The Sino-Vietnam War and the Sino-Indian Confrontation: History and Comparison

One evening in the late winter of 1979 – I was eight years old then – I looked, as usual, at my father’s newspaper (the late unlamented Amrita Bazar Patrika, for anyone who’s interested). I still remember the banner headline taking over half the front page: CHINA INVADES VIETNAM, it screamed.

China? I thought. Invading Vietnam? China, which had, as I knew, “attacked us” in 1962 and would undoubtedly one day “attack us” again? The same Vietnam which I also already knew had beaten the Americans? The Americans who were our enemies? That Vietnam? What on earth for?

I do not remember much of that article – after all this time I don’t remember if I even read all the way through it – and in a few weeks the war was over anyway. I was by then getting ready to go back to school after the winter break, and it just registered peripherally on my mind.

But the question never really went away. Why on earth would China invade Vietnam?

Today, for reasons I will explain, that question is important again.

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THE SINO VIETNAM WAR OF 1979

Whenever any discussion on Chinese military capabilities comes up, there are sure to be people who try and console themselves by pretending that Chinese military capabilities are nothing to worry about, and that “even Vietnam” defeated China in 1979, killing “20000/29000/34000/insert your own fantasy figure” Chinese soldiers. China was defeated and humiliated, so nobody should worry too much about fighting the Chinese; they were whipped and will be again.

Is that so? Let’s see.

The basic facts of this tragic episode are simple. In 1979, Vietnam – only recently victorious in the struggle against the Americans and their vassal regime – was involved in a border war against the People’s Republic of China. In December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Pol Pot regime, which China supported; in February 1979, China invaded Vietnam in an effort to compel Hanoi to withdraw forces from Cambodia to protect itself from the Chinese invasion. After 27days of fighting, the Chinese withdrew. What the casualties were on both sides is impossible to say because neither side has given an accurate estimation, and because each side claimed utterly fanciful figures of the casualties the other suffered.

We can, however, judge the results of this war on both a strategic and tactical level.

Strategic:

China’s plans were three-fold:

 First, to compel the Vietnamese to withdraw partially or completely from Cambodia. Chinese power projection capabilities back then were strictly limited. It could not send troops to Cambodia, which was separated from it by Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. It could, however, seek to draw off Vietnamese soldiers from Cambodia to defend the homeland, and to teach it that intervention against a Chinese client regime would have comsequences.

Result: Failure. The Vietnamese remained in Cambodia until 1989, and though they suffered fairly severe casualties in the meantime, the Chinese invasion had no effect on the occupation. However, it did compel Vietnam to garrison the area more heavily, therefore tying up troops who might otherwise have been re deployed to Cambodia.

Second, to show Vietnam’s ally, the USSR, that it could not intimidate China.

Result: Success. The USSR, which supported Vietnam with weaponry and intelligence, and massed troops on the Chinese border, completely failed to either prevent the invasion or affect its course. The Chinese openly warned the USSR that they were ready for a full scale war if the Soviets intervened in favour of Vietnam...and the USSR did nothing. At no point after 1979 did the USSR ever threaten China militarily, or look as though it was about to.

Third, to compel Vietnam, which had a history of hostility towards China and had mistreated “pro-Chinese” ethnic minorities and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese citizens, to change its policies towards China.

Result: In the long run, this paid off, with Vietnam settling its border disputes with China in 1989, and until fairly recently going out of its way to suppress all mention of the Sino Vietnamese war even in textbooks and the media. Only now, when tensions in the South China Sea are increasing, is Vietnam beginning to allow discussion of the war at all. And today China is incomparably stronger and in a position to handle such a confrontation than it was forty years ago.

Therefore, on the strategic level, it was far from an unmixed disaster for China.

