CHAPTER 13
“Touching the Tiger’s Buttocks” The Third Vietnam
War
IN APRIL 1979, Hua Guofeng, still China’s Premier,
summed up the results of the Third Vietnam War, in which China had
invaded Vietnam and withdrawn after six weeks, in a contemptuous
dig at the Soviet role: “They did not dare to move. So after all we
could still touch the buttocks of the tiger.”1
China had invaded
Vietnam to “teach it a lesson” after Vietnamese troops had occupied
Cambodia in response to a series of border clashes with the Khmer
Rouge, which had taken over Cambodia in 1975, and in ultimate
pursuit of Hanoi’s goal of creating an Indochinese Federation.
China had done so in defiance of a mutual defense treaty between
Hanoi and Moscow, signed less than a month earlier. The war had
been extremely costly to the Chinese armed forces, not yet fully
restored from the depredations of the Cultural Revolution.2 But the invasion
served its fundamental objective: when the Soviet Union failed to
respond it demonstrated the limitations of its strategic reach.
From that point of view, it can be considered a turning point of
the Cold War, though it was not fully understood as such at the
time. The Third Vietnam War was also the high point of
Sino-American strategic cooperation during the Cold
War.