The second task of Office 8 was to provide policy input to strengthen social and political order (domestic security). Office 8 was to report on efforts to combat corruption and bribery, abuses of power, oppression of the population, and violations of state law, as mandated by Directive 228. In its report to the Council of Government, Office 8 stated, “Law enforcement remains weak and
has failed to address people’s complaints.” However, it took great pride in its ability to “prepare northern border provinces well and strengthen border de- fense” well before the Chinese invasion in February 1979. That included “relo- cation of ethnic Chinese people from the border region to areas deep inside the country” and neutralizing ethnic Chinese residents’ ability to collaborate with and offer intelligence to the invading Chinese troops.⁴⁶ Ethnic Chinese residents (Hoa Kieu) in Vietnam had a changing relationship with the CPV, evolving from being seen as favorable in the 1950s and 1960s to threatening in the second half of the 1970s in parallel with the deterioration of Sino-Vietnamese relations.⁴⁷ Immediately Hanoi claimed a military victory over the Chinese invaders with an official figure of Chinese casualties. According to a report by the SRV Council of Ministers dated May 29, 1979, "Our army and people had heroically fought back the Chinese invading troops in six border provinces, causing them heavy losses: Over 60,000 Chinese troops were put out of action [dead or injured]. 550 military vehicles, including 280 tanks and armored vehicles, were damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of artillery guns and large caliber mortars were destroyed. A great number of weapons and invading troops were captured."
Internal Vietnamese documents suggested that the Chinese succeeded in adding an element of surprise to its invasion of Vietnam by sounding false alarms of a pending Chinese invasion as early February 1978, one year before the actual invasion in February 1979. But besides small border skirmishes, there was no Chinese invasion. A series of secret reports by the Police Command of the Ministry of the Interior revealed that Chinese villagers in Lung Hiu (China) had spread the rumor that China would launch a major attack on Vietnam during the New Year (Tet) in late February 1978. Vietnamese villagers were scared, and many left their homes near the border. In Quang Ninh Province, villagers also spread rumors that on New Year's Day, February 29, Chinese troops would attack Hoang Mo and that, as Chinese troops mobilized, Chinese villagers had left the border area, suggesting a pending invasion. The Police Command of the Ministry of the Interior instructed local forces and authorities to stay alert but also be vigilant about the Chinese use of psychological warfare to scare Vietnamese people along the border.
The towns of Lang Son, Cao Bang, Lao Cai, and Cam Duong were reduced
to ruins. About 330 villages, 735 schools, 428 hospitals and medical stations, 41 farms, 48 forestry enterprises, 81 enterprises and mines, and 80,000 hectares of food crops were destroyed. About half of the 3.5 million people in the six border provinces lost their residences; thousands of Vietnamese, including the elderly, women, and children, were killed or wounded, not counting the cultural and historical monuments that were reduced to rubble.”
Shocked by the scope of the devastation, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong's
fact-finding delegation proposed that the government take urgent action to
address three pressing issues: (1) stabilization of people's livelihoods, restoration of social order and security, resumption of agricultural production, and provision of food and shelter in the border provinces; (2) emergency assistance for the military buildup and war preparedness along the border; and (3), most important, instilling new thinking within the government and party apparatus, a shift from a peace to a war mentality.
While the prime minister's delegation was assessing the situation, the Viet-namese government's delivery of emergency aid to the Sino-Vietnamese border regions was under way. The management of the aid further revealed Hanoi's unpreparedness for the attack. In the first week of March, as China was about to withdraw its troops, the Vietnamese Ministry of Internal Trade was able to trans- port its first major shipment of food to forces at the front, a total of 750 tons of food (320 tons of fish sauce, 300 tons of dried meat, and 130 tons of fresh meat and canned fish) along with 300,000 salted eggs. The MoD made an urgent request for a further 800 tons of meat by the end of March.<sup>53</sup> The Organization Committee of the Party Central Committee under Le Duc Tho made a request to the Ministry of Internal Trade that party officials from the district level up in the six provinces along the Sino-Vietnamese border be offered an extra food
ration of 1 kilogram of sugar, 4 cans of condensed milk, and 1 kilogram of canned meat per month on top of their base salaries.
With respect to emergency transportation, Hanoi was ill prepared for war against China and the state bureaucracy was so fractured that transportation to the frontlines along the Sino-Vietnamese border was slow and often interrupted by poor road conditions and ruined bridges. For three weeks, from the day of the invasion to the day China withdrew its troops from Vietnam, the ministry was able to transport only half the planned 2,700 tons of food to eight provinces affected by the war and internal displacement. Worse, due to transportation problems, mountainous border provinces such as Cao Bang, which was devastated by the invasion, received less than 10 percent of the planned food shipment. 55 Food shortages became a national security issue as the Vietnamese attempted to beef up its border defenses against future Chinese attacks. The Ministry of Internal Trade shifted the blame to the Ministry of Transport for the failure to meet the critical need for sufficient food for the Vietnamese population and troops along the Sino-Vietnamese border. In its report to Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, the Ministry of Internal Trade pointed to the poor infrastructure, including jammed rail systems, shortages of transportation vehicles and fuel, and poor coordination and organization. It also highlighted the fact that "some [government] agencies, particularly in the area of transportation, have not yet transformed their old thinking and practices from peace to wartime,"56 referring to the country's dependence on foreign aid during the anti-American resistance period of 1965–75. For instance, the Lai Chau Provincial Committee's urgent request for rice was approved on March 3, 1979, but by March 12 no rice trucks had arrived in the province.
To guarantee timely transportation from Son La to Lai Chau, a mountainous province bordering the province of Yunnan in China, the government approved a plan to reinforce the Ministry of Transport with three hundred new trucks, but by mid-March it had received only thirty. At a number of train stations, the General Railway Directorate was not able to mobilize enough workers to unload cargo, which significantly slowed rail transport. An average of thirty-three train cars were left unloaded for days at the Luu Xa train station and seventeen others at the Quang Trieu station (Thai Nguyen province) connecting Hanoi and the Cao Bang Plateau bordering the Chinese province of Guangxi. Despite a desperate need for material aid, some local authorities failed to organize enough manpower to unload, transport, and store goods, further impeding delivery of aid to the border provinces.
