When I was in Vietnam for the first time in 1987/88, I visited the Museum for US War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City—later renamed the War Remnants Museum. At the time, an exhibition was being held in a special room there displaying pictures showing war crimes that the ‘Chinese expansionists’ had committed during China's invasion of Vietnam in 1979—in grim detail. When I returned to the museum in 1992, the exhibition room was still there, but it was empty—the pictures of Chinese war crimes had been removed—and I was even told that there had never been an exhibition on Chinese war crimes there.
This commemorative turn reflected a change in Sino-Vietnamese relations: during the Second Indochina War (1964–75)Footnote 1 Hanoi usually had characterised the relations with Beijing as close as ‘lips and teeth’. The People's Republic of China (PRC) had been one the main suppliers of military and economic aid to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). However, in spite of official announcements since 1968, relations started to get strained because the DRV did not comply with China's advice to wage a protracted struggle and to show an uncompromising attitude towards Washington. When in the last war years Hanoi did not completely side with Beijing and continued to cultivate relations with the Soviet Union, its second main provider of military and economic assistance, distrust between the DRV and China increased. After the end of the war in 1975, when Hanoi increasingly leaned towards Moscow, joined the COMECON in June 1978 and later that year even signed a treaty of cooperation and friendship with the Soviet Union, Beijing's worst fears seemed to come true. Now China, which regarded the USSR as its ‘enemy number one’, classified Hanoi as a Soviet satellite and ‘Cuba of the East’. In order to counter Vietnam's ‘hegemonistic policy’ in Indochina the PRC provided massive assistance to the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. When in December 1978 Hanoi decided to launch a full-scale offensive against the Khmer Rouge and topple the Pol Pot regime as a reaction to Cambodian incursions into Vietnamese territory, relations with Beijing further deteriorated and finally broke down. In February 1979, China's leader Deng Xiaoping ordered about 200,000 Chinese troops to invade the Vietnamese border provinces in the North to ‘teach Hanoi a lesson’. Although militarily Vietnam prevailed and in early March 1979 China had to withdraw its troops, the PRC managed to isolate Vietnam diplomatically. Sino-Vietnamese relations in the 1980s were at a low ebb—Hanoi routinely called the Chinese leadership an ‘expansionist gang’ (bọn bành trướng Trung Quốc).
All that, however, changed when in 1986 the Vietnamese leadership embarked on a reform policy, withdrew its troops from Cambodia, and in 1989/90 had to witness the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the virtual disappearance of almost all its close political and economic allies. Against this background in November 1991 Hanoi and Beijing officially normalised relations.Footnote 2
After 1991, Hanoi had to play a delicate balancing act in its relations with China. Due to its asymmetric relationship with China, Vietnam cannot afford an openly anti-Chinese stance. At the same time, Vietnamese authorities have to accommodate and manage an anti-Chinese nationalism that has flared up regularly in the last two decades on several occasions: in 1999, when Vietnam settled its land border disputes with China in a controversial Treaty of Land Border; in 2007 the Vietnamese government announced plans to mine bauxite in the Central Highlands region and offer a contract for that project to a Chinese company; in 2014 when Beijing sent an oil rig into the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam; and in 2018 when the Vietnamese government compiled a draft law that would allow foreign investors—probably Chinese companies—to lease land for up to 99 years in three new Special Economic Zones.Footnote 3
After the normalisation of relations with China in 1991, the war with Vietnam's northern neighbour almost completely fell into oblivion, despite it having been previously presented in the Vietnamese media as an invasion by the ‘Chinese expansionists’—in museums, school history textbooks, and films and songs.Footnote 4 The Vietnamese state and the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) kept on celebrating the victorious war against the French (1946–54) and the ensuing struggle for unification of the country, which officially ended up as ‘heroic’ and ‘just’ wars in 1975. In contrast, they systematically silenced the commemoration of the Sino-Vietnamese War.Footnote 5 Consequently, the state's media channels usually kept silent whenever anniversaries of the war occurred; any journalists and other independent groups who dared to commemorate the war were censored. An article that the journalist Huy Đức had written on the 30th anniversary of the war that went online on the Sài Gòn Tiếp Thị website on 9 February 2009 was removed after just a few hours, for example.Footnote 6 He was one of the few who had addressed the taboo topic. What was certainly not helpful for the article's reception was that Huy Đức had also mentioned the huge losses that the Vietnamese People's Army (PAVN) had suffered in the battle of Vị Xuyên in the mid-1980s, and made a remark at the end of the article saying that the war had fallen into oblivion. Similarly, it was no coincidence that the memoirs of the former Vietnamese diplomat Dương Danh Y on the war were published by BBC Vietnamese in the same year, not by the Vietnamese media.Footnote 7
