The Third Indochina War

  Vietnam-Cambodia-China Relations (1950s-1975) In the attempt to produce a satisfactory account of the origins of the Third Indochina War, there is no need to go as far back as pre-modern Cambodian history to describe the already well-documented ‘age-old resentments and suspicions’ that the Cambodians generally hold against the Vietnamese (and indeed, towards the Thais as well). Our narrative proper therefore begins during the period when many of the main protagonists in the Third Indochina War were already active in the arena of conflict. Over the years, many have passed on, such as Sihanouk, who at the time of the 1954 Geneva Conference was thirty-two years old. Sihanouk, widely regarded as the ‘Father of (Cambodia’s) independence,’ died in 2012; and Pol Pot (aka Saloth Sar), who was the general secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) from 1963 to 1981 and the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea until the Vietnamese invasion in 1978, died in 1998. Others are still...

 Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction 1.Vietnam - Cambodia - China Relations (1950s - 1975) 2.From the Fall of Saigon to the Invasion of Cambodia (April 1975 - December 1978) 3.The Sino-Vietnamese War (February 1979) 4.Regional Responses to the Vietnamese Invasion 5.The Long-Drawn Endgame Epilogue List of Characters/Dramatis Personae Bibliography Index Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge my debt to the many scholars who have written about the Third Indochina War upon whose works I have drawn. I wish to thank Chong Yee Ming, Huang Zihao, Joachim Lai, Vu Minh Hoang, Tran Thi Bich, Ha Hoang Hop, and Terence Chia for their help. I also wish to express my appreciation to Lucy Rhymer at Cambridge University Press for her support, Rose Martin, Dan Harding, Natasha Whelan, Sunantha Ramamoorthy as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Any mistakes and shortcomings in this book are my own. This book is perhaps the culminat...