Following the Chinese withdrawal, Hanoi mobilized over 200,000 people to work on border defense projects. Each worker was allotted 21 kilograms of food per month, including 18 kilograms of rice and corn, half a kilogram of meat, one kilogram of fish, one kilogram of tofu, half a liter of fish sauce, and three salted eggs in addition to a salary of 24 Vietnamese dong (VND) per month.
In actuality, as it was about to launch its full-scale invasion of Cambodia in late 1978, the Hanoi leadership called for preparation to defend its northern flank against a Chinese invasion plot, but it clearly did not contemplate a large-scale invasion with massive numbers of Chinese soldiers. From late 1978 to early 1979, Office 8 of the Prime Minister's Office played a crucial role in assisting the Council of Government with war preparations along the northern border. On the day China invaded Vietnam, the government quickly disseminated the party's and government's directives to local authorities and mobilized local armed forces to defend the country. They moved swiftly to secure the loyalty of ethnic minorities living along the Sino-vietnamese border and convinced there to fight the Chinese. They pledged more state aid to take care of the minority population and the families of combatants.
Xiaoming Zhang has repudiated the claim that "Vietnam had committed only militia and local forces, who executed constant attacks against Chinese invaders."¹⁶⁰ He writes, "Vietnam’s 1979 war records remain unavailable. However, the publication of PAVN unit histories reveals that a significant number of Vietnamese regular forces fought against the Chinese invasion, including some that engaged in 'last-stand' actions before being overwhelmed by resolute PLA attacks."¹⁶¹ Internally circulated documents corroborate Zhang's argument. On May 28, 1979, war hero General Vo Nguyen Giap, a ranking member of the Politburo, deputy prime minister, and minister of defense, reported to the National Assembly that three types of armed forces, including regular Military Region forces,¹⁶² local armed forces, and citizen-soldiers of the six provinces along the Sino-Vietnamese border, were involved in the battle against the Chinese invaders.
The state's official articulation of Vietnamese heroism and patriotism was rendered by none other than Vietnam’s war hero, General Vo Nguyen Giap, at the fifth session of the Sixth Plenum of the National Assembly in May 1979. On behalf of the Council of Government, Giap presented a lengthy report entitled "The Great Victory of the Two Wars to Defend the Motherland and the Duties of Our People and Army in the New Situation" on May 28.¹⁶⁴ According to Giap, the fifth session was convened mainly to discuss "the meaning and causes of Vietnam's victory" in the two wars, "China’s intentions," "Vietnam’s international duty in Cambodia," and "the Vietnamese people's duty in the new situation."
The handwritten minutes of the National Assembly representatives’ discussions of General Giap’s report, which was kept secret at the time, revealed some notable criticisms of the report and raised additional issues about the conduct of the wars.¹⁶⁶ Although all representatives agreed with General Giap’s conclusion regarding the causes of Vietnam’s victories—"the capable and farsighted leadership of the Party, the bravery of Vietnamese people and soldiers, and the strength of Vietnam’s national unity"—many suggested that the report fell short of acknowledging local realities or shortcomings. Most important, the National Assembly debate arrived at this conclusion: "Our victory could have been greater if we had not been blindsided by overconfidence, which led to mistakes in the conduct of the war."¹⁶⁷ Chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee Truong Chinh and eleven other high-ranking Assembly members from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hai Phong called for a thorough investigation of the causes of negligence and heavy punishment for officials who made the mistakes that caused serious loss of the state’s and people’s property in order to restore people’s trust in the party and the government.
Some members of the Assembly directly blamed the party’s leadership for its “lack of vigilance” and “incorrect assessment of China’s intentions” in direct opposition to General Giap’s rosy report. Assembly member Nguyen Ky Uc from the province of Cuu Long (in southern Vietnam) stressed the colossal lack of vigilance of the top leadership.⁶⁹ He recalled that at a conference on counter-offensives in the southwest against the Khmer Rouge in late December 1978, a number of provincial authorities raised the issue of China’s retaliatory attacks in the north, but the leadership appeared to ignore such concerns and did not anticipate China’s invasion of Vietnam. Shortly before the war in the north broke out, even some high-ranking party officials from the Nguyen Ai Quoc School (political training school of the Central Committee of the CPV) stated with great confidence, “The Chinese do not dare face off with us yet.”⁷⁰ Echoing his southern colleagues, Vo Van Pham, a representative from Ben-Tre, pointed out, “We underestimated the enemy. In previous reports, our Vietnamese military leaders called China a ‘paper tiger.’”⁷¹
Regarding military strategy, Nguyen Ky Uc criticized the Vietnamese military leadership for its underperformance. In an internal debate, Uc said, "There was nothing new about the Chinese military strategy in their invasion of Vietnam [referring to China's dispatch of large expedition forces to invade Vietnam in the distant past], but why didn't we achieve a decisive military victory like the battles of Dong Da or Bach Dang?"72 Uc's colleagues Vo Van Day, Le Thi Sau, and Tran Thi Minh Hoang, from the three southern provinces of An Giang, Kien Giang, and Dong Nai, joined the fray, arguing that "due to our lack of vigilance and incorrect assessment of the threat from China, all the Cambodian cadres we trained were killed by the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique and our economic foundation in the north was destroyed by the Chinese invaders."
After China withdrew its troops from Vietnam on March 18, 1979, military confrontations continued along the border. From the Vietnamese perspective, China was still engaging in sustained sabotage against the Vietnamese government. Various local reports convinced Hanoi's leaders that China was trying to create ethnic conflict by stirring up animosity between ethnic Vietnamese (the Kinh people) and other ethnic minorities in Vietnamese provinces along the Chinese border and was using Chinese residents inside Vietnam as a Trojan horse for Beijing's plot to incite an internal uprising in Vietnam. In one internal debate, a National Assembly member warned, "China has attempted to connect with reactionaries in our society to start internal rebellions. China is appealing to Chinese residents, especially in the south, to side with them against our party and government." We need to pay attention to the problem of Chinese residents in the south, especially their political tendencies and economic power. We need to issue an appropriate policy regarding the Chinese residents. Evidently Chinese residents in Vietnam faced more severe persecution by the Vietnamese government after the Chinese invasion in 1979.
