Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Mark Bradley, University of Chicago
Discussant: James Hershberg, George Washington University
Despite hundreds of studies on the Indochina wars, we have had scant knowledge of the critical roles played by North Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union. The recent opening of archival materials in Beijing and Moscow, and a more limited opening of primary sources in Hanoi, provides the first opportunity to examine the policies of the communist powers and impact of alliance politics within the communist world on the nature of the Indochina wars. This panel brings together four scholars from Europe and Asia whose pioneering work with these newly available materials promises to recast scholarly understanding of the conflict. The papers present four case studies—Vietnamese-Soviet relations in the wake of the 1954 Geneva accords; debates in Hanoi and Beijing in 1964–65 over Chinese intervention in Vietnam; a 1967 campaign against revisionists in Hanoi that alleged Soviet support for a military coup; and the reaction of Hanoi, Moscow and Beijing to the crisis the 1968 Tet Offensive posed for the United States—in an effort to illuminate some of the most important unanswered questions of the war. What were the Soviet and Chinese attitudes toward the Vietnamese revolution? How did the Vietnamese perceive Chinese and Soviet advice and guidance? And finally, who influenced whom? Was North Vietnam forced to adopt the policies of its more powerful allies or was it able to maintain its freedom as an independent actor? While each panelist is a specialist in a particular national history, their papers aim to address these questions by locating the place of North Vietnam and the Indochina wars in the larger context of the international history of the Cold War.
Mari Olsen, Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies
This paper is based on Soviet and East German documents and will focus on the relationship between the Soviet Union and Vietnam from August 1954 to the end of 1960. I will start with the results of the Geneva Conference, the division of Vietnam and the prospects for reunification. Three main issues will be discussed in the paper. First, the degree of Soviet influence in, and attitude toward, the Vietnamese struggle for reunification. How did Moscow perceive the growing wish among the Vietnamese to develop a strategy based on armed struggle to reunify Vietnam? And did Moscow attempt to influence North Vietnam’s policies toward southern Vietnam? Second, Vietnamese perceptions of Soviet attitudes toward their reunification policy. Did Hanoi alter its policies according to Soviet preferences? And third, the Moscow-Hanoi-Beijing triangle. To what extent did the Sino-Soviet relationship influence Soviet-Vietnamese relations? In Vietnam, the Soviet Union was pulled between ideological solidarity with the Vietnamese communists and its emerging need to improve relations with the West. However, from 1956 this picture started to change and Moscow’s desire for peaceful coexistence with the West prevailed over its solidarity with the Vietnamese communists. This paper aims to show how and why Moscow and Hanoi drifted apart, and the consequences their deteriorating relations based on a consideration of political, military and economic relations between the two allies.
Chen Jian, Southern Illinois University
The period 1964–65 represented a crucial period in the escalation of the Vietnam War. How did the leaderships in Beijing and Hanoi perceive the danger of further American military involvement in Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident? How did they respond to the incident? If the United States brought the land war to North Vietnam, would China intervene? And if so, in what forms? These are some of the key questions concerning the history of the Vietnam wars which have not been answered in the past because of the lack of reliable documentation. Drawing upon recently available Chinese and other documents covering exchanges between top Chinese and North Vietnamese leaders, this paper will provide new answers to these important questions in an effort to examine the roles of ideology and realism in the relationship between Beijing and Hanoi.
Judy Stowe, Independent Scholar, London
In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, over forty people were arrested in Hanoi as so-called revisionists. Among them were veteran revolutionaries, army generals plus leading academics and journalists. They were interrogated and detained without trial, often in solitary confinement for the next nine years. No word of their fate has ever been published in the Vietnamese press. According to official party documents leaked in recent years, however, they were involved in what is called "An Organization to oppose the Party and the State by following the line of modern revisionism and supplying intelligence to a foreign power." The leak of these documents results from an attempt of the party to rebuff a spate of petitions and memoirs clandestinely circulated in Vietnam by survivors of the 1967 purge who argue they were victimized by claims that they had been a part of a plot by the Soviet embassy in Hanoi to carry out a military coup to engineer a shift in party leadership. These memoirs raise intriguing questions about the nature of Soviet-Vietnamese relations in a period when they were allegedly close allies. The paper also discusses the role of the Chinese in these events and the common assertion in these memoirs that from 1964 onwards Ho Chi Minh was little more than a figurehead behind whom swirled a bitter internal and international power struggle.
Ralph Smith, SOAS, University of London
American studies of the Vietnam War, using American archives wherever possible, have focused overwhelmingly on the perspective of United States decision-making, diplomacy and military operations; while a very small number of studies have focused, almost as exclusively but without access to any archives, on Vietnamese Communist policies and aspirations. In An International History of the Vietnam War (3 vols., 1983–91) I argued for a more global analysis of the unfolding situation, treating it as a major international conflict whose significance cannot be fully appreciated in terms of U.S. policies alone. Now that it is becoming possible to throw new light on the war by using Russian archives of the Soviet period, and also much more detailed official histories coming out of Beijing and Hanoi, we must avoid falling victim to any opposite tendency to focus on the various strands of Communist decision-making, while forgetting Washington and Saigon. In this context my paper will concentrate on two American dilemmas which became apparent by the end of 1967 and which helped shape the crisis in Washington following the Communist offensive of Tet Mau-Than in early 1968. First, the global extent of U.S. military commitments and the fear of international Communist actions in Korea and Berlin, which affected the issue of whether to send more troops to Vietnam; second, the impact on Vietnam decisions of the U.S. deficits and the global monetary crisis of November 1967–March 1968. We need to consider American calculations and debates in these two areas in the light of the way they were perceived in Moscow, Beijing and Hanoi, paying attention also to the extent to which Marxist-Leninist analyses of the global situation may have affected actual strategies and decisions.