Threatening a "Second Lesson"

China and Viet Nam exchange angry words and artillery fire

The Chinese government hereby issues a stern warning to the Vietnamese authorities to stop immediately their armed provocations, or China will reserve the right to fight back.

That menacing statement, issued by Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Qi Huaiyuan last week, was not a threat of out-and-out war. But neither was it idle propaganda. In a steadily escalating exchange of artillery fire across the Sino-Vietnamese border, China made it clear that it was prepared to retaliate against what it saw as Vietnamese provocation along the countries' common 800-mile border. More important, the cross-border incidents were part of a Chinese effort to intimidate Viet Nam at a time when the Hanoi government was stepping up its offensive against the rebels who oppose Viet Nam's occupation of neighboring Kampuchea. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former Kampuchean ruler who now heads the anti-Vietnamese resistance movement, acknowledged as much when he declared at a Peking news conference, "The more China intervenes against Viet Nam, the more we are satisfied."

The current episodes are the most serious flare-up of border tension since May 1981, when China claimed that its soldiers had killed 150 Vietnamese troops in a single engagement. Throughout the week, according to reports from Peking, Chinese militiamen killed at least 37 Vietnamese soldiers in four or more incidents in Yunnan province. In the meantime, said the New China News Agency, Vietnamese gunners opened up on a district in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, damaging the primary school, the bank, the food-grain management office and a hospital.

Diplomats in Peking generally agreed that China was not on the verge of "teaching Viet Nam a second lesson," as it had been threatening to do off and on since the four-week-long Sino-Vietnamese war of February and March 1979. At that time, China had justified its brief invasion of Viet Nam as a "lesson" designed to discourage the Vietnamese from engaging in any more troublemaking along the border. But for the past several weeks, the Chinese have been upset about Vietnamese attacks on Kampuchean refugee camps located along the border between Kampuchea and Thailand. The Chinese were particularly alarmed when the Vietnamese carried their war right into Thailand, shelling Kampuchean refugee camps and also hitting Thai villages.

China's main grievance against Viet Nam is that, with Soviet assistance, Hanoi has come to dominate Indochina and now seeks to eliminate in Kampuchea the last remnants of Chinese influence in the region. To counter the Soviet presence, China backs the Sihanouk-led coalition of rebels who oppose the puppet government of Heng Samrin that Viet Nam installed in Kampuchea in 1979. China's Vice Premier Wan Li expressed his support directly to Sihanouk in a meeting in Peking last week. The Chinese have given him $100,000, Sihanouk said, to be divided among the three factions of the coalition opposed to Viet Nam's occupation of Kampuchea. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.