Experts split over China’s aims in Vietnam push

Press, 20 February 1979, Page 8

Experts split over China’s aims in Vietnam push

By

DONALD G. McNEIL,

L, Jnr, of the “New York Times,” through NZPA

NZPA New York American university professors who study Chinese politics and history took two views of China’s motives for invading Vietnam in interviews yesterday. Some scholars interpreted the invasion to be chiefly a strategic move to humiliate Vietnam and force Hanoi to move its troops from Kampuchea to its northern border area. Other experts said the invasion was an attempt by Mr Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-ping), China’s Senior Deputy Premier, to consolidate nationalist feelings within China behind his leadership. A brief, successful invasion, they argued, would avenge both the ethnic Chinese who had been persecuted by the Vietnamese Government, and the border troops who had been killed. In addition, the invasion would serve to quieten domestic opposition to Mr Deng’s policies.

Every scholar interviewed, however, stressed that the interpretations of the situation were based not on inside information, but on the limited reports on the fighting and on their own knowledge of the history of Chinese border incidents.

Several experts compared the present move with the

[invasion of India in 1962, ini i which the Chinese thrust I past the border, killed about) ■2500 Indian troops, and then) withdrew 33 days later from) all but 14,000 square miles) of mountainous captured territory. None of the professors said they expected the Chinese to remain until they provoked a Soviet invasion of China. Professor Ross Terrill, of the Harvard Centre for East Asia Studies, said: “First of all," what are we talking about? Six miles inside the border and some air strikes. I’m not sure ‘invasion’ is the word we want.” He said that the Chinese had probably invaded “out of an accumulation of frustrations: the Kampuchean set-back, national anger over 180,000 persecuted Chinese in Vietnam, and the frustration in some quarters — the machismo faction — over the fact that they’re not going to get at Taiwan for a while because of the American reaction.” Professor Terrill said he saw a possible confrontation resulting from the invasion between Mr Deng and Mr Hua Guofeng, China’s Premier. Professor Terrill listed some “ironies” involved in the invasion: “It marks China’s coming of age in behaving like a great Power — it’s bullying

la smaller one, and it’s doing) it not because it’s going to. I the aid of its brother coun-l ) try, Cambodia, as it should : (have two months ago, but! I because it’s supersensitive; about its own border. “It’s like it was in the Korean War,” he said, noting that China had “only intervened there when General Douglas Macarthur was nibbling at its borders.” Professor Jonathan D. Spence, of Yale, called the invasion “a dangerous move” that was “complicated to interpret. “Vietnam can’t fight a two-front war,” he said, so the invasion would “deflect troops from Cambodia and give the Cambodians breathing space.” Professor Spence said the invasion was “also a way of testing Soviet reaction, for Deng to see if China’s new relations with America will make any difference. “I doubt they’ll stay,” he said. “The Chinese got

burned the last time they invaded Vietnam in 1788.” David Milton, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, and author of “The Wind will not Subside” ' a history of the Cultural Revolution written while he was in China from 1964 to 1969, compared the invasion to the Yalu River incidents with the Soviet Union. Professor Milton said that he thought at the time of

the Yalu incidents that they had been provoked by the Soviet Union, but that he was no longer so sure of that.

“They served to unite the Chinese and gave Mao the opportunity to overthrow Lin Piao and set up the Nixon visit,” he said. “It could be similar here, the Chinese claiming retaliation, but Deng using it as a device to consolidate the people behind him.” Professor Milton said he believed that there was “a lot of opposition to Deng in China, that a lot of them feel humiliated by the country throwing itself into the arms of the Americans.

“Deng is going for broke,” he said. "He’s opened the country to tremendous demands, whether they’re for political freedoms or colour televisions, or whatever. He’s got to control that, and a war creates a time in which opposition is not tol- : erated. It’s easier to keep the peasants down on the farm.” Professor Franz H. Schurmann, of the University of ' California at Berkeley, said that Mr Deng’s world view [ was much like that of Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser. He said that that view could be summarised this way: “The view that Russians mean to dominate. And it’s risky to provoke them after they’ve signed a defence treaty with Vietnam. “But,” Professor Schurmann said, “there’s nothing like a wartime situation for unifying people. The Korean War was a Godsend for the communists. They mobilised a country they hadn’t been capable of ruling.” He said: “Right now the leaders probably think they’ve waited through 20 years of very slow industrial growth while they made sure the population had enough to eat.' Now the sense of urgency is very strong and the ' possibility for development is there. That implies taking risks. But we have no way of knowing what will happen.”