Against the backdrop of assertive Chinese actions in the South China Sea such as in 2014 Vietnamese state media increasingly stepped up coverage of the Sino-Vietnamese War.Footnote 8 The so-called oil rig crisis in 2014 constituted a turning point in the commemoration of the war. The moving of a Chinese oil rig to waters near the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea led to a deterioration in mutual relations, to anti-Chinese demonstrations in Vietnam, and to an enhanced interest among many Vietnamese in past military clashes with their northern neighbour.Footnote 9 For example, many Vietnamese started to complain that the history textbooks used in schools around the country only covered the war of 1979 to 1989 in a few lines and they even criticised the authors of the contested textbooks.Footnote 10 As a result of this public outcry, Vietnamese historians called for an overhaul of the school textbooks.Footnote 11
The second half of the 2010s witnessed a further upsurge in the efforts to recall and commemorate the Sino-Vietnamese War in Vietnam. The state media there published articles that openly criticised Chinese propaganda for presenting a distorted view of the war.Footnote 12 Furthermore, Vietnamese TV channels also began to broadcast documentaries about the Sino-Vietnamese War and addressed one legacy of the war that the Vietnamese state had not paid attention to in recent decades: the need to trace the remains of thousands of fallen Vietnamese soldiers in the border provinces of North Vietnam and ensure that their loved ones could perform the proper mourning rituals.Footnote 13 In the same vein, Vietnamese TV programmes on the Vietnamese War Invalids and Martyrs’ Day on 27 July have increasingly commemorated the war against China.Footnote 14 Similarly, more and more articles in the Vietnamese press directly emphasised that the commemoration of the war had been neglected for a long time. Thus, one article from 2017 was entitled ‘The border war of 1979: Not fearing the enemy, only fearing oblivion.’Footnote 15 Foreign observers also took note of the commemorative turn in Vietnam.Footnote 16
In the following, I will analyse the way in which the Vietnamese state and the VCP commemorated the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the war against China in 1979. I argue that the official Vietnamese ‘memory machine’Footnote 17 directed by the VCP's Department of Propaganda and Education (Ban Tuyên Giáo Trung ương) has upgraded the commemoration of the war significantly, but it is still trying to keep things firmly under control by issuing meticulous guidelines on how to organise anniversary events. By comparing the official commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Sino-Vietnamese War and that of the war against the Pol Pot regime, I will show that the former was much more subdued and low-key.
In the second part of my article, I will show that Vietnamese veterans have actively shaped the commemoration of the war against China over the last few years. My case study focuses on the remembrance of the second part of the Sino-Vietnamese War when fierce battles were fought in the border district of Vị Xuyên in Hà Tuyên province (now Hà Giang province); these began in 1984 and ended in 1989. The short and massive invasion of Chinese troops in February and March 1979 had long overshadowed the ‘Second War against China’, as Vietnamese veterans call the military clashes in Hà Giang. In this article, I highlight the agency of the veterans who benefited from the commemorative turn of 2013/14 and contributed to it at the same time. Thus, it was not the Vietnamese collectively, but the veterans among them who broke the silence of war memory. They did this by organising commemorative activities on the old battlefield in Vị Xuyên district and by reaching out to state media and social media. The Vietnamese state with its ‘memory machine’ only reacted to these initiatives belatedly, but then stepped up its commemoration of the battles in Hà Giang. So in a nutshell, the veterans of Hà Giang are one of the groups of non-state actors and ‘agents of remembrance’ in Vietnam that have managed ‘to claim a piece of the past’.Footnote 18
This article is also a contribution to the growing literature in Vietnamese memory studies.Footnote 19 The commemoration of the Second Indochina War has been widely studied.Footnote 20 This is also true of research on the commemoration of the war dead in Vietnam.Footnote 21 In sum, there is a clear focus on the memory of the ‘Resistance War Against the Americans to Save the Nation’ (Kháng chiến chống Mỹ, cứu nước), as the Second Indochina War is officially called in Vietnam. The study of the commemoration of the Sino-Vietnamese War has been neglected so far, however.Footnote 22