Tactical:

On this there can be no argument whatsoever; on the battlefield, China (no matter what casualties it suffered) handily won the war. Every single battle that was fought in the 27-day-long campaign resulted in a Chinese victory. That the Vietnamese refused to commit their main forces, leaving them in defensive positions before Hanoi, only makes the point clearer; Vietnam had conceded that the border battles were lost, and that the capital now needed to be defended. And while China captured over 1500 Vietnamese prisoners during the fighting, the two-hundred-odd Chinese prisoners taken by the Vietnamese were all captured when they were cut off from their main force after China had declared the war over and was withdrawing. This is not how a defeated army loses prisoners of war.

Vietnamese soldiers surrendering to Chinese PLA troops, 1979

Also, there is another tactical feature of the war that is typically Chinese. Chinese military strategy, developed by Mao during the Civil War, still influences their thinking to this day. Mao’s dictum was clear: the guerrilla should never attempt to hold territory, because that would expose him to being counterattacked. Both in 1962, when China and India fought a border war, and again in 1979, China fought short duration conflicts – 30 days in 1962, 27 in 1979 – and withdrew as soon as strategic objectives were met. There is absolutely no reason why this should be different today, in the 21^st Century, when most wars are short and sharp. I will shortly explain why this is important.  

To get back to the point: on a tactical basis, the argument that the Sino-Vietnamese war was a disaster for China is ridiculous.

Why does this ancient history matter anyway?

Here is why:

****************************************************

THE DOKLAM/DONGLANG STANDOFF

The current borders of the Indian state are rather unwieldy. A look at the map shows that there is a huge chunk of it (where, incidentally, the author of this article lives) that is almost isolated to the east, connected to the rest of the country by a narrow strip of land only about twenty kilometres wide. This strip is known as the “chicken’s neck”, and it connects “mainland” India with the landlocked  seven north eastern states. Just north of the chicken’s neck are three territories, two of which are independent countries (Nepal to the west and Bhutan to the east) and, sandwiched between them, Sikkim, which was until 1975 (when it was annexed by India under circumstances that are at least highly dubious) also an independent nation.

(Map of Kashmir depicted as it really is in this image, not as India claims it to be.)

For a country which allegedly wants peaceful relations with all its neighbours, India has managed a remarkable feat: it has, with just one exception, alienated every single one of them. The reasons for this are many, but ultimately come down to India’s habit of acting as the would-be subcontinental hegemon, with a divine right to order around all the other smaller countries as it sees fit. Nepal in particular has borne the brunt of Indian bullying, repeatedly being subject to economic blockades to compel it to bend its policies to suit India’s wishes.

The other South Asian countries, unsurprisingly, have not exactly been happy about this, and have reacted by reaching out to alternative partners. And the partner that was ready and waiting to take over was at hand: China. Today, China is integrating its communications networks with Nepal’s, rendering future Indian attempts at bullying inconsequential. It has leased the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, has become Bangladesh’s top arms supplier, has bought an island in the Maldives, and launched multiple projects in Myanmar. Pakistan (which is also improving relations with Russia, after India went out of its way to court the Americans) is so closely integrated with China now that they are converging towards becoming one economic entity.  

The one exception to this rule is Bhutan, and the reasons are interesting.

Bhutan, like Nepal and Sikkim, was allowed by the British to exist as an independent nation for one reason only; it was supposed to be part of a “chain of protectorates” separating British India from Chinese Tibet. The British had signed an “agreement” (in so far that a coercive treaty can be termed as such) under which Bhutan could have no independent foreign relations except under British “guidance”. In other words, the Bhutanese would have to do what the British said, and there were no two ways about it.

When the Brits left, the new Indian government, which slavishly followed British practice in almost everything, became the “successor state” to that treaty. It was finally renegotiated in 2007, when the Bhutanese regained, theoretically, the right to have an independent foreign policy. But the Bhutanese currency, the ngultrum, remained pegged to the Indian rupee, so that the Bhutanese economy remained hostage to India’s goodwill. And the Bhutanese aren't happy about it.

In 1962, India had provoked, and subsequently lost, a war by pushing troops across the Chinese border in a very badly planned and conceived “Forward Policy”, but that had not directly involved Bhutan. When defeated Indian troops had attempted to flee for their lives through Bhutanese territory, the then government of Bhutan had compelled them to surrender their rifles before it allowed them safe passage. At no point was Bhutan a colony of India’s, or a protectorate; it was, and remains, at least theoretically an independent nation, even if not treated as such by India.