Nguyen Tan Lap, a representative from the southern province of Hau Giang, suggested that the party should cleanse itself of the remaining Chinese influence in the leadership and the country’s major economic sectors because Vietnam had tolerated excessive Chinese influence in the past.75 However, Assembly members Luu Huu Phuoc and Duong Viet Trung from the province of Hau Giang (in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam) warned that, although the war further justified persecution of the remaining Chinese residents, who were already being treated as “suspected collaborators with Beijing” in the south, “In our propaganda, we must make sure that our people understand clearly that our enemy is the Chinese expansionists’ clique in Beijing, and we must not call them our ‘hereditary enemy’—the term used by Nhan Dan (the party newspaper)—because we need to seek harmony with Chinese people and persuade them to oppose Beijing’s expansionist policy.”
In 1979, as Vietnam's economic crisis continued, the Vietnamese government demanded that people make more sacrifices for national defense. In internal debates, a representative from the province of Tien Giang (southern Vietnam) complained that the majority of the seven thousand teachers in his province had quit their jobs because they could not bear the hard life of their profession.77 The representative from Dong Thap called for a "Vietnam-first" policy, suggesting that the Vietnamese government should curtail aid to Cambodia and instead help Cambodia help itself by "exploiting its rich national resources, including its fisheries and forests."78 Clearly criticism of the Vietnamese government veered into Vietnam's heavy burden of nation building in Cambodia.
Many challenged General Vo Nguyen Giap's claim that the Soviet Union was doing its part under the 1978 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. To be sure, General Giap wrote, "The Soviet Union immediately condemned China's invasion of Vietnam, and provided timely aid in many fields to meet our needs. On March 2, 1979, Comrade Brezhnev declared, 'We are absolutely united with Vietnam, and no one should have any doubt about the Soviet Union's commitment to the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation that binds our two countries.'"79 However, National Assembly member Lam Thi Mai from the province of An Giang argued that the Soviet Union's condemnation of China's invasion of Vietnam was "rather weak."
In summary, postinvasion debates within the party circle reveal an element of surprise and miscalculation in Vietnam's strategic thinking about the defense of the northern flank against China. Party officials privately criticized their party and government leaders for not sending PAVN regular forces to fight the invading Chinese troops sooner. As a result, the loss of property and lives was enormous. Nevertheless, the overriding narrative that emerged after the Chinese invasion, as General Giap emphasized, is filled with heroism and the victories of local citizen-soldiers and armed forces in districts along the Sino-Vietnamese border. The historical narrative is registered as another episode of Vietnamese people fearlessly standing up to northern Chinese invaders, as their ancestors did against Chinese dynasties for two thousand years in the distant past.
The Primacy of the Military-First Policy
Rising in power and influence behind this heroic narrative is the military wing of the party and government. General Giap took pride in his strategy of treating the entire district as a defense fortress (Ca huyen la mot phao dai).81 From February 17 to March 18, 1979, Vietnam claimed to have removed (killed or injured) more than 60,000 Chinese soldiers from battle, destroying three Chinese regiments and sixteen battalions. In addition, Vietnam claimed to have destroyed 550 military vehicles, including 280 tanks and armored vehicles, 115 artillery pieces, and many heavy mortar cannons; captured a large quantity of weaponry and military equipment; and taken many Chinese prisoners.82 Vietnam's estimate of Chinese casualties is close to that of western observers: 26,000 killed and 37,000 wounded.83 This is three times higher than the 20,000 killed and wounded that Beijing acknowledged publicly. According to historian Xiaoming Zhang's calculation of casualties in two Chinese military regions, based on Chinese sources, PLA casualties totaled more than 31,000 soldiers (5,103 dead and 15,412 injured in Guangxi and 2,812 killed and 7,886 wounded in Yunnan).84 We may never know the full truth due to the fog of war and each side's propensity to inflate the casualties of the other side to justify its own narrative of victory.
The Chinese claimed to have killed 57,000 Vietnamese soldiers, captured 2,200 prisoners of war; destroyed 340 pieces of artillery, 45 tanks, and 480 trucks; and captured 840 pieces of artillery and more than 11,000 small arms, along with many other types of military equipment.85 In addition, the Guang-zhou Military Region claimed that its forces captured 226 tanks, 457 artillery pieces, 8,298 small arms, 230,000 rounds of shells, 8 million rounds of small arms ammunition, and 2,635 tons of food.86 General Giap's official report to the National Assembly on May 28, 1979, did not give an accounting of the Vietnamese casualties in this war but focused solely on the “meaning and causes of Vietnam’s victory in the two wars in defense of the motherland,” as General Giap termed it.
Focusing on the number of casualties may miss the point because what fueled the war machine on both sides in the 1980s was the truths manufactured by Hanoi and Beijing to perpetuate their respective narratives of great victory, transmit a collective memory of heroism, and instill patriotism in the minds of the citizenry. 88 For Hanoi’s leaders, the purpose of the narrative of “the great victory in the two wars in defense of the motherland” was to situate contemporary Vietnamese heroism in the historical metanarrative of defeating foreign invaders, particularly China, in order to arouse the Vietnamese people’s patriotism and ask them to make the ultimate sacrifice for the nation. 89 The CPV was determined to draw on Vietnamese nationalism to mobilize resources and manpower for its two-front military confrontations in Cambodia and against China.
