"Suck Them In and Outflank Them"

In China's punitive war against Viet Nam, who was punishing whom?

"We cannot tolerate the Cubans to go swashbuckling unchecked in Africa, the Middle East and other areas, nor can we tolerate the Cubans of the Orient to go swashbuckling in Laos, Kampuchea or even in the Chinese border areas. Now some people in the world are afraid of offending them, even if they do something terrible. These people wouldn't dare take action against them." So said China's Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing last week, puffing on a Panda cigarette as he aimed an unmistakable rebuke at what Peking considers the jelly-bellied Western response to adventurism by the Soviets and their clients. Teng also gave the fullest explanation yet of the motives behind China's two-week-old "punitive" invasion of its southern neighbor, Viet Nam. In an effort to placate international alarm, he repeated assurances that the operation "will be limited in degree and will not last a long time," perhaps no longer than China's four-week invasion of India in 1962. There were reports at week's end, in fact, that the Chinese were considering a cease-fire and might begin pulling back this week.

In any event, Teng allowed that his timetable could be off since "the Vietnamese are stronger" than the Indians. Indeed they are. As the murky war bogged down in seeming stalemate, one pressing question was: Who was punishing whom? When the Chinese proposed talks "as soon as possible" to end the conflict, Hanoi swiftly denounced the offer as a "trick" intended to disguise Peking's plans for "war intensification." The Vietnamese may well have had reason for this cocky rejection of a truce. The Soviet Union last week cranked up its warnings of possible intervention another notch by demanding that "the aggressor be made to get out immediately." Meanwhile, there was a strong feeling in Hanoi that the Chinese were facing an awkward dilemma. They had occupied border areas of Viet Nam, but without having faced battle-hardened units of the country's regular army. A further advance south toward Hanoi meant risking a serious extension of supply lines and reprisal by the Soviet Union. On the other hand, a unilateral withdrawal would expose Peking's threat to "punish" the Vietnamese as the growl of a paper tiger.

For all that the world was able to learn of it, the Communist vs. Communist fighting might just as well have been taking place in outer space. Communiques from both sides grew increasingly Delphian, as if the combatants were joined in a conspiracy of silence. Despite the official statements--which invariably included grossly exaggerated accounts of dead and wounded--Western analysts believed that up to 150,000 Chinese regular soldiers, arrayed across all of Viet Nam's six northernmost provinces, had captured or laid siege to eleven districts and at least 20 towns. The Chinese claimed to have destroyed six missile sites and a number of communications centers. The estimated 70,000 Vietnamese troops committed thus far, still mostly regional frontier forces and local militia rather than elite regular divisions, being held in reserve, repulsed some attacks and absorbed others for the sake of subsequent counterattacks.

The heaviest fighting was apparently concentrated at the cutting edge of two bulging Chinese salients. In the northeast, at the top of Highway 1 running south from Friendship Pass, three Chinese columns encircled and then occupied the deserted provincial capital of Lang Son, but came under intense artillery barrages from Vietnamese forces in the surrounding hills. In the northwest, below the captured town of Lao Cai, Chinese troops tried to advance down both banks of the upper Red River valley. The Chinese were believed to have occupied Cao Bang and three other towns in the central mountains. At the eastern end of Highway 4 on the Gulf of Tonkin, Vietnamese forces battled over the port town of Mong Cai, which was reported to have changed hands twice and remained in dispute. Running round the enemy flanks, Vietnamese mobile units also launched two swift hit-and-run counterraids all the way back across the border into Chinese territory, one six miles inside Yunnan province, the other just beyond Friendship Pass.

Peking's communiques about the war, presumably designed to encourage the home front, featured claims of territorial gains and heroic acts by Chinese soldiers. One dispatch described how a company commander had picked up a rocket launcher from two of his wounded men and "at the bugle call, led a charge against a Vietnamese hilltop position, where he shot down seven enemies with a submachine gun." A deputy squad leader was similarly extolled for having sacrificed his own life to blow up a Vietnamese bunker with a satchel charge ("Before the blast came, he even found time to wave his comrades forward").