Official 40th anniversary commemoration of the Sino-Vietnamese War, 2019
Guidelines and ceremonies
In Vietnam, the Central Department of Propaganda and Education is in charge of disseminating an orthodox master narrative that presents Vietnam's modern history as a succession of victories achieved under the correct leadership of the VCP. The Department has a whole range of instruments at its disposal to enforce ideological orthodoxy.Footnote 23 One means is to control the official calendar of festivities. Thus, in a December 2019 speech Võ Văn Thưởng, the Chairman of the Department of Propaganda and Education, reviewed the work of that year and emphasised that one of the main functions of the Department had been to provide guidelines for celebrating important anniversaries. He admitted that some of the anniversaries in 2019 had been ‘sensitive’ (nhạy cảm), such as the 40th anniversary of the war to defend the southwestern border, that is, the war against the Khmer Rouge in 1978, and the anniversary of the struggle to defend the northern border, that is, the war against China in 1979. In this respect, the Department of Propaganda and Education has the task of holding back ‘hostile forces’ and ‘reactionary elements’ and suppressing any wrong or poisonous news that is spread by social media. It classified the 40th anniversary of the war between Vietnam and China as ‘sensitive’.Footnote 24
Seen against this backdrop, it is understandable that the Department attached so much importance to monitoring and controlling the commemoration of the anniversary. At the end of 2018, for example, the Department issued detailed guidelines on ‘the celebration of great anniversaries and important historical events’ in the coming year (as it usually did).Footnote 25 This document only provided guidelines on celebrating the 40th anniversary of the ‘Victory Day of the war to defend the southwestern border’, however, and announced that the Department of Propaganda and Education would provide further guidelines on the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the war against China in a separate document. Unfortunately, that document is not available,Footnote 26 so we have to rely on other sources in order to understand exactly how the Department wanted the celebrations for the anniversary to be carried out (in contrast to those for the anniversary of the victory against the genocidal Pol Pot regime in 1979).
An outline written by the Hải Phòng party committee contains essential information on the official policy to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war against China.Footnote 27 According to this document, one of the main aims of the commemorative activities should be to prevent ‘hostile forces’ from misusing the anniversary by distorting historical facts, organising anti-Party activities and inciting hatred against China, thus negatively influencing Sino-Vietnamese relations. The commemorative activities should be in line with the official policy towards China ‘to put the past behind ourselves and look forward to the future’ (khép lại quá khứ hướng đến tương lai).
In the same vein, a programmatic article published in the newspaper of the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture warns against misuse of the anniversary and provides further information on the main thrust of the commemorative policy.Footnote 28 It denies assertions made by critics at home and abroad that the VCP and the Vietnamese state have dodged and forgotten the war of 1979 and not paid due attention to the veterans and others who were involved in the war. According to the author, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the war against China, Vietnamese mass media had published many articles that correctly emphasised that the VCP and the Vietnamese state had always cared for veterans, war invalids and families of martyrs. The article repeats the claim that the Party and the Vietnamese state had never forgotten the ‘heroic war to defend the northern border in 1979’ over and over.
If we compare how the VCP and the state commemorated the victory against the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 and the war against China from 1979 to 1989 in 2019, the differences are striking.
According to the guidelines of the Central Department of Propaganda and Education, a huge ceremony was to be held at state level in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of ‘the victory day of the war to defend the southwestern border of the country and of the joint victory against the genocidal regime together with Cambodian soldiers and civilians’, as the war against the Khmer Rouge in December 1978/January 1979 was officially called.Footnote 29 This ceremony took place in Hanoi at the beginning of January 2019. Almost the entire Party and state leadership attended it: Party chairman and state president Nguyễn Phú Trọng, Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc and several other Politburo members, ministers and other high-level politicians.Footnote 30 The Vietnamese prime minister and the vice-chairman of the Cambodian Senate both gave speeches there.
