Word: viet
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China's assault on Viet Nam was expected and well advertised. Tensions had been building up ever since Hanoi's forced expulsion of ethnic Chinese last spring, Viet Nam's lightning rout of Peking's client regime in Cambodia last month, and an intensifying series of incidents on the China-Viet Nam border. Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing repeatedly and publicly telegraphed the punch during his U.S. visit this month, railing against the "hegemonistic" ambitions of the Soviet "polar bear" and against Vietnamese "aggression" in Southeast Asia. Hanoi "has to be taught a necessary lesson," he warned. In Tokyo...
...fighting, in the wooded hills and tilled valleys of a scenic region called the Viet Bac, was shrouded behind military secrecy on both sides and by a cloud cover that thwarted satellite observation. Hanoi issued regular self-serving communiques; Peking's announcements were so cryptic as to be meaningless. Said one Hong Kong observer: "It's like hearing a couple of cats squawling in the middle of the night ?they're making a helluva racket, but you don't know if they are fighting or making love." From the start of hostilities, however, it was all too obvious that...
...possible Chinese objective: a swift, hit-and-run offensive, and then go home. But the Chinese were not yet ready to withdraw. At this point the Chinese shock troops, led by General Yang Teh-chih, China's deputy field commander in the Korean War, had not tangled directly with Viet Nam's crack regular army?battle-tested by victorious successive campaigns in South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia and equipped with the latest sophisticated Soviet hardware...
...front rapidly developed two main, logical prongs of attack: one in the northwest on the railroad line leading south to Hanoi, the other in the the east on the major rail link that parallels Highway 1, the jugular thoroughfare from Friendship Pass. Both thrusts appeared to aim directly at Viet Nam's capital. At the same time, an auxiliary Chinese force, spearhead units of an estimated three more divisions, probed toward the coast for a possible end run aimed at cutting off Highway 4 to Lang Son and later, perhaps, the main Vietnamese reinforcement and supply route of Highway...
Hanoi radio blared that Viet Nam's defense of Lang Son had inflicted more than 3,000 Chinese casualties, and that in just one coastal battle 50 miles southeast, Vietnamese forces had "trounced three battalions and wiped out 700 Chinese aggressors." In all, Viet Nam announced, its forces had killed 5,000 to 8,000 Chinese in five days, while losing less than half as many. The lopsided claims were remindful of the inflated enemy "body counts" reeled off each day by U.S. briefers during the Viet Nam War. Western sources in Peking estimated that the Vietnamese had suffered...