On the Vietnamese side, the opaque shield of secrecy and propaganda surrounding the war was briefly pierced by two unlikely eyewitnesses. U. S. Representatives Billy Lee Evans and Elizabeth Holtzman were in Hanoi on a fact-finding mission for their House subcommittee on refugees. Wearing a Vietnamese army pith helmet, Georgia Democrat Evans was taken by Jeep to the northwest front in the Red River valley only days after the fall of Lao Cai. Evans heard artillery barrages thundering from the rugged border mountains, intermittently at night, intensely in the morning. Field commanders, said Evans, "indicated they were trying to suck the Chinese into a trap and then outflank them."

Brooklyn Democrat Holtzman, taken to Lang Son before its capture, found the provincial capital under artillery fire and completely evacuated, "with padlocks on every door. It was a ghost town." Near by, outside the village of Chi Lang, she saw "hundreds of people sitting on the roadside. People were fleeing by the thousands, on foot, bicycle and cart. They brought livestock with them, oxen and dogs. I saw a pig tied to the back of a bicycle."

Viet Nam had yet to bring up any units from its 130,000-man force in Cambodia, and thus one of China's presumed objectives had failed so far: to ease the military pressure on the Peking-sponsored resistance of defeated Premier Pol Pot. Nevertheless, the Chinese campaign appeared to put new verve in the insurgency against the Viet Nam-backed government in Phnom-Penh. Cambodian guerrillas claimed to have killed more than 200 Vietnamese soldiers in clashes along three national highways near the capital and in ambushes near four other major cities.

Other forces, meanwhile, hovered warily at sea within electronic range of the battlefronts. The Soviet Union reportedly sent a second missile-armed destroyer from Vladivostok to join the squadron of 13 Soviet ships already cruising near Viet Nam. A U.S. aircraft carrier left the Subic Bay naval base in the Philippines to join a Seventh Fleet task force in the South China Sea. Moscow stepped up its resupply airlift to Viet Nam --in plain view of Holtzman and Evans at the Hanoi airport, as it happened--and was reported to have sent senior Soviet military officers to the Vietnamese capital.

The Soviet counterploys prompted U.S. concern that Moscow might want to establish a permanent port of call at Cam Ranh Bay, the sparkling white-sand harbor northeast of Saigon that served as the main U.S. Navy base in the Viet Nam War. Having rights to Cam Ranh would give the Soviets a dramatic new naval advantage and would pose a potential threat to Chinese and Western shipping lanes, especially Japan's petroleum lifeline through the Strait of Malacca. But with no overt Soviet moves by week's end, Western observers remained hopeful that Hanoi's independent-minded leaders would surely think twice before granting Moscow so strategic a foothold in Southeast Asia.

The Soviets did not go beyond their warnings to China and lateral accusations against the U.S. In a televised speech, President Leonid Brezhnev repeated Soviet demands for the "immediate" recall of Chinese troops "to the last soldier," but stopped short of any direct threat of retaliation. The Soviets continued to badger Washington with charges of complicity, direct or indirect, in the Chinese invasion. Washington's "evenhanded" policy of castigating both the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the Chinese invasion of Viet Nam was scornfully dismissed as a tilt toward China. It was that insistent Soviet view which torpedoed a United Nation's Security Council effort to devise a cease-fire formula. Western and Third World members lined up behind a proposed resolution calling for reciprocal withdrawal of both Vietnamese and Chinese troops. China indicated that it was in favor, but negotiations collapsed in the face of a certain Soviet veto. In the light of Vice Premier Teng's festive reception in the U.S., and Washington's tepid response to the Chinese invasion, the Soviet resentment of America's role in the crisis was superficially understandable, but not warranted by the facts. Moscow had been informed after Teng's visit about President Carter's efforts to dissuade him from any action in Viet Nam. In Soviet eyes, Carter's disapproval must have seemed too mild in the midst of the exciting new Chinese-American embrace. Moreover, Washington's current assurances that Sino-American normalization will continue despite the invasion, and Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal's unperturbed trip to Peking, where he discussed most-favored-nation status for China, were not lost on Moscow. Those gestures could hardly be expected to change the Soviet view that the U.S. had "at least indirectly encouraged the invasion." Even some U.S. officials privately agreed with critics of American policy that the Chinese played their America card far better than Washington played its China card. sb

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