In contrast, during the 40th anniversary commemorations of the war against China, which was closely related to the war against Pol Pot's regime, the Vietnamese authorities kept a low profile: instead of organising a meeting at state level with representatives of the Party and state leaders, a small meeting was held in Hanoi on 23 January 2019. It was chaired by the Vietnamese Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs in conjunction with other ministries and the Fatherland Front. Trần Thanh Mẫn, the Chairman of the Front and highest representative of the VCP at the meeting, gave a speech at the event. No representative of the Party and state leadership attended, however. In his speech, he emphasised that the VCP and the Vietnamese state should always remember those who had contributed to the ‘struggle to defend the northern border’. He also mentioned that one of the most urgent tasks was to find the remains of fallen Vietnamese soldiers, especially on the Vị Xuyên battlefield. Both Trần Thanh Mẫn and the second speaker, the deputy minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, consistently avoided using the term ‘China’ and ‘Chinese’.Footnote 31
Conferences
Following the guidelines laid down by the Department of Propaganda and Education, the Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences (Viện Hàn lâm Khoa học Xã hội Việt Nam) and the Vietnamese Association of Historians (Hội Khoa học Lịch sử Việt Nam) jointly organised a national conference in January 2019 entitled ‘The Struggle to Defend the Northern Border of the Country—Looking Back after 40 Years’. This scholarly event presented a sanitised version of the war.Footnote 32 First of all, as the title indicates, the conference presented Vietnam's ten-year-long military conflict with the People's Republic of China as a ‘military fight’, not as a war. Articles on the conference in the Vietnamese state media followed the tendency to play down the historical significance of the war, and emphasised that one of the main aims of the conference was to criticise the attempt to distort and misuse the event for anti-Party and anti-state activities and damage relations with China. This is completely in line with the overall framework of the commemorative policy on the anniversary set by the Central Department of Propaganda and Education.Footnote 33 In contrast, the title of an earlier conference on the Cambodian conflict had included the term ‘war’.Footnote 34
A historian who attended the conference on the war against China remembers that many of the participants had taken issue with the title of the event. However, members of the Organising Committee who were directly criticised said off the record that they did not have any choice, as ‘higher authorities’ had made a decision on the conference title. In February 2019, the Military Headquarters of Hà Giang province and the Veterans’ Organisation in Hà Giang organised a talk on the Sino-Vietnamese War with the same title.Footnote 35 This suggests that the Vietnamese authorities—most probably the Central Department of Propaganda and Education—had previously issued a guideline to avoid the term ‘war’.
The same participant at the conference in Hanoi told a second story that confirms the restricted framework for the official commemoration. In interviews during the break, he repeatedly used the term ‘war against China’. However, on the same evening when Vietnamese state television reported about the conference, it only showed interviews with participants who had stuck to the official wording and only talked about ‘the enemy’ (địch) or the ‘other side’ (bên kia).Footnote 36 Other documentaries that were shown on Vietnamese TV on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the war showed the same tendency.Footnote 37
The way the national conference on the Sino-Vietnamese War was organised irritated many veterans. Consequently, the Nationwide Liaison Committee of the Veterans of the Battle of Vị Xuyên-Hà Tuyên sent a letter of protest to the Organising Committee, the Vietnamese Communist Party and the Central Department of Propaganda and Education.Footnote 38
Firstly, the letter argued not only on behalf of many veterans, but also on behalf of many ‘genuine historians’ (nhà sử học chân chính) and journalists, claiming that the title of the conference did not fully reflect the character of the war as a ‘just war’, and proposed to change the original title from ‘The struggle to defend the northern border of the country’ to ‘The war to defend the country against China's invasion’ (Chiến tranh bảo vệ Tộ quốc chống xâm lược của Trung Quốc ở phía Bắc tháng 02/1979). Furthermore, the letter emphasised that after the war in 1979 there had been a second war called ‘The war to defend the country against encroachment at the northern border, 1980–85/1989)’ (Chiến tranh bảo vệ tổ quốc chống lấn chiếm biên giới phía Bắc). The mass media, it said, should distinguish between the war of 1979 and the latter war and in particular highlight the significance of the battlefront of Vị Xuyên (February 1984 to May 1989).
In addition, the letter criticised that no witnesses of the war such as generals and officials in charge of the six border provinces had been invited to the conference. Witnesses of the war, it went on, should be invited to draw historical lessons from the war.
In an interview, Major General Nguyễn Đức Huy, chairman of the Liaison Committee of the Veterans of the Vị Xuyên Front, added that the Committee itself had suggested that a conference should be organised on the 40th anniversary of the war, but no representative of the veterans had been invited to participate.Footnote 39
Books
A number of books were published on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the war, but interestingly, all of them were edited by journalists or veterans’ organisations.Footnote 40 So far, no monograph on the Sino-Vietnamese war has been published by a Vietnamese historian, and the Institute of Military History (Viện Lịch sử Quân sự), which would be in charge of conducting a research project about the war, has not published any work on the topic either.