On December 22, 1979, General Secretary Le Duan stated on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of the PAVN: “The People’s Army must be a large and popular school for the younger generation, training our youth to become new [revolutionary] men, good soldiers, and good producers.” 90 Military hero General Vo Nguyen Giap wrote, “Our people’s tasks of building our country and defending our nation are closely linked. As Uncle Ho reminds us, ‘Our ancestors, the Hung Vuong (King Hung), built our nation, and you and I together have a duty to protect our country.’” 91 Like other Vietnamese nationalists in the 1950s and 1960s, General Giap emphasized the fighting spirit of the Vietnamese in the tradition of resistance to foreign aggression dating back to King Hung. 92 While nationalism evoked patriotic emotion in the Vietnamese people, the government backed it up with strict law enforcement and the full power of the state, asserting its control over every aspect of national life. Following a short-lived peace after 1975, Vietnam turned into a heavily militarized state in 1979-80, on top of having been a police state before that.
Throughout 1978, in preparation for national defense, the People’s Prosecutor—the highest and most powerful law enforcement organ of the state—launched a sweeping operation to cleanse the country of internal “bad elements,” including those who engaged in abuses of power, corruption, bribery, extortion, avoidance of military duty, and refusal to move to the New Economic Zones. The People’s Prosecutor also played a crucial role in spreading propaganda, disseminated the law on military duty, punished those who evaded military duty, and reeducated them to return to military service. In addition, the People’s Prosecutor hunted down enemies burrowing within the masses and the party apparatus who were suspected of sabotaging the state policy of military conscription, committing bribery, or issuing fake documents to those who evaded military duty and those who stole salaries, embezzled the state benefits of military families, or stole the belongings of dead soldiers.
In June 1978 the People’s Prosecutor called an urgent meeting and instructed officials at its branches in the seven provinces along the Sino-Vietnamese border to discuss urgent measures for dealing with China. In September it held a similar conference for representatives from Military Regions 5, 7, and 9, the PAVN regular army, and the CMC to purge hidden enemies in the local population along the southwestern border with Cambodia. Internal purging was intended to strengthen local armed forces, enhance military discipline, and tighten political and social order in the border regions.95 The People’s Prosecutor’s report to the National Assembly read, “Internal social and political order is a high priority [for this office]. Especially when the reactionary leaders in Beijing have betrayed and opposed us, the reactionary elements [ethnic Chinese citizens in Vietnam] in our country may have the idea that the opportunity to sabotage us has arrived.”96 The People’s Prosecutor stressed that in the battle against China in the north and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, it was important to raise the political understanding of local people and local authorities in the border regions and alert them to enemy elements hiding among them.
The year 1979 was very difficult for Vietnam as it was engaged in both the military confrontation with China and the rebuilding of the PRK, under a pro-Vietnam regime, in postgenocide Cambodia in addition to contending with socioeconomic hardship at home. On the home front, Hanoi focused on three strategic tasks: (1) stabilizing people's livelihoods, (2) strengthening national defense and security, and (3) building a material and technical base to meet national defense needs. Vietnamese leaders also called on the nation to focus on two urgent economic duties: (1) concentrating on agricultural production, mainly grains and other foodstuffs, to stabilize farmers' livelihoods, and (2) increasing exports to guarantee imports of vital goods and pay down the national debt.98 The Politburo's Resolution 228, augmented by the prime minister's Directive 159, granted more power to the People's Prosecutor, to tighten social and political order and eradicate abuses of power, corruption, and waste of government property in order to increase people's trust in the party and government.
From the outset, the CPV and the government systematically fueled anti-China nationalism and the Vietnamese anger over Chinese brutality during the most important invasion of Vietnam in 1979. General Giap summed up the most important lesson of the war against the Chinese invaders in his report to the National Assembly on May 28, 1979, as follows:
The heroism of our local armed forces and citizen-soldiers in the six provinces along the Sino-Vietnamese border defeated the might of 600,000 Chinese regular troops. This victory marked a new military capability—that is, the combined power of our three types of armed forces, the police, and the people at the locality. One Vietnamese person killed 100 or even 150 Chinese invaders. On average the ratio of those killed and injured is 1 Vietnamese soldier to at least 30 Chinese soldiers. The enemy prepared to inflict this war on us for two decades, and even though our country faced much difficulty after thirty years of war, we still defeated the Chinese.
General Giap's report spoke of the brutality and the policy of total destruction of the Chinese invaders, including the Chinese policy of “kill all, loot all, and destroy all”; indiscriminate killing of the women, children, and the elderly; and vicious killing methods such as beheading and burning people alive.
Defining Vietnam’s military confrontation with China as a life-and-death national security imperative, the conservative and military-first faction within the party and government demanded that the entire populace and military demonstrate their loyalty to the party and government and make further sacrifices for the cause of national defense. As mentioned earlier, the conservative leader Le Duc Tho, who controlled the powerful Organization Commission of the Party Central Committee, had already demanded that more resources be diverted to party cadres in the border provinces to boost national defense.
The state reiterated the importance of rebalancing the country’s economic production and national defense, demanding that local people be economically self-sufficient and ready to fight the Chinese invaders under the slogan “Every district is a fortress.”103 General Giap wrote, “Every district is a comprehensive economic management unit, a strong agricultural-industrial economic foundation for building a new life in the countryside and a strong fortress ready for battle to defend its local territory and capable of meeting its logistical needs on site.”104 On March 5, 1979, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly approved the Council of Government’s request for the “total mobilization of the nation’s manpower and resources to defeat the invading [Chinese] troops and defend its independence and territorial integrity.”
As Vietnam was at war, economic corruption was singled out as a "social evil," which served to further discredit top economic planners, especially those who managed the economy and state resources. In particular, Deputy Prime Minister Le Thanh Nghi, chairman of the State Planning Committee, and Deputy Prime Minister Vo Chi Cong, minister of agriculture, soon took the blame. The call for harsher punishment of corruption within the party apparatus came from National Assembly members. As the country was at war, these lawmakers pointed to the disease of chronic corruption and waste in the party and government, which eroded people’s trust. Regarding food distribution, for instance, party members Ha Ke Tan and Hoang Minh Giam from Ha-Son-Binh called attention to the fact that there remained “many cases of corruption and waste of state assets in the economic field.”106 Party officials Nguyen Tho Chan and Pham Thi Ngam from Hai Phong leveled harsher criticisms against the party and government, stating, “The National Assembly met many times, and there has been a lot of criticism about social evils like corruption, waste, and abuse of power, but we have not yet seen any improvement on this front.”
