Quest to Transform Southeast Asia } 227
fishermen. Within a few hours, most of the cargo was in the hands of the
Philippine military.
A second delivery was attempted in December 1973. This time, the arms
were carefully sealed in plastic at a PLA facility on Hainan Island to be
dropped in shallow water off the Philippines for retrieval by CPP scuba
divers. The CPP had proposed delivery by a PLAN submarine, but the ILD
insisted that the CPP carry out the operation. Another ship purchased with
ILD money had no more luck than the first; it ran aground well before the
Philippine coast. The crew was rescued by a Hong Kong ship and delivered
to that territory, where immigration officials eventually allowed them to
seek asylum in China. About the same time, a CPP courier was arrested
at the US-Canadian border in possession of CCP letters to CPP leaders
along with $75,000. By the spring of 1976, CPP leaders in China had been
assigned to agricultural work at a special compound in Hunan province
and China’s material support for the Philippine revolutionary movement
had ended.
Regarding northeast India, following the 1962 Sino-Indian war, the CCP
assisted secessionist insurgencies in northeast India. China’s support for
these anti-Indian insurgencies may well have had different roots than the
more clearly Marxist-Leninist insurgencies of Southeast Asia. Unlike the
other China-supported insurgencies in Southeast Asia, none of the north-
east Indian insurgencies were Marxist-Leninist-inspired or -led. Yet this CCP
support may have been part of an effort to create a new regionwide balance of
power favoring revolutionary China.
Around 1967, China set up a camp near Tanzhong in southwestern
Yunnan to train groups of Naga guerrillas. Naga rebels had taken up armed
struggle for independence from India shortly after India’s creation. Between
1967 and the mid-1970s, some eight hundred Naga fighters were trained in
Yunnan, given modern arms, and reinfiltrated back to India’s Nagaland via
the Kachin state in north Burma.^93 Several hundred more Nagas attempted
to reach Tanzhong, but were apprehended and turned back by Burmese or
Kachin State military forces. In 1969, China began supplying arms to Mizo
secessionist insurgents in India’s Mizoram (part of Assam state until 1972).
Training for small batches of Mizo insurgents at camps in Yunnan began
in 1973 and continued into the mid-1970s. In May 1969, China and Pakistan
set up a coordination bureau to oversee the supply of arms, training, and
funding to insurgencies in northeast India. What became Bangladesh in late
1971 was then still East Pakistan, and provided easy access to India’s north-
eastern states.
Once again, it was Deng Xiaoping who shut down this revolutionary inter-
ference. Meeting in Beijing with Indian foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
in February 1979, Deng said that whatever aid China might have given
to Indian rebels was now a thing of the past. When groups of Naga rebels