Endings And Aftermaths – Lien – Hang T Nguyen

There was simply no way to effectively administer so many refugees in a city that only five years previ- ously had had a population of 600,000. But there was much more to it than that. The Khmer Rouge leadership had a vision for Cambodian society that was strictly egalitarian (except when it came to them, of course), agricultural, and brutally enforced.

People were forced out of the cities and marched into the countryside, regardless of age or physical condition. Thousands died and were left along the roadside.26 In proclaiming Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge leadership insisted it was the dawn of a new society. Gone was the past royal Cambodian society with its princes and kings, and along with it any vestiges of that age, including schools and governmental offices.

Private property was abolished. Material goods were confiscated. The population was forbidden from wear- ing bright clothes. Personal relationships now came under the province of the government. Land was redistributed. And thousands upon thousands of Figure 11.5 Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan. Source: Alex Bowie / Hulton Archive / Getty Images. 26 Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven, 1996), 62–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316225288.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press T. Christopher Jespersen people, real and imagined enemies of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary proj- ect, were tortured and executed.27 The Khmer Rouge also amplified the anti-Vietnamese sentiment already run- ning deep among Cambodians. Many of the 400,000 ethnic Vietnamese who were living in Cambodia in 1970 had fled or been killed by 1975–6, so the Khmer Rouge focused their attention on villages in Vietnam along the border with Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese government also disagreed over offshore islands. Relations with Hanoi deteriorated rapidly after 1975, reaching their nadir in 1977–8. Following a series of Khmer attacks on Vietnamese villages, Hanoi responded by invading Cambodia in December 1978. “Distrust eventually snowballed into paranoia,” Stephen Morris wrote. “This condition later led to Hanoi’s false belief that Beijing was instigating Khmer Rouge attacks upon it.”28 This, in turn, led to a retaliatory invasion of Vietnam by China in February 1979.

As Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping explained to President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while visiting the United States in January, China planned on teaching the Vietnamese a lesson.29 The Chinese quickly discovered what the French and Americans had experi- enced: the Vietnamese were formidable foes on the battlefield.30 In Cambodia, the Vietnamese clearly had the upper hand. Their troops were battle-tested after more than two decades of fighting US, South Vietnamese, and other allied forces. Their army was well supplied with Soviet and captured American equipment.

The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international devel- opments in the period before and after the war’s end, includ- ing its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapproche- ment, Soviet–American détente, and global counterculturalism served in various ways to elevate the already high profile and importance of the conflict, as did its expansion into Cambodia and Laos.

After the “fall” of Saigon to communist-led forces and Vietnam’s formal reunification in 1975–6, Hanoi’s persecution of former enemies, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, and economic mismanagement triggered a massive migratory crisis that redefined international refugee policies. In time, the migra- tion changed the demographic landscape of cities across North America and Europe and continued to impact our world long after the conflict ended. Pierre Asselin holds the Dwight E.

Stanford Chair in US Foreign Relations History at San Diego State University. He is the author of A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965, and Vietnam’s American War, now in its second edition. Published online by Cambridge University Press Published online by Cambridge University Press the cambridge history of THE VIETNAM WAR General editor Lien-Hang T. Nguyen Split into three volumes, The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War brings together seventy-five leading experts on the war from across the world, covering the late colonial era to present-day leg- acies, using diverse methodologies and approaches.

When did the fighting begin, why and how did it escalate, and in what manner did the violence end and the legacies endure? These are some of the fundamental questions that have consumed scholars, whose works trigger more questions than offer definitive answers. The volumes seek neither to reconcile past arguments, enflame ongo- ing disputes, nor set off new debates – instead, they intend to cel- ebrate the diversity and differences in scholarship and attest to the indisputable importance of this conflict in global history.

From decision-making in the corridors of power, to everyday life at war on the battlefront and homefront, to cultural legacies of the war on a global level, the three volumes present the most exhaustive and authoritative treatment of the seminal conflict.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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