited communist Vietnam. Sihanouk was convinced that Hanoi
would ultimately win the Second Indochina War. It was a powerful,
aggressive, united Vietnam that he feared, and he understood long
before most other leaders in the region that only China, with its deter-
mination to reassert its influence in Southeast Asia, would be prepared
to rein in Vietnamese ambitions to dominate Cambodia (and Laos). In
other words, Sihanouk foresaw a return to a traditional pattern in rel-
ations between China and Southeast Asia, and was prepared to accept
this as the basis for a China–Cambodia bilateral relations regime.
What he did not foresee was the Khmer Rouge, though in the end
even they served merely as a catalyst in precipitating the very outcome
Sihanouk took out his Chinese insurance against.
One other Southeast Asian leader shared something of
Sihanouk’s historical understanding of the importance of China for
regional relations, and that was Prince Suvanna Phuma of Laos. The
1954 Geneva agreements had left Laos, like Vietnam, divided. Two
northeastern provinces had been set aside for regroupment of pro-
communist Pathet Lao forces. For three years Suvanna strove, in the
face of American opposition, to reunify his country. In August 1956,
Suvanna visited both Hanoi and Beijing to obtain North Vietnamese
and Chinese agreement to the establishment of a neutral coalition
government in Laos. Diplomatic relations were not on the agenda. All
Suvanna promised was strict neutrality and adherence to the provi-
sions of the Geneva agreements, which precluded foreign bases on Lao
A Short History of China and Southeast Asia