A War of Angry Cousins

(4 of 9)

Hanoi radio blared that Viet Nam's defense of Lang Son had inflicted more than 3,000 Chinese casualties, and that in just one coastal battle 50 miles southeast, Vietnamese forces had "trounced three battalions and wiped out 700 Chinese aggressors." In all, Viet Nam announced, its forces had killed 5,000 to 8,000 Chinese in five days, while losing less than half as many. The lopsided claims were remindful of the inflated enemy "body counts" reeled off each day by U.S. briefers during the Viet Nam War. Western sources in Peking estimated that the Vietnamese had suffered the most in the early fighting: 10,000 killed or wounded, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese casualties.

The Vietnamese easily outmaneuvered Peking in the propaganda war if not on the battlefield. They issued virulent denunciations of Chinese conduct, including alleged atrocities and biological warfare. Radio Hanoi claimed that Chinese warplanes bombed factories, power plants and communications centers, inflicting "terrible" damage and civilian casualties, and that Chinese artillery fired "chemical shells" at border targets. Backing up its ally, the Soviet Union accused Chinese troops of indiscriminately burning down villages and shooting women and children. Pravda, in a dispatch from Lang Son, alleged that a Chinese unit intercepted a civilian bus on a country road and executed all the passengers.

Hanoi also claimed that it had firm evidence of Peking's long planning for the invasion. Newsmen based in the capital, taken on a guided tour of the front, were shown printed Vietnamese phrase books found on the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. Among other things, the eight-page pamphlets contained instructions to be given Vietnamese prisoners ("You will be taken to a safe place and allowed to rest ... Don't worry. Your wound will be treated immediately.")

The fuse under the China-Viet Nam explosion had been sputtering for nearly a year. Last spring, intent on consolidating their purer-than-thou socialist revolution, the Vietnamese authorities decided to root out "bourgeois trade" and "dangerous elements," namely ethnic Chinese who had lived for years in northern mining areas, in Danang and in the bustling Cholon district of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). An estimated 160,000 Chinese refugees fled the country, aboard fishing boats or on foot across Friendship Pass, to resettle on communes in Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces. Meanwhile, a sporadic series of raids and skirmishes that were to intensify in the next months flared back and forth across the border.

Irate at the maltreatment of the Chinese, Peking—which had provided Hanoi with an estimated $14 billion in aid over the past two decades—abruptly cut off 21 current assistance projects. In June, as the last Chinese aid technicians went home, Hanoi yielded to longstanding Soviet blandishments and formally jumped into Moscow's economic orbit as a member of the Communist trade alliance, COMECON.