When the War Was Over (71 page)

Trouble began with the Cultural Revolution. Young Chinese in Hanoi paraded waving Mao's Red Book. In Chinese schools, teachers encouraged Maoist thought. Newly fearful of Chinese intentions, the North Vietnamese placed all Chinese schools under the control of the ministry of education and replaced the entirely Chinese-language curricula with Vietnamese-language courses. Some of the teachers were expelled and left for China.
From 1970 onward, Chinese children were sent to Vietnamese schools, and Chinese teachers, who had taught their courses in Mandarin, were told to teach in Vietnamese. Soon afterward, the authorities ordered a number of Chinese to move to the remote highlands and out of the cities.

A pattern emerged of the Vietnamese punishing the ethnic Chinese of the north whenever there was trouble between Hanoi and Beijing. In 1974, just before the Vietnamese communist victory, China captured the disputed Paracel Islands from Diem's troops. Hanoi did not protest, but within months the ethnic Chinese of the north were forbidden employment at state-owned factories or strategic industries. Immediately after victory, the party declared that all foreigners were forbidden to be members. As one former member said: “This decision was, we felt, directed against the Chinese as we were the only foreigners who had been members in the party.”

The ethnic Chinese were being locked out of the new order. By 1977 new laws were preventing them from earning a living wage in the country. The Chinese dockers who ran the Haiphong harbor had their pay reduced arbitrarily and were denied state ration cards. At the same time the main Chinese group within the government—the United Chinese Associations of Hanoi, Haiphong, and Nam Dinh—was disbanded. The government said: “The Chinese in Vietnam have completed their historic responsibilities and now they should begin a new era.”

In other words, they should leave the country. Chinese-Vietnamese relations had soured quickly after 1975, and the government in Hanoi viewed ethnic Chinese as a potential fifth column that could be used against Vietnam in the event of war. After 1975 Beijing had asked the United States to keep a military presence in the region to prevent the Soviet Union from stepping into the power vacuum. Later the Chinese tried to convince Vietnam to sign an “anti-hegemony” clause aimed against Moscow. The Soviet Union required no such pledge and was increasing its aid to Vietnam. With the purge of the “Gang of Four,” Chinese-Vietnamese relations improved briefly, and in the spring of 1977 China invited Vietnam's General Vo Nguyen Giap to tour Chinese military installations. China also briefly resumed some abandoned aid projects in northern Vietnam. By midyear, however, Vietnamese-Cambodian relations deteriorated and all of the conflicts that led to the Third Indochina War fell into place.

In July of 1977, Laos signed a special friendship treaty with Vietnam which legitimized its nearly satellite status to Hanoi. The Vietnamese offered a similar friendship treaty to the Cambodian communists; they refused, adamantly. Then Vietnam raised the question of renegotiating the Cambodia-Vietnam
border, adding to Phnom Penh's paranoia about Vietnam. Thoroughly provoked, the Cambodians escalated the issues and decided the Vietnamese were responsible for all of their problems—internal and external—just as the Vietnamese, in turn, had decided to blame the Chinese for their problems.

Now the Vietnamese blamed China for their problems with Cambodia as well. The Vietnamese decided that China was instigating the Cambodians against them. By the second half of 1977, Cambodia had begun attacking the Vietnamese on their common border. Within months the Vietnamese were expelling ethnic Chinese from their country for acting as a fifth column for China against Vietnam. In January 1978 all ethnic Chinese in the north were told to accept new identity cards that listed their nationality as Vietnamese rather than Chinese, an order forbidden by the 1955 oral agreement. Hanoi had already ordered the Chinese of the south to register as Vietnamese citizens. But citizenship was only the beginning of the crackdown.

In the north, the authorities sent out their police, or public security officials, with orders to force out Chinese living in the provinces, particularly in sensitive border areas. Villagers watched as their homes were destroyed and their property stolen. More Chinese were fired from their jobs in the cities. Chinese began to sell their possessions and pay bribes for travel permits to flee the country overland to southern China. Others took to boats and tried to land on the Chinese coast or in Hong Kong. The flood of the boat people had begun.

