The Chinese Army in the Vietnam War
Cambridge Oxford University Press, 2020, 320 pp RRP: $88.95
ISBN: 9780190681616
Written By: Xiaobing Li
Reviewed By: Garth Pratten
Millions of words of analysis in English exist on what the West refers to as the ‘Vietnam War’ and Vietnam as the ‘American War’, but which is more appropriately referred to as the Second Indochina War. The bulk of these focus on the American experience, less on those of the two Vietnamese states or minor participants like Australia. Fewer still address China’s participation – long a shadowy subject due to downplaying by Vietnam and denial by China. Xiaobing Li’s Dragon in the Jungle: The Chinese Army in the Vietnam War is thus a valuable contribution to the historiography of the Second Indochina War. It reveals the full extent of Chinese participation, as well as offering insights into the development of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and relations between China, Vietnam and the former Soviet Union.
Li demonstrates that China’s commitment was not so much an act of Communist solidarity but rather it was shaped by its crumbling relations with the Soviet Union. China feared US troops moving into the Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam (DRV) would lead to encirclement, but it also worried a large Soviet presence there would undermine its influence in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, if China had to strengthen its southern border to mitigate a US threat from the DRV, it would mean weakening its northern border with the Soviet Union, a border which was looking to be under increasing threat.
China’s answer to its strategic dilemma was to increase its material and financial support to the DRV as the war in the Republic of [South] Vietnam intensified and then commit ground forces following the commencement of US bombing in the first half of 1965. China’s aims were twofold: to keep the DRV supplied to allow it and its proxies to prevail in the south, and to fortify its east coast and Hanoi against the possibility of a US amphibious offensive. China thus became the second largest external participant in the war deploying 320,000 personnel into the DRV between 1965 and 1970, and a second wave of a little short of 10,000 in 1972–1973. 110,000 Chinese personnel were also deployed to Laos for a decade beginning in 1968.
Li sets out to ‘view the war through the eyes of the Chinese officers and soldiers’.[1] In this endeavour he succeeds – organisational, tactical and experiential detail is one of the strengths of Dragon in the Jungle. Drawing on interviews, Chinese secondary sources, and published collections of archival documents, Li details the operations of the various components of the Chinese force, which undertook four main roles: air defence (AD), road and railway construction and repair, defensive engineering, and logistical transport. The AD campaign is extensively covered in a story of learning and adaptation as the Chinese, equipped with obsolescent weapons, radars and fire control systems, sought to defend the DRV’s lines-of-communication against increasingly intensive US air raids. The road and railway engineering divisions led a Sisyphean existence. As Li notes: ‘they would build a new railway or highway, watch it be bombed, repair it, and then again saw its destruction due to continuous bombing’.[2] Li examines how the Chinese troops and their commanders confronted challenges common to large military contingents deployed in a foreign country: rotation and reinforcement policies, coping with adverse environmental conditions, operating at the end of often tenuous lines-of-communication, and maintaining morale and discipline both in the face of enemy fire and among a host-nation population.
Any notion of a united Communist front in the war is dispelled by Dragon in the Jungle. Li highlights the almost farcical competition for both military advantage and influence between the Chinese and the Soviets, which the DRV sought to exploit. For example, the DRV ‘complained incessantly’ about the deficiencies of the Chinese AD batteries compared to those of the Soviets, armed with state-of-the-art surface-to-air missile systems. One Chinese AD officer observed they had two rivals in Vietnam: ‘the American imperialists in the sky, and the Soviet revisionists on the ground’.[3]
Li observes that China’s inability to close the AD technology gap was one of several factors contributing to the decline in its influence in Hanoi but does not explore other ideological or strategic differences in depth. Readers with an interest in China-Vietnam-Soviet dynamics in the war should also look to Lien-Hang T. Nguyen’s Hanoi’s War to expand their understanding of this dynamic. Ultimately, Li argues, the growth of Soviet influence in the DRV – combined with clashes along the China-Soviet border – fanned fears of Soviet, rather than US, encirclement and precipitated the withdrawal of the bulk of Chinese troops between 1969 and 1970.
In an effort to set the Chinese experience of the Second Indochina War in a broader historical context, Li’s last chapter discusses the deterioration of China-Vietnam relations after the war, including Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1977 and China’s prolonged war with Vietnam beginning in February 1979. This account provides a springboard to a summary of military reform in China up until the release of its 2015 defence white paper that wanders away from the subject at hand. The chapter is labelled a conclusion; it is more a postscript. While it adds to the sense of the historical complexity of the China-Vietnam relationship, the reader is left wanting a consolidated assessment of the significance of China’s contribution to the Second Indochina War.
In the absence of a robust conclusion, Li’s judgements need to be gathered along the way. The raw data he assembles readily demonstrates the scale of the effort to extend and maintain DRV roads and railways, and the logistical tonnages moved across them. The criticality of Chinese support to the DRV’s war effort and eventual victory is easy to see. Assessment of the AD effort is more problematic. It is described as contributing to a sophisticated AD network and limiting the effectiveness of US bombing but comparative analysis to support these judgments is limited. Li never reconciles the discrepancies between Chinese and US statistics relating to aircraft losses.
Li’s ultimate judgement is that China’s contribution did little to strengthen relations with either the DRV or the Soviet Union. He does, however, maintain that the Chinese deployment contributed to US reluctance to escalate the war for fear of provoking more direct intervention – thus implying strategic success. While US fears of widening the war are well-established, more effort was needed, drawing on US archival sources, to demonstrate that the physical presence of Chinese troops was a factor in US decision-making. This is particularly the case given that – as Dragon in the Jungle shows – US air forces were not reluctant to bomb them.
Li’s other principal thesis is that the experience of the Second Indochina War was a fundamental driver in the modernisation and professionalisation of the PLA. While the path from operational experience to subsequent modernisation programs is not strongly traced, there seem to be grounds for inferring that shortcomings revealed in Vietnam resulted in a stronger and more sophisticated PLA AD arm. Other homegrown PLA reform and modernisation efforts seems to have been more a product of the split with the Soviet Union – both the withdrawal of technical assistance and technology sharing and the border tensions. Li is measured in his judgements about PLA reform. While he lauds its ability to mobilise and deploy a large expeditionary contingent into the DRV, he also describes how military professionalism struggled with the forces of party control and ideological enlightenment during Mao’s cultural revolution. Li’s final sentence suggests he believes similar issues remain central in the Chinese military milieu: ‘Whether or not the military leaders of the new generation are eventually accepted by the Party and government as leading actors, they will shape part of the domestic and foreign policy-making context’.[4]
It is widely acknowledged that nations’ strategic cultures are, in part, shaped by both their historical experience and the narratives they tell themselves about it. While Dragon in the Jungle adds to our understanding of the Second Indochina War, it is also a useful text in an age where we seek to understand the complex set of relations between China, Russia and Vietnam – all of which defy easy description.
Endnotes
[1] Xiaobing Li, Dragon in the Jungle: The Chinese Army in the Vietnam War (Oxford University Press, 2020), 4.
[2] Li, Dragon in the Jungle, 166.
[3] Li, Dragon in the Jungle, 140.
[4] Li, Dragon in the Jungle, 269.