Like a lot of other nations which were carved out by the hands of colonial powers, Bhutan has territorial disputes with China (it would never dare have territorial disputes with India for obvious reasons). Specifically, there are three points at which the two sides have a dispute. Two are not important for the present discussion, except to note that China has offered to Bhutan to cede them in return for Bhutan ceding the third; and this spot, sandwiched between Bhutan and a tongue of Chinese territory stretching south past Sikkim, is called Doklam, or (by the Chinese) Donglang.

Let’s state something right away: Doklam (to give it a convenient name) is not Indian territory. Not even India pretends it is Indian territory. The dispute, such as it is, is between Bhutan and China, and, normally, India would have nothing to say about it.

Unfortunately, these are not normal times.

The 1962 war between India and China was followed by decades of frozen relations, but by the early nineties the thaw had begun, with steadily increasing economic cooperation. The border disputes between India and China, while theoretically still in existence, were consigned to the Himalayan freezer where they belonged. Huge Chinese investments in Indian infrastructure and manufacturing projects were matched by Indian business projects in China. For a while it looked like a growing partnership in the works.

That changed with the advent of Narendrabhai Modi, and his ascension to power in the elections in 2014. Almost overnight, he seemed to look for ways to antagonise China, including enthusiastically joining with Japan and America in what was supposed to be an alliance to “contain” the Chinese, including refusal to join in China’s ambitious One Belt One Road (OBOR) project. It did not (and does not) seem to have occurred to the people in the government that the Chinese might have their own ideas about this as well, and be capable of taking steps to counter it. But of course China did.

One of the things China did was construct a road near the disputed territory in Doklam. Alleging that this was an infringement of Bhutanese sovereignty, a 2012 agreement, and also a threat to the chicken’s neck, India sent troops to the spot, and they have been facing off against the Chinese ever since. From the rhetoric that began flying around, you’d imagine that both sides were itching for a war.

Chinese government image claiming to depict Indian troops intruding into Chinese territory at Doklam.

This is not true. There is not going to be a war.

The Chinese reacted by pushing Indian soldiers back across the territory they claimed as their own, physically, as they had done in the run up to the war of 1962, and destroyed Indian bunkers in what they claimed to be their territory. So what was India’s response to that?

Nothing.

The army chief, who was appointed to the post by Modi over the heads of two more senior generals, is someone who used to boast that he was ready for a “two and a half front war” – against Pakistan, China, and Kashmir; he is someone who likes human shield use and has publicly stated that he wishes Kashmiri protestors were armed so that he could massacre them. From boasting, he has fallen totally silent as well, Modi’s mouthpiece television channels Times Now and Republic, which are little more than inventive laden propaganda outlets for his party, have apparently forgotten China exists.

Modi’s online troll army, formally known as the BJP IT Cell, is normally tasked with bullying leftists, Muslims, and secularists online. I love how Bhakts who have contempt for beef eating, Christian North Eastern "chinkies" and couldn't find the North East on a map get all nationalistic about China allegedly preparing to cut the same North East off from India. But then the orders must have gone out, and the Bhakts fell deafeningly silent on the China issue as well.

There are reasons for this.

First, India has not to this day forgotten the disastrous war of 1962. The conditions that led to that defeat –  overwhelming Chinese military superiority, compounded by incompetent and politicised Indian military leadership, combined with tremendous Indian geographical disadvantages – are the same as ever. 

Chinese and Indian troops face off, before the 1962 war.

And, while the 1962 war was between a Korean War Chinese army and a WWII Indian army, today the gap is far greater; a 21^st century Chinese army, with excellent logistics, would face a 90s era (at best) Indian army operating in the territory of another nation, which is hardly enthusiastic about becoming a battlefield. Indian soldiers have no Kevlar helmets and body armour, their rifles are of such poor quality that they were rejected even by the Nepali army, and morale is not exactly high. Apart from all this, the army has only some ten days’ worth of ammunition. It’s enough to massacre Kashmiri protestors, but hardly sufficient to take on the People’s Liberation Army.