In the south, the party fully applied the crackdown on capitalism in March 1978, shortly after the northern Chinese began fleeing. The northerners were hounded out for purportedly acting as a fifth column; the southern Chinese would be chased out for pursuing capitalism. Vietnam nationalized most commercial enterprises in the south, closed down all “bourgeois tradesmen's” shops, and required private savings to be deposited in national banks with the government controlling all withdrawals. While these rules were applied to Vietnamese and Chinese alike, they fell hardest on the ethnic Chinese.

By summer at least 160,000 ethnic Chinese had fled Vietnam for China alone. Over 105,000 ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese had fled Vietnam by boat and landed safely elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Perhaps as many died en route, according to later statistics. China charged Vietnam with “persecuting and ostracizing” the ethnic Chinese. In May, China canceled major aid programs to Vietnam, closing down some seventy projects and calling home Chinese advisors.

Vietnam saw these Chinese denunciations as part of a larger Chinese scheme to encircle Vietnam. Shortly after the Vietnamese-Cambodian border
war of December 1977, the Vietnamese broadcast a statement saying: “Since the Vietnam-Kampuchea incident began, rumors have been spread among the [ethnic Chinese] that China supports Kampuchea against Vietnam, large-scale war will break out, [ethnic Chinese] people in Vietnam will suffer losses; they must therefore leave Vietnam quickly.”

Hanoi's answer to this first wave of boat people was to blame China, saying China was spreading rumors forcing these people to leave. The next month, Vietnam accused China of giving “all-round support to the Kampuchean authorities in launching their border war aggression against the Vietnamese people.”

Hanoi officially stated the position that would allow it to declare something close to a state of siege. In Hanoi's view, Beijing had opened two fronts against Vietnam: By agitating the ethnic Chinese and encouraging Cambodians to attack Vietnam's southern border, China had put Vietnam's national security, its national survival, at stake. Hence, Hanoi could move to formalize its ties with Moscow.

The added dimension of racism began to surface openly. To be ethnic Chinese was to be
prima facie
a traitor. China itself was accused of “Han chauvinism” in attempting to take over Vietnam. The authorities made life impossible for many Chinese and then accepted bribes to allow them to flee on those awful boats that killed as many as they took to safe harbor.

And Vietnam was ready for war. Its army was now ranked among the five most effective in the world. (Its armed forces numbered one million fighters compared to 807,000 in the combined forces of the non-communist countries of the region.) With a population of 50 million people, it was the second-largest communist power in Asia.

Vietnam now had the best reason for invading Cambodia—its own national security—and it had its oldest enemy to blame—China. Vietnam had deep domestic problems that encouraged it to persuade the population to mobilize once more against the threat of a foreign power—China. (Cambodia would never have been seen as a true threat to Vietnam, hence the constant need to cite China as the target, even for the invasion and occupation of Cambodia.)

And crucially, the Cambodian communists had laid the groundwork for a Vietnamese invasion with their own need to blame a foreign power for the ghastly horrors of their revolution. The boat people thus became the first public sign to the world of an unbelievably swift resumption of the series of Indochinese wars.

We arrived in Cambodia just as the world, in particular the West, was awakening to the tragedy of postwar Indochina. Immediately after the war the American establishment wanted nothing more than to forget the phrase “Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.” The sight of America's abandonment of its embassy in Saigon on the eve of South Vietnam's defeat marked the beginning of an official moratorium on discussing the war proclaimed a few weeks later by then President Gerald R. Ford. The United States had suffered its first major military disappointment, if not defeat, and no number of disclaimers could alter that fact—neither blaming Congress for reducing funds to Saigon in the final months nor blaming the anti-war effort for undercutting American morale.

A deep, basic flaw had directed the U.S. war effort, but none of the American leaders of 1975 wanted to find out what had gone wrong. The clamor for answers had died down once the war reached its denouement. Coming two full years after American troops were withdrawn, the communists' victory provided an ambiguous ending to the war for all partisan groups in the United States. The war had dragged on long past the height of the anti-war movement. The sharply partisan political debate in the United States was moot once the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge fought their way into Saigon and Phnom Penh.

