China’s assistance after the Paris Peace Accords (1974–5) 

Source: Reassessment of Beijing’s economic and military aid to Hanoi’s War, 1964–75

 Despite the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, Beijing continued to provide Hanoi with considerable assistance. In 1974, China’s economic and military aid to Hanoi accounted for 2.5 billion RMB along with additional 2 billion RMB for the PRG, a new high.88 China’s security circumstances had changed. As the US threat to China from Vietnam dramatically diminished, so did the years of rivalry with the Soviet Union for dominance in Vietnam come to a halt. Beijing anticipated a relatively stable situation in Southeast Asia after the departure of US forces. For Beijing, stability in Indochina was more important than Hanoi’s ongoing struggle for national unification. According to Chinese leaders, after the Paris Peace Agreement, Hanoi ‘should take time to relax and build their forces’ while other Indochina countries (South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) ‘should build peace, inde pendence, and neutrality’ during the next five to 10 years.89 Vietnamese leaders realised that Beijing’s ‘funds would soon run out for the Vietnamese cause’.90 They accepted China’s advice, promising that Hanoi would not push for national unification in a hurry by incorporating ‘South Vietnam into a socialist entity’.91 Such an attitude taken by the Hanoi leadership was to satisfy Washington’s ‘decent interval’ requirement on the one hand and also to use its promise to extract extraordinarily large aid, worth 8.1 billion RMB, from Beijing for the year 1974. Chinese leaders believed that this petition was not only unrealistic, but also exceeded China’s capability. At the end, China only agreed to provide Hanoi with 2.5 billion RMB, which was much less than the Vietnamese had initially requested.92 Understandably, both countries found this outcome not only dissatisfactory, but also traumatic for their relationship. Beijing attempted to treat the PRG as an independent political entity with no anticipation for a unified Vietnam in the immediate future after the Paris Peace Accords. Prior to 1973, China’s aid to the PRG was always handled by Hanoi. Beginning in 1973, Beijing regarded China’s aid to the provisional government as a separate transaction, which should not be controlled by Hanoi. According to an urgent and supplementary aid agreement signed between the PRC and the PRG on 19July1973, it was clear that all transactions of Chinese supplies should go directly from the Chinese Foreign Trade Ministry to the Financial and Economic Ministry of thePRG.93HanoiprotestedagainstBeijing’s decision that treated the PRG as an independent entity. In the later signed agreements, Beijing had to reverse this procedure,continuingtoprovideaidtothePRGviaHanoi.94Nevertheless,China’sattempt, which was contrary to the strategic goal of national liberation that the North Vietnamese leaders had been pursuing, was bound to cause the latter’s discontent and even hostility. Finally, China’s military aid to Vietnam plummeted. By comparison to 1973, the supplies in 1974 and 1975 accounted for, respectively, 70% and 60% (firearms), 75% and 50% (bullets), 64% and 49% (cannons), and 62% and 43% (artillery shells). In 1974, China only provided Vietnam with 80 tanks and 506 aircraft, which, however, were 120 

