China's Economic Sanctions against Vietnam, 1975-1978

摘要

This article carries a two-fold argument. First, Beijing's economic sanctions against Vietnam during the period 1975-1978 were mainly motivated by its desire to punish Vietnam for an anti-China policy that smacked of ingratitude for the latter's past assistance, fuelled further by Hanoi's closer relations with Moscow. They were also designed to extract Hanoi's accommodation of China's demand for territorial boundary concessions and to halt the persecution of ethnic Chinese residents in Vietnam. Second, the resultant meltdown of Sino-Vietnamese relations, as well as the making of the Soviet-Vietnamese alliance between 1975 and 1978, was gradual and contentious rather than swift and decisive as most existing studies contend. Hanoi's reluctance to forge a formal military alliance with the faraway Soviet Union against China was largely driven by the importance of China's remaining aid and economic potential to Vietnam's post-war economic reconstruction and the uncertainty of the Soviet commitment to aid Vietnam.