Secondly, Modi has crafted an image of being a strongman in the Ataturk mould, but he's more like Mussolini; a balloon puffed up with hot air. One puncture and the balloon is done for, and Modi knows that perfectly well. A defeat in a military clash, especially one which India itself provoked, would puncture that balloon once and for all. Especially with the 2019 election edging over the horizon this is not something Modi can risk.

Third, and this is extremely important, China and India are today economically strongly intertwined, not just in India but abroad. Modi's corporate owners have huge Chinese investments. Do you suppose they can risk losing those? If there was a chance of a real war they'd pull on his chain so fast he'd fall over himself scuttling back to heel.

Fourthly, China isn't alone. India's policy of acting as the subcontinental bully has systematically alienated just about every single country on its borders, and China has filled the gap. If India wants a confrontation, it'll find itself alone, while in 1962 countries fell over themselves offering lip service support. China has already pointedly asked what India would do if, just as India “came to the aid” of Bhutan in its dispute, China sent troops into Pakistani Kashmir. It isn’t a question India would be too eager to handle.

Nor, to India’s surprise and dismay, did it get the response it was hoping for from the US. Apparently, to what passes for the minds of Indian politicians, America would be prepared to commit suicide to back up an Indian ego clash with China over a stretch of land claimed by Bhutan. To its consternation, the Trump administration, which is yet to appoint an ambassador to Delhi, has stayed deafeningly silent, except for a meaningless statement calling on both sides to resolve the dispute amicably.

No, America won’t kill itself for the greater glory of Modi. If India fights, it will fight alone.

Therefore, from India’s perspective, a war against China is the last thing India actually wants, and its subsequent behaviour bears that out. Despite all chest thumping to the contrary, India is looking for a face saving way out, and it only remains to be seen what kind of face saving exit China allows it.

China, despite its own hyper-jingoistic chest-thumping media, is no more eager for a war than India is. Yes, if there is a war, China will smash India flat, and that is something both sides know. But then what? China will win some bragging rights and a stretch of land which isn’t of any use to anybody unless Beijing wants to actually launch a full scale invasion of India. Beijing does not want to launch a full scale invasion of India any more than it did in 1962. So all it will win is bragging rights, a useless stretch of land, any chance of weaning Bhutan over to its side and....the loss of all the trillions of currency units of business that it stands to make in trade with India.

There is a third party, though, which might want a war between India and China, though it would carefully not take part. That is Modi’s hugging partner Trump and the United States of America. If there is a war, even if it is a short one ending in an Indian defeat, the immediate order of the day would be a massive rearmament programme; and the instinctive response of all recent Indian governments has been to turn to Warshington’s military industrial complex to supply defence needs.

Ay, there’s the rub, as Hamlet said. It’s all about the money here, on all sides. That is all there is to it.

Let us, however, take a look at what might happen in case there was a war, one caused by, say, some accidental clash or mistake.

The first thing that would happen is that it would not be long. China, as I said earlier, does not fight long duration wars. Mindful of both Maoist doctrine and Sun Tzu’s aphorism that no nation has prospered from a long war, Chinese strategy has always been to hit hard, make one’s point, and get out. So any idea India might have about bogging down the Chinese in a war of attrition is futile. Chinese strategy would be to expose India’s weakness, its inability to protect its Bhutanese client, and the hollowness of Modi’s own pretensions to being the Defender of India. The 1962 war destroyed Nehru; a war now would as surely shatter Modi.

Secondly, it would not be as per the planned Indian script; and this is why I started this article out by talking of the Sino Vietnam War of 1979. There is a repeated claim that the Vietnamese inflicted massive casualties on the Chinese and this proves that the Chinese, who use primitive human wave frontal assaults, can be slaughtered in battle. The assumption, apparently, is that the Chinese themselves failed to notice that they had taken casualties, and therefore have not taken any steps to correct that situation. In fact, the magazine India Today reported by the mid-1980s that the Chinese had drastically changed their war fighting tactics as a result. Instead of waves of Chinese soldiers swarming up the mountain slopes into carefully prepared Indian killing grounds, India Today said, India would face

“...massive heliborne commando assaults from the flanks and rear, backed up by overwhelming artillery fire.”