Furthermore, any books edited by veterans’ organisations are usually only for internal circulation.Footnote 41 It is certainly no coincidence that the title of one of the books published in 2019 ‘The Struggle to Defend the Northern Border (1979–1989): From the perspective of the press’, clearly shows that this was only meant to be a modest contribution to the field and not an official history of the war.Footnote 42 Interestingly, the book launch did not take place on the 40th anniversary of the war itself, but on the much less politically sensitive anniversary of the ‘Vietnam Revolutionary Press Day’ on 21 June.Footnote 43 Many veterans of the war against China attended the event—most of them displaying all the medals they had earned during the war against China—partly to show their dissatisfaction with the official commemoration of the day.Footnote 44
The latest book published at the time of writing this article is Major General Nguyễn Đức Huy's memoirs on the war in Vị Xuyên district, Hà Giang province, from 1984 to 1989.Footnote 45 According to the author, it took the authorities in charge a long time to allow the book to be published. Other manuscripts that he had submitted for publication were initially declined, but eventually they were published by the provincial authorities of Hà Giang, albeit only for internal circulation. Nguyễn Đức Huy's book is not available in Vietnamese bookshops; it was mainly intended to be distributed among fellow veterans and friends.Footnote 46
Many newspaper articles covered the 40th anniversary of the war in 2019 in line with the VCP's guidelines.Footnote 47 Similarly, the same year, Vietnamese state television broadcast several documentaries on the war.Footnote 48
Museums
The Vietnamese Museum of Military History (Viện Bảo tàng Lịch sử Quân sự) in Hanoi used to present the Sino-Vietnamese war in a rather remote and dilapidated exhibition room. In 2015, the exhibition was entitled ‘Military history of Vietnam in the period of reconstructing and defending the country, 1975–2011’. The sign introducing a few pictures about the war between Vietnam and China just said ‘Defending the northern border in 1979’, thus avoiding both the terms ‘war’ (chiến tranh) and ‘struggle’ (chiến đấu). The exhibition displayed 11 pictures of battle scenes and a visit by a student delegation from Hanoi University to Quảng Ninh province in March 1979. In addition to that, some historical items such as weapons and uniforms were on show. The exhibition did not provide any further historical background, though, and the term ‘China’ (Trung Quốc) did not appear in it at all.
When I went there again a few years later in July 2019, the same exhibition hall had been completely renovated and upgraded on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the war—no doubt upon orders from higher authorities in Hanoi. At the entrance, there was a wall chart that explained the historical context of the event. The text—also entitled ‘Defending the northern border in 1979’—used the phrase ‘war to defend the northern border’ (chiến tranh bảo vệ biên giới phía Bắc) and celebrated the heroism of the soldiers, militia and civilians who fought from 1979 to the end of the 1980s. It also mentioned that they suffered major losses, but it systematically avoided the taboo word—‘China’. The curators stuck to this principle throughout the exhibition. Whenever they had to mention whom the Vietnamese were fighting at the northern border in explanations of photos or other exhibits, they simply used the unspecific terms ‘địch’ and ‘thù’ (enemy). While most of the Vietnamese visitors to the exhibition would know who the enemy was between 1979 and 1989, some foreign visitors would certainly be at a loss, not knowing whom the Vietnamese were actually fighting in those years.
In addition to showing ten or so pictures and several other exhibits, the new exhibition highlights the feats of heroic martyrs such as Lê Đình Chinh. He was the first Vietnamese soldier to sacrifice his life at the northern border in a skirmish with Chinese provocateurs in Lạng Sơn on 25 August 1978. The fact that his fate is highlighted in the upgraded exhibition of Vietnamese military history in Hanoi exemplifies a shift in the way the Vietnamese state has officially commemorated the war against China. A few months after this first violent clash at the border, the Vietnamese propaganda apparatus had started to celebrate Lê Đình Chinh's life and heroic death, and children were even encouraged to emulate his example. Since the normalisation of Vietnamese–Chinese relations at the beginning of the 1990s, however, it has no longer been appropriate to portray him as a folk hero, so he has fallen into oblivion. When Lê Đình Chinh was reburied in 2013, Vietnamese state media covered the story about the martyr, but did not mention exactly who had killed him.Footnote 49 The restrictions seem to have been dropped a few years later—at least in the media. An article from February 2019 covers the exact circumstances of Lê Đình Chinh's death in detail.Footnote 50 The text on the wall chart in the Military History Museum only speaks vaguely about ‘quân xâm lược’ (invading soldiers) and ‘kẻ dịch’ (enemies), however.