During a span of five months from December 1978 to May 1979, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly received fifteen hundred complaints about local party officials’ corruption and abuse of power.108 This was a serious issue that would further erode people’s trust in the government. Discontent with the government was high even before the Chinese invasion, and people were now being asked to consume less and contribute more to support a prolonged military confrontation with China while corruption and abuse of power were rampant.
" As Vietnam was at war on two fronts, against China and the Khmer Rouge, the government implemented a series of measures to tighten social and political control, including the establishment of the People’s Prosecutor’s Office.
The People’s Prosecutor’s Office, established in 1978, was tasked with purging the country of “hidden enemies,” particularly those with Chinese ethnicity, and ensuring the loyalty of the population to the party and government. The office was given broad powers to investigate and prosecute anyone suspected of disloyalty or subversion. In the context of the Chinese invasion, the People’s Prosecutor’s Office played a crucial role in mobilizing the Vietnamese people against the Chinese threat and in maintaining social and political order within the country "
*
In 1979-80 Truong Chin remained firmly in the conservative camp. The party's leading theoretician, Truong Chin believed that the pendulum of history had once again swung in Vietnam's favor, with the Soviet Union and the international socialist bloc strongly supporting its stand against reactionary China, which was aligned with the imperialist United States. In his opening remarks to the fifth session of the 6th Plenum of the National Assembly in early March 1979,109 Chin also attributed Vietnam's victory to the long-standing Vietnamese nationalist tradition of "fighting the enemy and protecting the country" (danh giac giu nuoc), recalling the Vietnamese people's resistance to northern aggression by Chinese dynasties.110 Thus Marxist-Leninist ideology and traditional Vietnamese nationalism colored Chin's assessment of Vietnam's position in the world and its national strength.
In 1980, in a grand scheme of mass propaganda, one of Truong Chin's books, *On Kampuchea*, was published in both Vietnamese and English. In this book, he began with a historical analogy to characterize China's strategy of using to the Khmer Rouge to weaken Vietnam from the south in December 1978 before Chinese invasion of Vietnam from the north in February 1979. Chin wrote, "In implementing its anti-Vietnam policy, Beijing repeated the offensive strategy applied time and time again by feudal China in its history of invasions against Vietnam, namely, combining a direct offensive with rear attacks. In the eleventh century, when Vietnam was ruled by the Ly dynasty, the Sung dynasty in China, in collusion with the king of Champa, used the Cham army in incursions on Vietnam’s southern border to weaken Vietnamese resistance to the Sung army’s attack from the north." Hanoi's leaders did not take this historical lesson to heart in 1978–79.
On March 5, 1979, the National Assembly's Standing Committee, under Provision 53 of the 1959 constitution, issued an order for general mobilization for war. On the same day, the Council of Government issued Directive 83-CP, militarizing the entire population to defend the country, and instituted a new regulation mandating that every citizen work ten hours per day—eight hours for production and two hours for military training or national defense duty.
There were also key changes to the membership of the Council of Government in the first half of 1979. On February 23, 1979, Deputy Prime Minister Vo Chi Cong was stripped of his portfolio as the minister of agriculture, and Nguyen Ngoc Trieu was appointed in his place. Ho Viet Thang replaced Ngo Minh Loan as minister of grains and foodstuffs, and Deputy Prime Minister Huynh Tan Phat was given another portfolio as chairman of state construction. On May 24 Vice-Minister Nguyen Co Thach was appointed minister without portfolio to assist the prime minister with foreign affairs.
Notable was the rising influence of military leaders, including Lieutenant General Hoang Van Thai and Major General Dang Kinh on the Standing Committee of the Council of Government, the highest executive committee. On January 24, 1979, Lieutenant General Hoang Van Thai, vice-chief of General Staff of the PAVN, on behalf of the Council of Government, delivered a fervent speech on the military victory in the two-front war against the Khmer Rouge in December 1978 and against China's invasion in February 1979.
On the same day, Vo Dong Giang, vice-minister of foreign affairs and a former army general, was appointed to replace Pham Van Ba as Vietnam's ambassador to the PRK. On February 23, after Prime Minister Pham Van Dong's report to the Standing Committee of the National Assembly about the signing of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the People's Republic of Kampuchea, Major General Dang Kinh, second vice-chief of General Staff of the PAVN, delivered a nationalistic speech about China's invasion of Vietnam, glorifying the heroic fighting of local Vietnamese forces.
On April 23, Major General Cao Van Khanh, third vice-chief of General Staff of the PAVN, reported to the Standing Committee on "the great victory of the Vietnamese people and army in their resistance to China's invasion." The next day, after Khanh's report, Vu Tuan, minister of the Prime Minister's Office, reported on the government's measures undertaken to overcome the effects of China's invasion in the six provinces bordered with China. Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Phan Hien then reported on the Sino-Vietnamese diplomatic negotiations at the vice-ministerial level, which began on April 18 in Hanoi.
In contrast to the military leaders’ glorious victory speeches, Vu Tuan, minister of the Prime Minister’s Office, reported massive destruction in the northern border provinces caused by the invasion and underlined the monumental and urgent tasks of restoring normalcy to people’s livelihoods and economic productivity. In April and May 1979, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly conducted its own on-site visit to the northern border provinces impacted by the invasion. It appointed Dao Van Tap, a member of the Standing Committee and vice-chairman of the Planning and Budget Committee of the National Assembly, as head of the National Assembly delegation to study the situation in war-affected regions in provinces bordered with China.119 After on-site visits, the delegation also witnessed the heavy burden of rebuilding the war-ravaged regions in the northern border provinces.