China had also acquired battlefield radars to track incoming artillery rounds, so as to locate enemy batteries and put them out of action; as India Today said, these were tactics that India could not counter, not then and not to this day, when Chinese road systems are better, they have better air cover, and light tanks on the Tibetan plateau ready to exploit breakthroughs.

Ironically, it was India which in 1999, at Kargil, was reduced to the same tactic of frontal assaults up mountain slopes. If the Pakistani defenders of those slopes had not been fighting with one hand tied behind their backs; if the Pakistani government, that is, could have admitted that it was their soldiers in action (and not, as they ridiculously kept claiming, “Kashmiri freedom fighters”), and used their air force and as many troops as India did, we’d have been slaughtered. If India thinks China wasn’t watching those battles and drawing the appropriate conclusions, it is deluding itself.

I’ve saved the most hilarious item for last: the Indian conceit of comparing itself to the Vietnamese. Oh, please; the Vietnamese fought off the Japanese, the French, the Americans and the Chinese, all in the course of half a century; they never gave up, never stopped fighting, even when things looked bleakest. India? India allowed itself to be ruled for almost 200 years by a few thousand British civil servants backed up by another few thousand troops.

We Indians, comparable to the Vietnamese in any way?

Give me a break.

Something Happened

The sliver of moon had just struggled over the roofs of the town below, and lay like spilt milk on the path and the dead garden around us.

“Do you think there’s anything in there?” I asked.

Mitron’s face was unreadable as he stood looking up at the house. “Dust, mice, a cockroach or two, and probably termites in the woodwork, I’m sure.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Mitron turned to me. “Mr Idom, let me remind you that you haven’t really given me any details to go on. I have no idea what I’m looking for...yet.”

“How could I give you details?” I protested. “I don’t know any myself. This house...”

“...was in your family for a century, and was left to you by your uncle. Yes, you told me that. And you told me it’s been unoccupied for almost fifteen years.”

           

“Because everyone said it’s haunted!” I snapped. “I told you this.”

“But you don’t know anything about the haunting, as you put it. You haven’t experienced it for yourself, have you?

“And so? Aren’t you the expert on the paranormal? Weren’t you recommended by every single source I researched? Why have I...” I broke off abruptly.

“Why have you hired me?” Mitron grinned, his teeth glinting briefly. “I don’t know. When you called me, you just gave me the barest bones of your story. You haven’t told me why you want me, though. It’s your business anyway, not mine.”

“Well, I want to sell this place.” The dust in the air, which had been rubbing my throat raw, finally made me break out coughing. “I can’t do that until there’s no question of it being haunted,” I said when I could breathe again. Mitron didn’t seem to be affected, and was watching me impassively. “Everyone knows you’re the best paranormal investigator in the country, if not the world. If you say there is no ghost, people will believe it.”

“Will they?” Mitron laughed, like a dog barking. “What if there is a ghost, then?”

I shrugged. “I’ll have to ask you to get rid of it, that’s all.”

Mitron nodded. “We will see. Do you have the key?”

I held it out, but he motioned me to keep it. “I still don’t understand why you wanted me to come here. I could have come to your office and given it to you.”

A brief frown of irritation flashed across his face. “I need you, in the house. That’s why I asked you to come and meet me here. I thought that was obvious.”

“But...I’ve never visited this house before. I can’t guide you around. What do you want me for?”

Mitron didn’t seem to hear the question. “Unlock the door, please.”

 The lock was as large as a fist, and the key turned in it slowly and reluctantly. The door sighed wearily open.

Inside was a small hall, empty except for a thick coating of dust. A window on the wall to the right was a pale glimmer of moonlight.

