Chinese had been supplying the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN)
since 1956 when the government of South Vietnam, with American
backing, refused to hold the plebiscite on reunification. More Chinese
military assistance was promised in support of a protracted but limited
insurgency in the south designed to minimise the likelihood of
increased US intervention. The American decision to accept the neu-
trality of Laos, formally agreed upon in Geneva in 1962, indicated that
if Washington intended to hold the line in Indochina, South Vietnam
would be the principal theatre of anticommunist operations. By then
the worry for Hanoi, and for Beijing too, was that the US might extend
the war into North Vietnam.
As Chinese scholars have pointed out, China’s more aggressive
support for the escalating conflict in Vietnam after 1962 reflected
Mao’s determination to regain the revolutionary initiative, both inter-
nally after the Great Leap Forward, and internationally in his
increasingly bitter opposition to the Soviet Union.^13 Internally Mao, in
early 1963, launched his ‘socialist education’ campaign, forerunner of
the Cultural Revolution. Externally, Moscow’s decision to lean
towards India in its border war with China exacerbated the
Sino–Soviet conflict. China proclaimed that the centre of world revo-
lution had moved from Moscow to Beijing, for the Soviet Union could
no longer be relied upon to support armed insurgency. The proof that
China, by contrast, could be relied upon lay in the backing Beijing
gave to the war in Vietnam.
The Sino–Soviet split placed Hanoi in an awkward situation, for
Vietnam needed all the help it could get in its escalating war in the
south. Offers of greatly increased military assistance, if the DRV would
join the Chinese camp, were politely turned down. Hanoi did begin,
however, to lean towards Beijing; for example, by criticising ‘revision-
ism’. As a result, relations between the DRV and the Soviet Union
cooled appreciably in the mid-1960s.
The events spanning the period from the assassination of South
Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon (just three weeks
Communism and the Cold War