246 { China’s Quest
China outmaneuvered the United States in the struggle for South Vietnam,
only to discover that the results were not what it had hoped for, namely a
friendly country allied with China, grateful for China’s help, and looking to
China for protection. Ironically, the outcome for the United States was also
the opposite of what it had expected. Washington failed in its effort to con-
tain communism at the 17th parallel, but found that a united communist-led
Vietnam served very well to contain communist-ruled China.Souring of the CCP-V WP RelationEven while China was constraining US escalation against the DRV by threat-
ening intervention, and even while China was providing large-scale assistance
to Hanoi’s desperate war effort, tensions were accumulating in the CCP-VWP
relationship. These tensions remained below the surface until the Americans
were driven out in April 1975. But they would emerge with remarkable speed
after that. At that point, a powerful emotional component of the PRC-DRV
relations became apparent. North Vietnamese leaders resented a long series
of Chinese policies and behaviors, seeing them as “betrayal” of the sacred
cause of Vietnam’s struggle against the United States. CCP leaders for their
part were angered by VWP ingratitude and repayment of China’s generous
support by adoption of policies hostile to China.
Hanoi’s resentment derived from memories of Chinese and Soviet pres-
sure during the 1954 Geneva Convention. VWP acceptance then of what was
promised would be a temporary partition of Vietnam had, in fact, given the
United States an opportunity to set in place a new anticommunist regime in
the south that, in effect, imposed another war on the VWP—a war far more
costly than the war against the French. It was true that the imposition of that
bitter compromise on the VWP was the result of both Chinese and Soviet
pressure, and that the CPSU was at that point the recognized leader of the
international communist movement. But the CCP was the elder brother of the
Asian revolutionary movement, and in that position the CCP had materially
assisted the VWP struggle against the French. China was therefore in a pos-
ition to deny further assistance if the VWP refused to accept China’s advice
in 1954. The VWP had gone along with Chinese-Soviet advice in 1954, but as
the Saigon government consolidated its position in the south with American
support and ignored the vague provisions of the 1954 agreement regarding
unification, VWP leaders began to view the bitter compromise of 1954 as a
Chinese “betrayal” of Vietnam. VWP leaders kept these views to themselves
until the Americans were defeated.
The entry of large numbers of PLA troops into the DRV in June 1965 gener-
ated tensions of more mundane sorts. Mao Zedong would respond in August
1965 to VWP complaints about the behavior of PLA soldiers in Vietnam by