“You told me, Mr Idom,” Mitron said, “that everyone says the house is haunted. What do they say about it?”

“I don’t know it all,” I replied. “All I’ve heard is that the people who tried to stay here felt...and saw...things. Nobody wanted to stay on afterwards.”

“Felt and saw things?” Mitron walked past the pale square of window to the rectangular black maw of the door on the other side of the hall, and looked over his shoulder at me expectantly.  “What things?”

I shrugged. “You know what imagination and rumour can do, I suppose. They all said different things. Things that had nothing in common. One letter I found in my uncle’s effects was from a tenant who rented the place seventeen years ago. He took a three year lease. He lasted three hours.”

“Oh? What did he say?”

The passage through the door was almost pitch dark. It didn’t seem to bother Mitron too much. “He said that he saw someone here from a long time ago, someone he’d blocked from his mind, in this house. And this person was not...he said something about the lights being strange. It wasn’t a very coherent letter. That reminds me, shouldn’t we have some lights in here?”

“Why?” Mitron turned a doorknob I hadn’t even seen in the darkness, and opened a second door. It was a large room with a row of windows along one side. Walking to the nearest, I saw the dead garden, and, beyond it, the empty street. “As you can see,” Mitron went on, “there’s enough light for our purposes. And, besides, if your uncle’s tenant was correct, and there are ghosts here, lights wouldn’t make a difference, would they?”

“Well, then,” I said. “What should we do now? Go upstairs?”

“No, this room will do fine.”

“And what do we do?”

“We wait.”

“Just wait?” I asked. He didn’t say anything, but his silence was eloquent. “I still don’t understand your reason for bringing me here,” I said eventually.

“Your house, your business, and you don’t want to be here?” Mitron’s voice was expressionless. “Besides which, I need you, to act as an attractant.”

“Attractant?” The word sounded ominous. “Have you found anything?” I asked eventually.

“I told you, we have to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

He sighed. “For something to happen, Mr Idom. Three hours, did you say your uncle’s tenant lasted?”

I nodded, and, because there was nothing else to do, went back to the window. Through the grimy glass the garden and street were blurred and misty-looking. Here, above the main town, there was no traffic. Except for a twitch of shadow that might have been a cat, nothing moved. Total silence fell.

Standing there, I wondered once again if I really wanted to do this, and whether the money I might get from the house was quite that important. Mitron, at least, was not someone I would have normally searched out. His face was even more like that of a bird of prey than his photographs suggested, his voice like a knife. Each time he looked at me I felt as though his eyes were stripping my skin and flesh and bones away and staring into the depths of what was left. He would have been intimidating even at high noon, in the middle of a bustling city. Here, in the deserted house and the wan moonlight, he was terrifying.

I could walk away from this, I told myself. I could tell him now that I’d changed my mind, that he could keep his fee, and we could leave. But could I really? Could I go away now without knowing, without being sure?

I would wait just a little longer, I thought. Just a little more.

When something happened it was so sudden that I almost jumped. It was also laughably simple and familiar; the ringing of my mobile phone. I fished it out of my pocket, almost dropping it in my fumbling haste, and put it to my ear. “Yes.”

“Mr Idom?” The voice was terrifyingly familiar. “I’ve been trying to call you for a while. I’m still waiting for you to meet me, Mr Idom.”

The phone did finally fall from my fingers, thumping on the floor. “Mr Idom?” I heard the voice coming from the darkness at my feet, tinny and idiotic. “Mr Idom?”

“Mr Idom?” the voice echoed from behind me, ancient and mocking. “Mr Idom?”

My mouth must have made a sound. I do not know what it said. I tried to turn around, and my body would not obey me.

“I told you we were waiting for something to happen, Mr Idom,” the voice said, and there was breathless laughter in the words.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2017

De Putin Made Me Do It, Sah

Putin is in your walls

Hides under your bed

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Or if you're in an aeroplane

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If you think to end it all

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It's Putin who wins once again

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The end of the world fast cometh

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Global warming, war, pollution

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When you die your damnation

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Too late you understand.