Pounding with two fists

This chapter explains China’s patronage transfers to North Vietnam from 1967 to 1970. In 1966 and 1967, the United States remained China’s dominant geopolitical rival, posing existential security pressures at China’s southern doorstep. Le Duan’s, the DRV’s powerholder, determination to carry out his militant strategy to counter the United States and topple the South Vietnamese government predisposed North Vietnam to align with China closely.

The DRV’s sympathizer position in the intense Sino-US geopolitical rivalries boded well for Hanoi to receive increased patronage transfers from Beijing in 1967 and 1968 as Washington escalated further in Vietnam. The geopolitical landscapes changed significantly in 1968 and 1969. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Brezhnev’s “limited sovereignty” doctrine for socialist countries in 1968 and the fatal Sino-Soviet border clashes in 1969 qualitatively changed the Soviet rivalry with China from ideological polemics to existential security threats.

They put Moscow on par with Washington as Beijing’s equal archenemies. Meanwhile, North Vietnam’s large-scale regular-unit military attacks in the Tet Offensive despite China’s preference for a protracted war and consent to the Paris peace talks with the United States in the aftermath, which China disapproved strongly and the Soviet Union encouraged assiduously, positioned Hanoi as a dealigned neighbor in Beijing’s two-pronged intense geopolitical rivalries with Moscow and Washington. As the book’s theory expects, China reduced its patronage transfers to the DRV significantly in 1969 and 1970 as Beijing’s shortened time horizon and risk aversion made it unwilling to purchase Hanoi’s noncommittal allegiance.