The last Maoist war: Chinese cadres and conscripts in the Third Indochina War, 1978--1991 (Vietnam).

摘要

The years after World War II were filled with war and conflict in Asia. After the Chinese Civil War (1945--1949), China turned to establishing "proper" relations with the nations on its periphery. In Vietnam that meant supporting the Vietnamese drive for independence. The People's Republic of China provided extensive support for the Vietnamese people in the First Indochina War (1945--1954) against the French, and in the Second Indochina War (1959--1975) against the Republic of Vietnam and the United States. During the Second Indochina War the Sino-Vietnamese relationship grew distant and acrimonious. After the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and overthrew the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge regime, the Chinese decided to support its Cambodian ally by attempting to force the Vietnamese out of Cambodia by launching a military expedition against Vietnam.; From the Chinese campaign of February--March 1979 to the Chengdu Agreements of 1991, China continued to pressure the Vietnamese through armed force or the threat of violence along the Sino-Vietnamese border. This work explores the Chinese use of force against the Vietnamese during the years of the Third Indochina War.; Chapters two and three explain the unique nature of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) on the eve of the war. Chapters four, five, six and seven outline the critical events of the war. Chapters eight, nine, and ten explore the problems the Chinese encountered during the war. Chapter eleven examines the Chinese memory of the war and addresses some of the lessons the Chinese learned.; This study relies on collections of PLA documents obtained on the Hong Kong rare book market. Non-Chinese students almost certainly have never exploited these documents for scholarly research. Additionally, this work uses Vietnamese military histories that have not previously been used by foreign scholars.; This work adds to current scholarship of the events that shaped contemporary Asia and provides a corrective to the widely held view that the Sino-Vietnamese conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s was just a minor border war.