Sino-Vietnamese Conflict and the Sino-American Rapprochement

Abstract

The collapse of the Saigon government in April 1975 and the subsequent unification of Vietnam under Hanoi's rule radically redefined the pattern of international relations in Southeast Asia. North Vietnam, exhilarated by its victory over the world's greatest power, began moving to establish the special relation between the countries of Indochina that Hanoi had long envisioned. These efforts, however, rapidly brought Hanoi into conflict with Peking, which had consistently sought to maintain the independence of Cambodia and Laos. Hanoi also more openly asserted its claims to the archipelagoes in the South China Sea. Peking had previously believed that Hanoi accepted China's claims to these islands.' It is important to understand, however, that the Sino-Vietnamese conflict antedates the upheaval of 1975 and that its emergence was largely a function of the two countries' relations with the two superpowers. The purpose of this article is twofold. It seeks first of all to elucidate some of the more important historical antecedents of the Sino-Vietnamese conflict in the period from the beginnings of the Sino-American rapprochement in late 1970 to the signing of the Vietnam Peace Accords in January 1973. During these years there was increasing divergence between the major foreign-policy objectives of both China and North Vietnam as Peking moved to improve its relations with the United States -a shift in policy that reflected the Chinese leadership's view that the Soviet Union constituted a greater threat to China than did the United States.