Abstract
Nicholas Khoo, Collateral Damage: Sino-Soviet Rivalry and the Termination of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance, New York, Columbia University Press, 2011; x + 267 pp.; US$50.00 hbk; ISBN 9780231150781
In a series of chronological chapters, Nicholas Khoo explores the collapse of the Sino-Vietnamese relationship after 1964. The Tet Offensive in 1968, the Paris Agreements in 1973, unification in 1975, and the 1979 border war serve as natural dividing points. The book addresses a major development in the second half of the Cold War that has attracted surprisingly little sustained and evidence-based attention by scholars in its entirety.
As a self-declared realist, Khoo places the fall of the partnership within the triangular relationship between the two Asian neighbours and the Soviet Union, arguing that the Chinese perception of a Soviet threat following the split between the two communist giants was the dominant factor in Chinese foreign relations in general and its policy to Vietnam in particular. As Hanoi and Beijing's security needs diverged over the period in question, he concludes, so did their relationship to each other. Khoo uses a great number of English and translated primary and secondary sources, as well as Chinese-language monographs and articles. In fairness, the author admits that he speaks neither Russian nor Vietnamese; he thus is able to use only a small number of translated documents and monographs originally written in languages other than English and Chinese. As a result, the book is heavily focused on China.
In the spirit of full disclosure, the interpretations and publications of this reviewer are a target of criticism in Khoo’s book. Adherents of Realism will find his book lucid and powerful, as the basic theoretical assumption that states maximize their security in an anarchic state system by countering perceived or real threats underlies the whole book. In that vein, the author discounts ideological factors and domestic politics to a very large degree. Constructivists and historians, like myself, will disagree with the book’s declared reductionist argument (13). A book review, however, is not the place to fight inconclusive battles in a stale war over basic assumptions on the nature of international relations.
While the book’s strong focus on the security needs and policies of the three states involved provide for a clear argument, more attention to contextualization might have led to different explanations of the story. For example, Khoo argues that the Sino-Soviet split led Moscow to apply the wedge strategy to the Hanoi-Beijing relationship in 1965 (24) without providing any direct evidence from Soviet sources. A brief review of Soviet global strategy in the mid-1960s may have led to the conclusion that Soviet aid was the result of a policy of coming to the defence of a fraternal socialist state under attack from the imperialist United States. There is good evidence that Moscow would have done the same in other cases; although Mao and Kosygin disagreed on virtually every issue in the famous meeting in February of 1965, they did agree that in case of general war with the United States they would cooperate as good comrades (see the English translation of the Soviet memcon in the appendix of Sergey Radchenko’s Two Suns). At another point (91), the author claims that China started to support the Khmer Rouge in 1973 as a result of the Paris Agreements and with an intent to check Vietnam, without mentioning that Pol Pot’s radicals by that time happened to supersede Sihanouk as the only political force able to overthrow Lon Nol, whom the Chinese leaders had opposed from the very beginning. The impact of the Cultural Revolution on China’s political discourse, both internal and external, and on its institutional ability to execute a coherent foreign policy also is widely, though not completely, absent in the book. The inclusion of this central political event in modern Chinese history would explain several of the country’s decisions, or the lack of Chinese delegations sent to Vietnam in the late 1960s (39). Here, methodological reductionism, and the Realist tendency to see states as unitary actors, may have obscured other, more convincing interpretations.
There is no doubt that the Sino-Vietnamese relationship cooled down and then collapsed over the second half of the 1960s and all of the 1970s. On the basis of much evidence, Khoo traces this collapse and the simultaneous improvement of Vietnamese-Soviet relations carefully. He is not shy to assert that this overarching development was not linear but included short periods of contrary trends. Yet, this reviewer often felt that the author discounted alternative explanations too easily when they did not fit the theoretical framework.
An alternative course of inquiry could have been the exploration of the policies of Vietnam itself, which happened to be far more active in fostering the split with China than Khoo is ready to acknowledge. For example, new evidence shows clearly that it was Hanoi that demanded the withdrawal of Chinese troops in the summer of 1968, not Beijing in an act of punishment, as the author implies (56). In general, Vietnamese strategy from the early 1950s to the early 1980s reveals a remarkable continuity not only in actual leadership (Le Duan and Pham van Dong; Ho Chi Minh had lost influence by the early 1960s) but also in overall strategy. Hanoi’s leaders always followed a hierarchy of goals, as Vietnamese and East European archival sources over the period from the 1950s to the 1970s consistently reveal: first, the construction of socialism and national unification, then hegemony over Indochina (Cambodia and Laos), and, finally, the export of world revolution into the rest of Southeast Asia. Similar to China’s political and ideological emancipation from the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Vietnamese Communists exited the long shadow of Chinese Communist political and organizational domination (dating back to the 1920s) over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. As the Vietnamese Communists achieved some of their ambitions in the 1970s (unification and socialism), the remaining goals on their agenda became more important. Paradoxically, I agree with Khoo that ethnic and territorial issues in the late 1970s were not at the heart of the Sino-Vietnamese conflict, although we arrive at this conclusion from different paths. As China had essentially become a post-revolutionary status-quo power by the mid-1970s, and particularly after Mao’s death, Vietnamese interests in Cambodia and its world revolutionary designs on peninsular Southeast Asia moved to the forefront. Naturally, Hanoi’s shift in overall policy became a major geostrategic concern for the new leadership in Beijing. Again, it was Vietnam that sought a closer relationship with the Soviet Union, and in the end an alliance to deter China, and not vice versa (an interpretation Khoo shares: 129). And it was China that followed by seeking rapprochement with first ASEAN, the new target of Vietnamese designs, and then the United States, an ally of most ASEAN members, in late 1978. By then, as the few available sources on Chinese-language strategic thinking suggest (which Khoo does not use), Beijing was primarily concerned with Hanoi’s regional agenda, not with Moscow’s global policies as Khoo asserts, unfortunately, with no evidence (128–9). Of course that all changed with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan a year later.
In the end, the book is a provocative statement on Sino-Vietnamese-Soviet relations. The author starts Collateral Damage by criticizing much of the more recent literature on Chinese foreign relations after 1949 and its ideological motivations. This historiography has been published on the basis of Chinese and other archival resources, which Khoo did not consult, and of Chinese-language secondary sources, some of which he does use. Opposing an emerging consensus on the history of the Cold War in East Asia is a daring but potentially rewarding strategy for placing a book on the market. This reviewer is not entirely convinced that Khoo makes a compelling case for a Realist interpretation.
McGill University