The Chinese have deployed a fairly large force on Vietnam’s border – 100,000 to 160,000 men and hundreds of military planes on bases close to the frontier and about half a million men in adjoining provinces. And Peking’s strong-man, Mr. Deng Xiao-ping, has said that “sanctions” are necessary against Vietnam on account of its military actions in Cambodia. On their part the Vietnamese and their Soviet allies have inevitably responded to this provocative deployment, the former by moving their troops and aircraft from the south to the north and the latter by expanding their naval presence off the coast of Vietnam where they have stationed a small task force which obviously can be augmented if and when necessary. This makes the situation look grim. Certainly an armed conflict of some dimension cannot be ruled out. As Western intelligence sources have been quoted as having said, the Chinese would not have spent so much on the military build-up if they were not serious and were merely bluffing. But what are the Chinese options?
Surely not a full-fledged war with Vietnam for the twin reasons that they cannot hope to win it and they cannot possibly risk Soviet retaliation in fulfilment of obligations which Moscow has assumed towards Hanoi under the recent treaty of friendship. The Chinese are not likely to under-estimate either the patriotism and determination of the Vietnamese – Vietnamese nationalism has always been anti-Chinese – or the Soviet Union’s commitment to the valiant Asian ally. It must also be conceded that as a rule the Chinese are fairly prudent about such things. So far in the last 30 years since the establishment of Communist rule in Peking they have intervened in a big way only once – in the Korean war in 1950 – and they did so out of the fear that the United States wanted to overrun north Korea in order to be able to create problems for them in Manchuria. This assessment of Chinese prudence is generally accepted. Which helps promote the view that the Chinese may be planning to mount a lightning strike, as in NEFA in 1962, in the calculation that they can thus inflict a decisive defeat on a small, perhaps regiment-size, Vietnamese force and salvage their prestige which has taken a beating in Kampuchea. But Vietnam in 1979 cannot be compared with India of 1962. India then was totally unprepared for the kind of conflict the Chinese sprang on it. Mr. Nehru did not believe that the Chinese would ever attack India. He was convinced that in the final analysis Moscow would be able to restrain Peking. India had also by then not trained and equipped troops for service in the Himalayas. Its defence machinery was still geared to looking after the problems of its security vis-a-vis Pakistan. Above all, it did not have treaty relations with the Soviet Union which it could have invoked to cope with the Chinese attack. The Vietnamese are fully prepared to meet any contingency and they have taken out the best possible insurance in the shape of a treaty with the Soviet Union. This should suffice to strengthen the position of those in Peking who favour prudence and caution.
The Times of India, 14 February 1979