Brinkmanship on a Hot Border

China launches a "punitive action"against Viet Nam

"China has launched an aggressive war all along the border of our country." With that terse statement, Hanoi radio announced Saturday that Chinese troops, which had been massed along the Vietnamese border since Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia, had poured into Viet Nam at several points along their joint frontier. Hanoi charged that before the predawn attack, the Chinese had softened up the Vietnamese with long-range artillery, followed by infantry and tank assaults. By the end of the day, Chinese forces had advanced as much as six miles into Vietnamese territory.

Peking's official news agency, Hsinhua, called the expedition a "counterattack to defend the country's borders." Most observers believed that the Chinese would withdraw after "punishing" the Vietnamese. But U.S. officials were nonetheless alarmed by the ominous step-up in tensions between the erstwhile allies. The administration called on both nations to withdraw their respective forces from foreign territory, and also urged the Soviet Union, now Hanoi's chief patron and bankroller, to act with restraint. Said State Department Spokesman Hodding Carter III at a hastily called press conference: "We are committed to the territorial integrity of all nations."

The Chinese and the Vietnamese have been exchanging insults and occasional gunfire along their mountainous 480-mile-long common border since last spring, when Hanoi forced an exodus of Chinese nationals who had lived in Viet Nam for years. But since December, the level of violence and invective has risen sharply, with shootings, cross-border raids and other clashes now occurring at a rate of about 30 a week.

Before the Chinese action, Viet Nam's Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh had denounced what he described as "feverish war preparations" by Peking, including the massing of 20 divisions along the frontier. Trinh also called on the United Nations to "examine the grave situation" and move to defuse it. The Soviet Union entered the rhetorical fray by warning Peking not to "overstep the forbidden line" in its quarrel with Hanoi.

What that line is remains unclear, and how Moscow might respond if it is crossed remains perhaps the most troublesome question of all. Australia's Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock, for one, fretted last week that if the Indochina squabble got much hotter and broader there "would be grave implications for both the region and beyond."

While the Vietnamese have deployed around 100,000 troops along the frontier, it is the size of the Chinese buildup that has caused most concern. Along the frontier in the provinces of Yunnan, Kwangsi and Kwangtung, the Chinese have gathered an estimated 150,000 troops, some of them rushed from positions facing Taiwan. In the past week or so, the frontier forces were bolstered by the arrival of several hundred Chinese fighter planes. At the same time, Chinese forces along the Soviet border in Sinkiang province went to full alert, and civilians were reportedly being evacuated from those areas. Said a China-watcher in Hong Kong: "No amount of paranoia could account for the size of this buildup. The Chinese are preparing for something."

The Soviets evidently agree. They have kept two small task forces, including warships, steaming off the Viet Nam coast, with the apparent aim of monitoring Chinese military communications as well as showing Soviet support for Hanoi. The U.S., for its part, has kept two Seventh Fleet aircraft carriers, the Constellation and the Midway, poised near by to discourage any rash action.

China, the country that Mao Tse-tung promised would always be Viet Nam's "reliable rear area," began to get really exercised about its neighbor's actions last Christmas when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, whose regime was a Chinese client. After Viet Nam's forces ran Premier Pol Pot out of Cambodia's capital, Phnom-Penh, and seized control of that country's other cities last month, China's Vice Premier Teng Hsiaop'ing began talking of taking "punitive action."

Already, Friendship Pass, across which Mao fed Ho Chi Minn's war against South Viet Nam and the U.S., has been stitched closed by the Chinese with barbed wire. Other routes are seeded with land mines or pocked with foxholes. A day seldom passes without Peking and Hanoi each blaming the other for a new string of incidents.

China's aim in keeping the border hostilities hot is fairly obvious: to try to draw some Vietnamese forces out of Cambodia and thus help Pol Pot's resistance effort. The Chinese also want to restore their dented image as a power to be reckoned with.

Viet Nam's motives for twisting the dragon's tail are much less clear. Hanoi might have convinced itself that even a limited Chinese thrust into Viet Nam would bring swift retaliation by some of the Soviet forces arrayed along China's western and northern frontiers. But as for why such tail twisting should now be so popular in Hanoi, some Western observers can only speculate that it is a sign that a group of hard-lining expansionists, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap and Army Chief of Staff Van Tien Dung, are gaining supremacy in the Vietnamese Politburo.

Ironically, Hanoi's muscle flexing all over Indochina threatens to weaken further Viet Nam's already seriously strained resources. In addition to the 130,000 troops Hanoi has sent into Cambodia, it has 30,000 in Laos; because 160,000 skilled Laotians have fled the country, Hanoi's troops now have to help run the nation. Meanwhile, Viet Nam's own economy is collapsing. Exports have dropped sharply, and food production is way down; last year the grain crop was a record 4.3 million tons below what was needed to feed Viet Nam's 51 million people. Unemployment is so serious that even the Hanoi daily Nhan Dan publicly laments that "hundreds of thousands of people remain jobless."

Inevitably, Viet Nam's woes will increase Hanoi's dependence on Moscow, to which the regime already owes $6 billion. "Through ambition, ineptitude and, one suspects, plain stupidity," says Patrick J. Honey, a longtime Viet Nam analyst at the University of London, "the Vietnamese Communist leaders have brought their own country to the brink of famine and economic ruin. They have provided a foothold for the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia, jeopardized Viet Nam's own national independence and brought the possibility of large-scale conflict to the region once more." As this week began, that possibility loomed larger than ever. qed

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