Neither side had looked much beyond the American war for answers—at Indochina as a whole, at the history and relations between Cambodia and Vietnam, Vietnam and China. That might have confused the ideological lines drawn during the war in the United States. As a consequence the anti-war movement withered once the U.S. troops were no longer fighting. And when the U.S. government refused to review American involvement after 1975, refused to assess blame or guilt, no one seemed to care.

Official American policy and American emotions froze. It was as if the entire country was bewitched, too exhausted and embittered either to change
views or to examine what had happened in the Indochina War. Hawks remained hawks, doves doves, with not a word exchanged. The first and second anniversaries of the war's end passed with little notice. There were too many victims on both sides of the debate, too many broken or missing veterans, too many ghosts to exorcise.

Americans could be jarred from their collective withdrawal from “Vietnam” only by the most violent reminders or inescapable ironies: by the steady staccato of a Vietnam veteran holed up in his suburban Washington house and blasting away at his neighbors' homes one wintry Sunday afternoon until the local police arrived and killed him; or by the discovery that an infamous Saigon policeman ran a fast-food cafe in the shadow of the Pentagon.

Henry Kissinger remained secretary of state, serving President Ford, who pardoned the disgraced former President Richard M. Nixon of any crime he may have committed in connection with Watergate. Under Kissinger and Ford's stewardship, “moratorium” meant silence about any guilt connected to the war, a prohibition against examining how the United States got involved in a war that had been lost at such a prohibitive cost to the country. Americans who had masterminded the disaster won an unspoken reprieve. They returned to their lawyer's world, remained in upper echelons of government, or became high-powered bureaucrats elsewhere. There were no official recriminations, no public explanations. Only silence.

In this freeze, Vietnam and Cambodia retained the coloration of the “enemy.” Ford continued the trade embargo and travel restrictions imposed against North Vietnam during the war. The United States single-handedly blocked Vietnam's entry into the United Nations. The United States would not accept defeat gracefully. Washington not only refused to have relations with Hanoi, it wanted the rest of the world to treat the new Vietnamese state as a renegade.

The American retreat from the region was swift. Only two major U.S. newspapers—the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
—kept a staff correspondent in Bangkok to cover the region from 1975 through 1978. Indochina was no longer considered “newsworthy”—all of Southeast Asia was covered from Hong Kong, which was also the listening post for China. The countries that had monopolized American attention for decades vanished from newspapers and television screens overnight.

Academia lost interest as well. Indochinese studies disappeared from the curricula of all but a handful of American universities. U.S. government support for these studies dried up. And the new Indochinese countries imposed stringent visa policies that prohibited academic specialists from
doing research in their countries. Some of these specialists moved on to other areas of inquiry, or moved out of the United States—as far away as Australia in some cases—to continue working on Indochina.

The few experts, academics, government officials, and journalists who continued reporting and studying the region became known as “Indochina watchers,” men and women who were forced to act like the “China watchers” of the fifties and sixties when that giant nation was cut off from the rest of the world. The Indochina watchers could only follow their countries of interest from a distance. They gathered pieces of information from the few sources available: carefully controlled government broadcasts and journals, refugees who fled the Indochinese countries, and the foreign diplomats posted to Vietnam and Laos. The refugees did not represent a cross section of their countries' populations, by either class, political persuasion, or geography. The returning foreign diplomats from Hanoi and Vientiane, the capital of Laos, had only restricted access to those nations. Visits to the Thai border with Cambodia and Laos yielded limited information.

The total was a very incomplete patchwork of information. There were no complete pictures of the individual nations, much less Indochina as a whole. And with little firsthand information, experts were understandably reluctant to draw major conclusions about the emerging communist states of Indochina. The problem was complicated further by the passions elicited by even the mention of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. All news about Indochina spawned controversy Many of the experts themselves had been embroiled in the bitter wartime debates over the American involvement. They could not discard their deeply embedded views overnight. It took time for even the experts to put the war behind them and see Indochina as the new region it was becoming, to see the countries on their own terms and not through the prism of America's war.