The Indochina Tangle: China's Vietnam Policy, 1975-1979
This is a detailed discussion of how China and Vietnam became deadly enemies in the four years following the fall of Saigon in 1975. The author sees many factors behind the dispute, including the border, the offshore islands, territorial waters, the overseas Chinese and Cambodia. But he stresses the growing Vietnamese-Soviet relationship that developed at a time when Chinese leaders were apprehensive about Soviet "encirclement" of China.
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Considers prospects for a long-overdue revision of US policy towards Vietnam. The UN policy to resolve the Cambodian conflict is quixotic, and now that the USSR has withdrawn as a regional power, there exists a strategic vacuum which the USA can move to fill.
The uneasy public quiet on Vietnam which the President achieved with his speech last November 3 was shattered by the large-scale U.S. military intervention in eastern Cambodia. Once more U.S. policy in Southeast Asia became the subject of major controversy. In this situation there is some danger that we shall become so caught up in the immediate issues that we neglect more fundamental questions with respect to current American strategy. The new actions are a product of a basic fault in the structure of U.S. policy but do not, by themselves, define that fault.
During the last week of April 1970 the Vietnam war became the Second Indochina War. On April 24 and 25 representatives of the four movements of the Indochinese Left convened at a certain spot in south China to seal an alliance that had been contracted many years before by three of the movements-the North Vietnamese Lao Dong, the Pathet Lao and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF)-and to which Prince Sihanouk, overthrown a month earlier by the Cambodian Right, was now adhering in a conspicuously unconditional manner. The Indochinese revolutionary front thus came into being.
