In Brothers in arms, Andrew Mertha seeks to explain the paradox that China, though providing crucial support for the Khmer Rouge state of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–79) in the form of foreign aid and technical assistance, was largely unable to influence Cambodian policy decisions. China, ‘involved in every aspect and at every stage of the CPK rise to power’ (p. 2), increasing its support to the CPK as the relationship between Cambodian and Vietnamese Communists went awry, was ‘both willing and able to graft its strategic interests onto the political evolution of the CPK’ (p. 3) prior to 1975. Yet after 1975, China's ability, if not willingness, to do so decreased sharply. This provides Mertha the central research question: ‘Why was a powerful state like China unable to influence its far weaker client state?’ (p. 3).
The answer, Mertha asserts, lies in the respective strengths of the Chinese and DK bureaucracies. Overall, Chinese bureaucratic fragmentation and a strong institutional matrix in Cambodia generally ensured that the DK could afford to rebuff Chinese demands. Sectoral variations arose from variances in bureaucratic–institutional integrity, traced out through three case studies. In terms of the military, the strength of DK military institutions ensured that China would be unable to shape DK policy in its favour. As for infrastructure, the fragmentation of Chinese bureaucracies was decisive for ensuring DK autonomy in policymaking. Only in trade and commerce did Chinese institutional coherence meet with the institutional complexity and fragmentation of its DK counterparts, resulting in the exceptional scenario that China here was able to shape DK policy in its own interest.
The main value of Mertha's study lies in considering the DK first of all as a state, and evaluating its bilateral relations on the basis of the functioning of the networks and organisations defining it. This is elusively simple — Mertha himself readily acknowledges that it borders on the prosaic — yet subtly changes the parameters for approaching DK foreign policy as an object of study. Blinded perhaps by the magnitude of the horrors generated by the regime, scholarship has most often situated policy decisions and outcomes primarily in the engrossing context of the intellectual trajectories of its leaders. This bias is being rectified by the research accumulated by the machinery of the Khmer Rouge tribunal (ECCC), with the obvious consequence that chains of command and lines of authority are treated primarily for what they can tell about the criminal accountability of KR leaders, not in terms of the policy outcomes they generated per se, beyond and apart from such accountability.
Timely in this sense, Mertha's research combines evidence of chains of command and institutional mapping coming out of the trials and the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) with previously untouched archival material on Chinese aid. Enlivening the account is information gathered through interviews with former DK officials, giving colour and nuance to the grey bureaucracy. Mertha's major contribution in terms of first-hand research doubtlessly lies in the interviews conducted with some of the thousands of Chinese technicians and skilled workers sent to implement Chinese overseas assistance in DK. Probing into stories of shared food and cigarettes, Mertha gets under the skin of these experts, who as members of the intellectual class themselves had been targets of various political purges at home, detecting compassion.
The result is a fresh, persuasive, and important re-evaluation of Sino–DK relations, making a significant contribution to our understanding of DK positioning vis-à-vis the Asian Communist states its fate would be bound up with. Mertha challenges the assumption that China did have substantial leverage to influence the DK, whether grounded in an analysis stressing a shared revolutionary outlook buttressed by personal connections, or in a Realpolitik interpretation emphasising regional geopolitics. China, Mertha asserts, was the subordinate party in a deeply uneven bilateral relationship. Mertha's analysis thereby supports what Steve Heder (Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese model; vol. 1. Imitation and independence, 1930–1975) has insisted on — that the Khmer Rouge were largely independent in their policymaking — if not doctrine — both from the Vietnamese and the Chinese. Whilst Heder's focus was on the Cambodian Communists' relationship with Vietnam up until 1975 (though also suggesting this trend was further accentuated after 1975), Mertha mobilises solid empirical evidence to show that the KR leaders' propensity to defy advice applied also to their interactions with China, and that this dynamic drove developments throughout the DK.
Though Mertha remains silent on the question of where the DK did find models (if not advice) to guide policymaking, and in particular on the relative importance of Chinese doctrine, his account does raise questions in this regard. Given the persuasive evidence that China's ‘Great Leap Forward’ provided one source of inspiration for DK policy, his account re-ignites questions about tensions between DK's spurning of advice whilst simultaneously adapting models. Such tensions would have been at play throughout the bureaucratic interactions Mertha traces. Fascinatingly, Mertha's account highlights the divergence of paths between China and DK, as the Chinese technical cadres at the centre of Mertha's narrative themselves constituted a major difference between China and the DK, where the class criterion trumped the training of cadres (see, for example, the account of DK Foreign Ministry official Suong Sikoeun, Itinéraire d'un intellectual Khmer Rouge, 2013, p. 298). The frustration of Chinese experts, having to train unskilled Cambodian peasants, is well-documented by Mertha. Their first-hand accounts of everyday interactions look well placed to also reframe the way we make sense of any ‘models’ taken by the DK. Andrew Mertha has written an admirable book, and it will be exciting to see if he will address such issues in his work to come.
