Vietnam gives remarks on Chinese film about border conflict

No country weighs on Vietnam like China, and it has been that way for centuries. Has the conflict with China ever really ended!?

Vietnam's 2,000 year history with its northern neighbor is complex. There have been countless conflicts as well as shared culture.

The two countries share a communist ideology shaped in part by their shared history, an ideology largely abandoned by the rest of the world. That helps explain why the 1979 border war is something neither government likes to talk about.

Memories of that war, and the many other bouts of invasion, occupation and retaliation throughout history, color Vietnam's relationship with China.

In the South China Sea, China continues to build on several disputed islands and reefs.

I think China is not only Vietnam's problem, but the world's problem right now!

China thinks it is at the center. The conquerer. It wants to turn everybody else into its subordinates. Don't believe China, when it appears to be playing nice. It's a trap.

After the war, the Vietnamese and the Americans could reconcile. Vietnam and France can reconcile. Veterans from both sides can sit down together and talk. Vietnamese and Chinese veterans hardly ever sit down together.

The Vietnamese have had too much experience with the Chinese. The Vietnamese can't trust the Chinese. We've had too much practice.

They want to spread their control. They will never give back what they took!

Exercising their legitimate right to defence, Vietnam’s army and people fought back with great fortitude.

Suffering heavy losses without achieving the initial goal of the attack while being condemned by the world opinion, China withdrew all its military forces from Vietnam on March 18 that year.

China is a neighbour of Vietnam. People of the two countries supported and helped each other during their respective revolutionary causes. But after Vietnam won the anti-US resistance war for national liberation in 1975, bilateral ties gradually degraded. In early 1979, when the Vietnam People’s Army defeated the reactionary Pol Pot gang and rescued the Cambodian nation from genocide, China and some other countries tried to distort the presence of Vietnamese voluntary soldiers in Cambodia, with the aim of undermining Vietnam’s revolution and backing reactionary forces, thus imposing their own interests in the Indochinese peninsula.

The international circumstances at the time also saw complicated developments, with contradictions between the Soviet Union and China intensifying while China-US ties improved and both countries considered the Soviet Union their Number One enemy.

China had several aims behind the assault. First, it wanted to force Vietnam to pull its voluntary troops out of Cambodia, thus giving some room for the Pol Pot army to recover and keep their remaining bases to continue fighting the newly-established revolutionary administration in Cambodia.

They hoped to win support from some powers hostile to Vietnam, including the US, for its scheme of “four modernization”.

China intended to damage Vietnam’s economic and defence strength, incite disturbance in Vietnam and lower Vietnam’s military and political prestige in the international arena.

China wanted to show off its strength to countries in the Southeast Asian region, while sounding out the reaction of the Soviet Union and the world opinion in preparing for later military manoeuvres.

Forecast the possibility of a war, at the end of 1978, Vietnam shored up its defence forces along the northern border. When China started the full-scale attack, the Vietnamese Government issued a statement the same day, declaring that the Chinese authorities are acting against the people’s interest, seriously damaging the solidarity and friendship between the two countries. The statement stressed that Vietnam had no other choice than to exercise its just right to defence.

To show good will and the wish to restore the friendly ties between the two countries, the Party and Government of Vietnam ordered the armed forces and people in the northern border region to stop their counter-attack campaigns to allow Chinese troops to withdraw.