In 2019, the Museum of People's Public Security (Bảo tàng Công an Nhân dân) in Hanoi also displayed some pictures and various other exhibits such as weapons and pieces of equipment about the war. Again, the explanations only referred to the phrase ‘struggle to defend the northern border’, and strictly avoided using the word ‘China’. An article on the museum's website highlights the fact that it keeps valuable pictures that illustrate the ‘just struggle’ (chiến đấu chính nghĩa) that took place in 1979.Footnote 51
The Vietnamese National Museum of History in Hanoi, which is Vietnam's most important museum of national history, did not organise any special exhibitions on the 40th anniversary of the war between Vietnam and China. When I went there in 2019, there was only one picture on the war on display, showing a bridge in Lạng Sơn destroyed by the ‘invaders during the northern border war’—the same picture that had been on show in 2015. In contrast, the Museum of the Border Guard in Hanoi (Bảo tàng Biên phòng) has a permanent exhibition entitled ‘The struggle to defend the northern border’ (Cuộc chiến đấu bảo vệ biên giới phía Bắc).Footnote 52 The museum was closed for renovation in 2019, however, and so did not play any role in the commemoration of the anniversary.
In sum, the Department of Propaganda and Education obviously chose the Vietnamese Museum of Military History to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war between Vietnam and China. The museum upgraded its own rather meagre exhibition on the war and emphasised the heroic struggle at the northern border, but—in line with guidelines from the Party—it managed to completely avoid using the term ‘China’, which is quite an accomplishment.
Commemoration of the ‘Second War of Invasion’
Battles in Vị Xuyên district, Hà Giang province (1984–89)
On 18 March 1979, Chinese troops withdrew from Vietnam. This was not the end of the war, however. In fact, the fighting continued for ten more years in the northern border provinces (until mid-1989), with the mountainous district of Vị Xuyên in Hà Tuyên province becoming the hotspot.Footnote 53
Although the Chinese forces retreated, the border region still witnessed some major flare-ups again afterwards, such as the shelling of Cao Bằng in July 1980, land-grabbing by Chinese troops in Lạng Sơn and Hà Tuyên provinces in May 1981 and even a ‘symbolic offensive’ again in April 1983. These military skirmishes, which were all minor, did not involve any regular People's Liberation Army (PLA) units, but just border troops; China was clearly not prepared to engage in a major attack on Vietnamese territory on a scale like that of 1979.Footnote 54
In April 1984, the military conflict escalated again, however; the border district of Vị Xuyên suffered heavy shelling from Chinese artillery (the heaviest since 1979, in fact) and regular PLA soldiers subsequently invaded Vietnamese territory and occupied several hills in the area. This change in Chinese tactics was due to the fact that previous attacks on Vietnamese territory did not have any major impact on Hanoi's military operations in Cambodia, as Beijing had hoped.Footnote 55 The Chinese chose Vị Xuyên carefully.
