Pedagogic War with Vietnam } 395
crisis had transformed the Soviet navy into a powerful and far-reaching force,
and Moscow was anxious to acquire access to the large and modern military
facilities the United States had built in South Vietnam. More broadly, Moscow
aspired to replace the United States as the dominant power in Southeast Asia.
Thus, shortly after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Moscow secretly proposed
to Hanoi the conclusion of a treaty of friendship and cooperation to serve as
a basis for expanded military cooperation plus Soviet economic assistance to
Hanoi. Hanoi sat on the Soviet proposal for nearly three years. Only in late
1978, as the SRV moved toward regime-change invasion of Cambodia, did
Hanoi embrace full alliance with the USSR.^28
It was China, or probably Mao Zedong specifically, who cut off Chinese
aid to Vietnam, pushing it into close alignment with Moscow. In August 1975,
four months after Hanoi’s complete victory, DRV economic planner Le Thanh
Nghi visited Zhou Enlai in the hospital room where he was dying from can-
cer. Nghi’s purpose was to solicit Chinese economic assistance for Vietnam’s
postwar reconstruction effort. In June 1973, when Zhou had asked Le Duan
to stop fighting in the south for two years, he had promised to continue aid to
Vietnam at the 1973 level for five more years. When Nghi visited in 1975, how-
ever, Zhou explained that China would be unable to give assistance:
During the war, when you were in the worst need, we took many things
from our own army to give to you. We made a very great effort to help
you. The sum of our aid to Vietnam still ranks first among our aid to
foreign countries. You should let us have a respite and gain strength.^29
Shortly after Nghi’s visit, Le Duan arrived in Beijing to plead for a reversal
of China’s apparent decision to cut off aid. Deng Xiaoping used his welcom-
ing speech to lambast superpowers seeking hegemony. Out of deference to
Le Duan, Deng did not refer explicitly to the USSR, but the implication was
clear enough: “The superpowers are the biggest international exploiters and
oppressors of today. ... More and more people have come to see now that to
combat superpower hegemonism is a vital task facing the people of all coun-
t ries.”^30 In his reply, Le Duan said that Vietnam had the “warmest sentiments
and heartfelt and most profound gratitude” for China’s aid. But he ignored
Beijing’s anti-hegemony analysis entirely, and said that Vietnam’s great vic-
tory would not have been possible without the “great and valuable” assistance
of other fraternal socialist countries, implicitly the USSR and East European
countries. He was fulsome in his praise of China’s success in building social-
ism and for its past aid to Vietnam, but he refused to endorse China’s view
of the USSR as a hegemony-seeking superpower. In effect, he desired to con-
tinue Hanoi’s previous arrangement of receiving aid from both the Soviet
Union and China. Beijing no longer found that arrangement acceptable and,
in effect, demanded that Hanoi choose between Beijing and Moscow. If it
choose China, Hanoi should disassociate itself from Moscow’s increasingly