 88Collections of Treaties (1974), 317–18, 323–4. 89Westad et al., eds.,77 Conversations, 187–8. 90Nguyen, Hanoi’s War, 232. 91Westad et al., eds.,77 Conversations, 189. 92Li and Ma, Chronicle of Zhou, 598. 93Collections of Treaties (1974), 318–19. 94Ibid., 44–5, 323–4. COLD WAR HISTORY 17 and 1210, respectively, in 1973.95 For China, the Vietnam War was over, and Hanoi’s needs for weapons should have been reduced. More importantly, the Chinese leader ship’s enthusiasm for assisting Hanoi was steadily evaporating. Military action by Hanoi soon disrupted the peace and stability that Chinese leaders had hoped to be upheld in Indochina. In summer 1974, North Vietnamese forces launched a series of probing attacks on South Vietnamese positions. China’s attitude toward aid to Vietnam now became notably less enthusiastic. On 3 August 1974, ailing Chinese premier Zhou Enlai met Le Thanh Nghi, vice premier of the DRV, to discuss China’s aid to Vietnam. According to Zhou, aid to North Vietnam had accounted for nearly half of all Chinese foreign aid. After handling the matter for more than two decades, he believed that it was time for him to call it quits.96 It was a startling turnabout: just one year before, Zhou had reassured Le Duan that China’s assistance to Hanoi would not change for five years.97 In reality, despite Zhou’s pronouncement, China briefly continued to send aid to Vietnam, but much less than in previous years. On 26 October 1974, China and Vietnam signed one final agreement to provide Hanoi with 850 million RMB in economic and military goods and US$50 million in cash for the year 1975.98 On 31 May 1975, after the fall of Saigon– at a time when Beijing was facing serious domestic economic problems after years of agricultural and industrial stagnation Beijing agreed to send Hanoi 21 million RMB. But then, in August 1975, Beijing rejected Hanoi’s request for further aid, claiming that the South Vietnamese defeat had left ‘large quantities of weaponry and ammunition’ for Hanoi and, invoking history, noting that the Saigon regime had ‘served’ as a much better supplier for the Vietnamese communists than Chiang Kai-shek had for the CCP during the Chinese Civil War.99 For the Chinese leadership, Hanoi was not ‘the poorest under heaven’; instead, China was the poorest with a ‘population of 800 million’.100 The time had come to attach conditions on any further monies. Thus, on 25 September 1975, Beijing pledged 100 million RMB to Hanoi for 1976, but as a loan, not as a gratis sum– and China wanted Vietnam to pay it back in 10 years, starting in 1986.101 Despite Hanoi’s continued appeals for more aid, no evidence in Chinese official records suggests that any new aid agreements were ever signed between the two countries thereafter. Conclusion According to official Chinese history, China provided all kinds of assistance to Vietnam, amounting to more than 20.36 billion RMB, of which 1.4 billion RMB were interest-free loans, from the 1950s to the end of the war in 1975. Adding the expenditure of Chinese military deployment in North Vietnam, the total amount of Chinese assistance to the DRV exceeded US$20 billion in then-year values based on contemporary exchange rates.102 Chinese assistance to North Vietnam was substantial when China’s own 95Li and Hao, People’s Liberation Army, 416. 96Li and Ma, Chronicle of Zhou, 674. 97Westad et al., eds. 77 Conversations, 188. 98Collections of Treaties (1974), 41–2, 44–5. 99Li and Ma, Chronicle of Zhou, 717. 100Westad et al., eds. 77 Conversations, 194. 101Collections of Treaties (1975), vol. 22, 56–8. 18 X.SHAOANDX.ZHANG national power was still limited. More importantly, with China’s assistance, the Hanoi government was able to commit more of its own people and resources to engage in the direct fight against the United States in the south, while worrying less about a US invasion. In 1964, the Vietnamese People’s Army had 300,000 men; by 1975 it had expanded to 1.2 million soldiers.103 China’s contribution to Hanoi’s final victory in the war was undeniable. As historian Chen Jian noted: ‘Although Beijing’s support may have been short of Hanoi’s expectations, without the support, the history, even the outcome, of the Vietnam War might have been different.’104 Notwithstanding, China’s aid to Vietnam, despite official claims otherwise, was never purely altruistic. The two countries signed several aid agreements each year. The amount and the types of assistance were determined by China in the light of its own national security interests and industrial capability at the time. Vietnam was regarded as a vital part of Mao’s grand strategy; it did not just serve as a buffer for China’s own security and an attestation that China played the leadership role in the world revolu tion. After perceiving an increasing Soviet menace, Mao sought rapprochement with the United States, alarming Hanoi. Responding to Hanoi’s protestations, China increased its aid to the DRV to affirm its continuous support for Hanoi’s war efforts against the United States. But as well, when it decided to, China also used aid reduc tions to express its own dissatisfaction, as with Hanoi’s approach to the United States for peace negotiations in 1968 and 1969 and as Zhou expressed in 1974. Even though Beijing and Hanoi shared the same ideology, their national interests were far apart. From a Chinese perspective, China’s aid to the DRV should have provided Beijing with some leverage over Hanoi’s approach to war. But no evidence exists that China’s aid influenced Hanoi’s decisions and execution of the war. Instead, Hanoi skillfully manipulated its relationship with Beijing to obtain substantial aid. After the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam and the subsequent collapse of the South Vietnamese regime, Hanoi no longer had to hide its long-standing historical suspicions of China. It subsequently launched its own territorial and border disputes with China and a cleansing campaign against the ethnic Chinese living inside Vietnam, soon becoming China’s new adversary; in 1979, both nations would go to war.105 In retro spect, China’s support for assisting Vietnam and resisting America constituted a major diplomatic blunder, arguably its biggest foreign policy failure in the Cold War. Acknowledgements Richard P. Hallion, and three anonymous readers read the manuscript and provided helpful comments and suggestions. Hallion also did editorial work on the manuscript. 102Wang, Diplomatic History,51–2. 103Military History Institute of Vietnamese National Defense Ministry, Fifty Years of the Vietnamese People’s Army, 1944–1994 (Beijing: Military Translation Press, 1996), 455. 104Chen, “China’s Involvement,” 380. 105Xiaoming Zhang, Deng Xiaoping’s Long War: The Military Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979–1991 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).