In an attempt to glorify military service and restore morale, the Vietnamese government began to pay more attention to veterans and military personnel. On May 24, 1979, acting on a request from the Council of Government, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly awarded sixteen Ho Chi Minh medals to Vietnamese military leaders for their outstanding contributions to the anti-American resistance along with Military Achievement (Quan cong) and Combat Achievement (Chien cong) medals to 10,218 soldiers from 938 units for defending the border against the Khmer Rouge's and China's aggression in 1978-79. The committee awarded Resistance (Khang chien) medals to 263 families that had many family members serving in the army during the anti-American resistance period. Glorious Soldier (Chien si ve vang) medals were awarded to 91,011 cadres and soldiers in the police force and army.120 The Vietnamese government's attempt to glorify military service after the Chinese invasion stood in stark contrast to the rather poor treatment of veterans and families of deceased soldiers when the war ended in 1975.
On February 11, 1980, the Council of Government issued Directive 44-CP calling for military mobilization in two different scenarios: one in which war had not yet broken out between Vietnam and China, and the other in which the two countries were at war.121 In the first situation, workers in key economic sectors, including transportation, telecommunications, electricity, coal, oil refineries, and logging, and workers who operated machinery in agriculture, construction, and irrigation were exempt from military service. Also exempt were core leaders of villages, schools, and production units at the local level and heads of household or family breadwinners, the only remaining son of a military family, the only son of a family, cadres of agricultural cooperatives and forestry units in northern border provinces and the Western Highlands, high school teachers, lecturers at professional schools and universities, students in professional schools, and students who had passed their exams to enter university in 1980.122 Military conscription was carried out in two rounds. The first round was to be completed in April, followed by a second round in September of that year. In the case of war with China, conscription would be widened to include grade twelve high school students and first- and second-year university students.
Directive 44 was the result of a debate between the military and economic factions of the government, namely, Minister of Defense General Vo Nguyen Giap and Chairman of the State Planning Committee Le Thanh Nghi. This executive directive determined two strategic directions for national defense in 1980. First, if war did not break out between Vietnam and China, key economic sectors were to be off limits to the state's extractions for national defense. However, if the country was at war with China, the MoD would automatically have the power to extract the nation's human and material resources at will, with a few restrictions, for the purpose of defending the nation against China's military aggression.The policy compromise reflected the tensions between two necessities: national defense and economic development.
On February 25, 1980, the Council of Government issued Directive 58-CP, granting the MoD far-reaching authority to mobilize human and material resources in all fields at all levels of the state apparatus—not even local authorities were spared military obligations—to support the war effort. Provision 3 of Directive 58-CP granted more authority to the minister of defense to coordinate with vice-ministers in all ministries, general directorates, government agencies of the Council of Government, and the general secretaries of People’s Committees (governors) in all provinces and cities under the leadership of the Central Committee of the CPV. The minister of defense was instructed to sign contracts for resource mobilization with other government agencies by March 15. If war broke out with China, Directive 58-CP would automatically become the general order for war. The State Planning Committee was responsible for issuing reports on this issue to the Standing Committee of the Council of Government.
Shortly after the directive went into effect, various ministries and local authorities raised serious concerns about the adverse effects of the MoD’s military conscription plan on agricultural production and the food supply. On February 29, Deputy Prime Minister To Huu, a conservative in the government, was instructed by Prime Minister Pham Van Dong to issue urgent instructions to all general secretaries of People’s Committees in provinces and cities under the supervision of the party and all ministries under the leadership of the Council of Government to temporarily freeze military conscription.
Balancing military capability and economic productivity was increasingly difficult as a result of the protracted war in Cambodia and military confrontation with China. In a top-secret letter to the prime minister dated March 19, 1980, Pham Nien, director of the General Directorate of Telecommunications and Post, complied with the MoD’s demand that he conscript 103 university graduates or seniors in this field to serve in the army. He reserved only 25 out of 75 transport vehicles the MoD had requested.127 In asking the prime minister to let him supply fewer vehicles, Nien reasoned that if the state took such a large quantity of vehicles from his department he would not be able to perform his political duty—that is, dissemination of the party’s political works.128 By October 1979 the Ministry of University and Professional Training Schools signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense to enlist into the army a total of 1,819 university graduates in various fields from construction to engineering.
The Ministry of Transport met the MoD's demand for a total of 1,300 transport vehicles for military service but fell short on providing small vehicles, ships, ferries, and boats. It could provide only 69 out of 190 engineers and technicians and 400 out of 580 electricians and mechanics requested by the MoD.130 Vice-Minister of Transport Binh Tam asked Prime Minister Pham Van Dong to exempt his ministry from military training because his officials were busy transporting material aid to Cambodia and Laos.131 For 1980, 60,000 tons of rice, of which 11,000 tons were to be urgently dispatched to the six provinces along the Sino-Vietnamese border by April 1980, further constrained the Ministry of Transport's capacity.132 The debate over logistical priorities further demonstrated Hanoi's sudden shift from a balance between economic development and national defense priorities to "everything is for the frontlines" against China. On April 15, in an agreement penned by Vice-Minister of Defense Major General Dinh Duc Thien, the Ministry of Health was directed provide 90 medical doctors, 40 pharmacists, 300 medical school graduates, and 265 out of 533 assistants to medical doctors, which was the quota set by the MoD.133 In addition, a large quantity of medicine and equipment, including 8,000 patient beds and 12 vehicles that served as mobile clinics, were funneled to the military.
National defense trumped economic concerns. In a top-secret report sent
by the MoD to the prime minister on September 4, 1980, Vice-Minister Vu Xuan
Chiem expressed that he was pleased with the results of resource mobilization
for 1980. The MoD signed agreements with 21 out of 28 ministries and 13 out
of 19 provinces in Military Regions 2, 3, and 4 and the Special Zone of the prov-
ince of Quang Ninh.<sup>135</sup> By September, the MoD had recruited 82,000 soldiers
(73,900 male and 8,100 female) out of the quota of 100,000 in the north. The remaining 20,000 were to be recruited in the south. A total of 6,121 technicians and 3,108 university graduates and final-year students were conscripted into military service that year. Military conscription, however, was not yet carried out in the south by September 1980.
