Abstract
On the 17th February 1979 the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched a large-scale attack into Vietnam in order « to teach Vietnam a lesson » , according to the words of Deng Xiao Ping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party since Mao Zedong's death. Vietnam answered to the attack to defend its “sacred independence and sovereignty” and until the 16 March 1979 the two countries waged war. The attack led by China was supposed to be decisive and short in order to overwhelm the People's army of Vietnam (PAVN) with massive amount of troops, to capture some provincial capitals and then retreat. Many observers at the time though that this short punitive mission by China was due to the Vietnam invasion of the China's ally, Cambodia, to end the regime of Pol Pot who was exterminating a part of the population to implement his socialist plans .
Clearly, the timing of the Sino-Vietnamese conflict two months after the 25th December 1978 invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam suggests that the war was mainly about Cambodia. However, the causes of this war need to be investigated further, because a mono-causal explanation to this real reversal in Sino-Vietnamese relations seems simplistic. Indeed, after the two Vietnam wars, the Sino-Vietnamese's closeness was compared to « lips and teeth » because China had supported the exile of Ho Chi Minh, helped in the revolutionary struggle against France with war material, and sent troops against the USA invaders before 1970.
But in fact, in spite of their rapprochement in the 1950s and 1960s to support the communist cause, Vietnam and China were not natural friends and there are probably other underlying factors, external to the situation in Cambodia, to this sudden punitive mission of China. According to Nguyen Mang Hung, the origins of the conflict are deeply rooted in « history, geography, clash of national interests and policy differences ».