In addition, 3,530 vehicles, the majority of which were transport vehicles, were transferred from various economic sectors to the military.137 For 1980, the Ministry of Materials Supply allocated for national defense 5,425 tons of iron, 144 tons of corrugated sheets, 11,448 tons of steel, 34,900 tons of coal, 410 tons of aluminum, 7,000 sets of tires, and 2,000 tons of fuel.138 The vice-minister of the Ministry of Materials Supply informed Prime Minister Pham Van Dong of the ministry's inability to provide all the materials requested by the MoD and asked that the number of engineers the MoD demanded for military service be reduced so that it would not adversely affect economic productivity, materials planning, and maintenance technicians within the ministry.
On May 16, the Ministry of Materials Supply sent another letter to both the prime minister and the minister of defense indicating that it was preparing to deliver 13,765 tons of hardware, out of 17,198 tons requested by the MoD, but 4,282 tons were imported goods. Therefore, the Ministry of Foreign Trade and the Ministry of Transport were to be responsible for delivery and transport of those materials to a location determined by the MoD. A total of 7,281 tons of hardware were scattered in three storage facilities in Hai Phong (the main seaport in the north), Ha Bac, and Vinh Phu, and therefore the Ministry of Transport was to transport those to the MoD’s preferred location.140 Tens of thousands of workers in the provinces were diverted to food production, transport, and firearms repair for national defense in 1980 alone. Vietnam’s militarization penetrated every aspect of the economy, pumping out enormous resources. With this national security emergency, the MoD was granted broad power to mobilize resources for war.
The Ministry of Foreign Trade and Ministry of Health were not able to meet their respective quotas due to shortages. The Ministry of Health could only provide fifteen out of seventeen types of medicine mandated by the MoD, and it could not produce enough medicine due to a shortage of materials and delays in the delivery of imported aid. Few who refused to cooperate with the MoD were forced to comply. The Ministry of Foreign Trade and the city of Hanoi were singled out for noncompliance with Directive 58-CP. Vice-Minister of Defense Vu Xuan Chiem complained, “If we do not mobilize resources now, we will not have time when war breaks out. Officials of the Ministry of Defense have made three trips to the Ministry of Foreign Trade, but they did not reach any agreement.”141 Clearly, those who observed the MoD milking resources From the economy in the name of national defense pushed back on the MoD's demands.
The State Planning Committee and senior officials in charge of economic affairs at the Prime Minister's Office (economy-firsters) were increasingly concerned about the siphoning of resources from of the economy into national defense. An urgent secret report from the Ministry of Materials Supply on May 26, 1980, noted that out of a total of 18,612 tons of raw materials the MoD requested, the Ministry of Foreign Trade had to import nearly 7,000 tons, including 3,173 tons of steel, from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries by the end of 1980.142 Since the Ministry of Transport had to surrender 1,224 vehicles to the MoD, its transport capacity was further weakened by the urgent demand that it move military equipment and supplies to Cambodia and strategic military positions along the northern border with China. This produced a cascade of resource diversions from economic productivity into national defense, a trend that increasingly alarmed the economy-firsters.
Detailed records at ministerial levels reveal increased tension between the military-firsters and economy-firsters beneath the surface of party unity on national security. In May one of the economy-firsters, Tran Phuong, vice-chairman of the State Planning Committee, urged the prime minister to consider reducing quotas for human and material resources for national defense and to request urgent aid from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.143 On October 7, another economy-firster, Phuong Minh Nam, vice-minister of the Prime Minister's Office, in a report on the implementation of Directive 58-CP, privately informed the prime minister that "all the government agencies have tried very hard to allocate manpower and material resources, including tractors and construction equipment, for national defense, but resources fell short in many areas."144 He pleaded with the prime minister, "While resource mobilization for war was necessary, the difficulty that local authorities are experiencing in balancing the need to prepare for war and the need for economic productivity is a major problem."145 However, the worsening of the two-front war in Cambodia and against China silenced those who raised economic concerns.
In 1980 diplomacy reached an impasse. Vice-Minister Phan Hien reported on the failed border negotiations in a meeting at the vice-ministerial level between Vietnam and China in Hanoi on April 18, 1979, although both sides agreed on an exchange of prisoners of war.146 China terminated all negotiations by the end of 1980.147 At the same time, the military intervention in Cambodia shifted from offense in 1978-79 to a defensive posture in 1980. Cambodian resistance forces dominated by the Khmer Rouge quickly regrouped and turned to guerrilla and psychological warfare, combined with sneak attacks, to destroy Vietnamese targets bridges and transportation convoys and kill Vietnamese soldiers. On the northern front, China continued to put military pressure on Vietnam with “Offensive Operations against the Enemy’s Controlled Points” along the Yunnan- Vietnam border.
In October 1980, Council of Government Directive 333-CP granted more power to the minister of defense, General Van Tien Dung, than had Directive 58-CP to implement compulsory military service to a larger segment of the entire population. It states, "In accordance with the request of the minister of defense, approved by the chairman of the State Planning Committee, from the second phase of military conscription scheduled to begin in October 1980, all male citizens (from eighteen to twenty-five years of age) in all rural areas, towns, offices, state enterprises, and professional schools in whatever positions, as long as they meet the requirements of military conscription as set by the annual state plan, will serve in active military duty for the duration set by the Law on Military Duty."152 In addition, the government decided to recruit single women from eighteen to twenty years old in rural areas to serve in the army for three years.
Still exempt from military service were cadres, technicians, engineers, and leaders in important economic-defense sectors, including electricity, metallurgy (e.g., steel manufacturing), coal mining, the production of construction materials, light industry, and food production.154 China continued its military harassment in northern Vietnam. Between 1979 and 1984, it launched about 7,500 armed attacks into Vietnam along the border and continued pounding residential areas. The Vietnamese reported 2,000 Chinese violations of Vietnamese air space.155 Vietnam's protracted war with the Cambodian resistance forces, mainly backed by China and Thailand, from 1979 to 1984 also forced Vietnam to increase military spending, which took a major toll on its already weak economy.
In summary, after China's invasion of Vietnam in February 1979, the Vietnamese leadership experienced a major national security shock after witnessing the horrendous destruction in border provinces by the invading Chinese troops. The documentary evidence pertaining to the internal debate over how to confront the Chinese military threat reveals a compromise, kept private at that time, between the leaders of the military (General Chu Huy Man and General Van Tien Dung, who were promoted to Politburo members in the March 1982 Fifth Party Congress), who advocated a military-first policy, and the leaders of the State Planning Committee (Chairman Le Thanh Nghi and Vice-Chairman Tran Phuong). Historically and institutionally, the State Planning Committee was largely dominated by economy-firsters, including Le Thanh Nghi, who tried to cut waste and improve the efficiency of the economy. These economy-first planners were increasingly alarmed by the continuing deterioration of the economy as large quantities of national resources were funneled into the war machine instead of economic development.
The economic crisis in 1979-81
The economic crisis in 1979-81 had both domestic and foreign causes.156 The failure of the state's central planning of the economy was caused by a number of internal and external factors, including disastrous flooding in 1978, widespread corruption among party officials, wasteful use of state resources as a residue of Vietnam's wartime reliance on foreign aid, low productivity, an increased trade deficit and debt, constant shortages of raw materials, and the detrimental effect of the two-front war on the economy. As David Wurfel summed it up, "By 1982, imports from capitalist countries had dropped to forty-eight percent of their 1979 value, while imports from socialist countries had risen from fifty-two percent to eighty-one percent of Vietnam's total. Overall imports dropped fourteen percent in 1980, thus cutting supplies to state enterprises."
In response, the political leadership took the first steps in adjusting to the new economic conditions with "spontaneous bottom-up reforms" in both industry and agriculture.158 The idea the chairman of the State Planning Committee, Le Thanh Nghi, proposed in 1978. The party endorsed "output contracts" (khoan san pham), an innovative approach to increasing agricultural productivity. Wurfel wrote,
The essential characteristic of this contract was that the cooperative, which had its own production quota, agreed with farm families on quotas for set pieces of land, to be delivered at the state price, with the family free to sell any excess over the quota on the open market.
On January 13, 1981, the Party Central Committee in Hanoi issued Instruction 100 C/TU, making the contract system national policy in an attempt to curb farmers' opposition to collectivization of the land. In December of that year, the contract system was extended to the south.160 Bottom-up reforms in industry, which Le Thanh Nghi called for in December 1977, took the form of "fence breaking" (pha rao), which allowed individual factories to break through the constraints of the central planning system. The first key reform decree for state industry, in January 1981, allowed state factories to diversify their products outside the plan as long as they met state quotas. The reforms increased economic growth but also produced the new problem of inflation as demand grew more rapidly than supply. The inflation in 1979, registered at 43 percent, rose to 83 percent in 1982. Alongside this inflation were “negative phenomena,” including speculation, smuggling (mostly goods pouring into black markets in southern Vietnam from Thailand after passing through Cambodia), and various forms of corruption.
The dominant conservative leaders were alarmed and sought to reassert tight control over the economy. In September 1981, a Council of Ministers resolution moved to limit the free market activities of state enterprises, directed at the south, especially Ho Chi Minh City.
The March 1982 Fifth Party Congress put a brake on the urgency of reforms, marked by the removal of Nguyen Van Linh, party secretary in Ho Chi Minh City, from the Politburo and the Central Committee secretariat. Within the conservative camp, Deputy Prime Minister To Huu voiced the need for the party to provide close guidance to the collectivization movement, and Hoang Tung, a Central Committee spokesperson, emphasized the need to eradicate private ownership.
As the conservatives and military-firsters won the ideological battle, the economy slowed and the costs of escalated military confrontation and nation building in Cambodia and against China rapidly increased in 1979–81, a trend that continued into the ensuing years, 1982–85, in spite of increased aid from the Soviet bloc.
As Vietnam’s economic crisis persisted and the costs of its two-front war rapidly increased, by 1982 the conservative and military-first faction had begun to rely more heavily on economic and military aid from the Soviet bloc.
Hanoi's overconfidence in its military capability, fed by its underestimation of Beijing's military resolve and great power support from the Soviet Union as a deterrence against China's retaliatory attacks prevented Hanoi's leaders from anticipating China's invasion of Vietnam with such massive numbers of troops.
Information from internal documents also shows that behind Hanoi's public claims of military victory, Vietnam suffered massive economic damage as a result of the government's underpreparedness for such an invasion. In public, Hanoi claimed another historic victory over the Chinese invaders. In private, however, the Vietnamese leadership came under heavy criticism by many National Assembly members who had warned that such an invasion by China might occur in retaliation for Vietnam's military intervention in Cambodia.
Ideologically, the Vietnamese leadership, with its "two-camp" worldview, believed that the pendulum of history had once again swung in the direction of the socialist bloc and that Vietnam was on the winning side of international socialism in its opposition to China's shift to the capitalist world. This belief certainly influenced Hanoi's assessment that Beijing was in a weak position and
might occur in retaliation for Vietnam's military intervention in Cambodia
therefore unlikely to wage a major war against Vietnam. However, the ideological factor is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain Hanoi's failure to anticipate China's invasion of Vietnam in February 1979. As archival documents from that time show, in Hanoi's strategic thinking, however erroneous in retrospect, the deterrence effect of the Vietnamese-Soviet alliance and leaders' confidence in the superiority of Vietnam's military capability prevented Hanoi from anticipating a major invasion by China.
The most consequential impacts of the Chinese invasion were the rising influence of the military-first faction in Hanoi's decision making and the militarization of the entire nation at the expense of economic development. The revolutionary socialist state of Vietnam was by nature a resource-extractive state during wartime. However, what was new after the Chinese invasion was the excess of the military-first policy in reaction to constant fear of another Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The heavy militarization of the northern border defenses in anticipation of such an invasion inflicted a heavy toll on economic productivity as material and human resources were pumped out of the economic sectors and into national defense. To economy-firsters within the Vietnamese government, this military excess was detrimental to Vietnam's economy but the two-front war dictated a military-first policy. In retrospect, the shock of the Chinese invasion, amplified by the Vietnamese underpreparedness for such a large-scale invasion, prompted the dominant military-first faction to favor excessive militarization and mobilization of resources for national defense.
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