This district in Hà Tuyên province is located in a remote area far from the strategic heartland of the Red River Delta and Hanoi, the capital, and thus did not pose a serious threat to Hanoi, unlike an attack on Lạng Sơn. Its remoteness also caused the Vietnamese side great logistic difficulties. In addition, according to Nguyễn Đức Huy, who became deputy-commander/chief of staff of Military Zone 2 and was thus one of the Vietnamese commanding officers on the Vị Xuyên battlefield, the isolated geographical location also allowed the Chinese to carry out land-grabbing operations on Vietnamese territory without attracting any major international interest.Footnote 56
The Chinese offensive in Vị Xuyên in 1984 was closely linked to the ongoing military activities of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in Cambodia: it was intended to tie down Vietnamese forces in the North while Hanoi was attacking the Khmer Rouge troops in Cambodia. The overall aim of the Chinese was to exert military and economic pressure on Vietnam to withdraw its forces from Cambodia.Footnote 57
The ‘Laoshan Offensive’, as it was called by the Chinese side, met with stiff resistance from the Vietnamese troops. After sending large numbers of reinforcements to the battlefield—the Vietnamese army in the area now amounted to a total of 40,000 men—the PAVN launched a major counteroffensive early on 12 July 1984, which is now known as ‘MB84’ in Vietnamese. This constituted ‘the largest Vietnamese offensive operation since the beginning of the military confrontation between Vietnam and China in 1979’.Footnote 58 The Vietnamese assault on the hills occupied by PLA troops, which lasted for almost a day, did not achieve its aim, however; hundreds of Vietnamese soldiers were hit by Chinese shells as they charged forward in waves, while many others were killed or wounded by Chinese artillery equipped with night-vision devices and ground moving-target indicator radars in the staging area.Footnote 59
By the end of the day, 600 soldiers from PAVN Division 356 alone had sacrificed their lives and 1,200 were wounded. All in all, about 1,000 Vietnamese soldiers died.Footnote 60 The MB84 campaign was one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles fought at the Vị Xuyên front. Because of the high number of casualties on 12 July 1984, the veterans of Division 356 remember the day as the ‘death anniversary of the battle’ (ngày giỗ trận).Footnote 61
When Major General Hoàng Đan took over as commanding officer after the setback in July 1984, he only said one sentence to his predecessor, who had been in charge of the MB84 campaign that had cost so many lives: ‘If you keep on fighting like this, then the heroic Vietnamese mothers won't be able to bring children into the world fast enough.’ He proposed that the Vietnamese troops should return to the kind of trench warfare they had already practised so successfully against the French in the famous battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.Footnote 62 This warfare offered Vietnamese soldiers better protection from Chinese artillery shells than the risky tactic of attacking the fortified Chinese positions in waves. In addition, after spring 1986 the PAVN itself increasingly relied on heavy artillery bombardment, making use of a Soviet multiple rocket launcher system.Footnote 63
Vietnamese and Chinese soldiers were now fighting in close proximity in the trenches—sometimes as little as 10 metres away from each other. Due to a change in tactics in May 1985, the Vietnamese troops managed to reoccupy Peak A6B, which was a turning point of the war in Vị Xuyên because the Vietnamese side had proven that it could hold its position against fierce Chinese counterattacks.Footnote 64 The PLA suffered heavy casualties in further clashes in September 1985 and from then on focused on holding its positions and making small-scale attacks.Footnote 65
The Chinese launched a broad attack for the last time in January 1987, but the PAVN had taken pre-emptive measures beforehand and managed to repel the assault. After that, the intensity of the military clashes between Chinese and Vietnamese troops decreased.Footnote 66 According to Xiaoming Zhang, the Chinese army increasingly saw the battlefield of Vị Xuyên as a testing ground for the PLA troops to gain combat experience. Chinese troops were therefore rotated;Footnote 67 between 1984 and 1989, a total of 180,000 Chinese troops fought on the battlefield of Vị Xuyên. The last Chinese soldiers left it in October 1989.
According to Major General Nguyễn Huy Đức, who had been an officer during the First and Second Indochina wars, the ‘Second war of invasion’, as he called the clashes in Vị Xuyên, was an intense conflict whose scale even surpassed the bloody battle of Quảng Trị (June–September 1972) in which he had participated. While about 100 PAVN soldiers were killed per day in Quảng Trị, ten times that number lost their lives in Vị Xuyên on 12 July 1984 alone. The PAVN had to commit nine divisions in Vị Xuyên—more than in Quảng Trị—and suffered many more casualties on 12 July 1984 than in 1972.Footnote 68 The fighting was more intense as well because it took place on a very small battlefield, in stark contrast to the Chinese invasion of several border provinces in 1979. The PLA artillery fired between 30,000 and 50,000 shells on a daily basis and a total of two million shells between 1984 and 1989.Footnote 69 The war in Vị Xuyên was also as fierce as the infamous battle of Quảng Trị in terms of artillery bombardment, the only exception being that the US forces also made massive use of naval artillery at the latter.Footnote 70
The artillery bombardment in Hà Giang in the 1980s was so intense that some of the limestone mountains on the battlefield were levelled out—about three metres of the top of Peak 685 were simply blasted away—and became completely white as a result. The Vietnamese soldiers therefore called the area the ‘lime-kiln of the century’ (lò vôi thể kỷ).Footnote 71 And because of the intense Chinese shelling and the high number of casualties that caused, the Vietnamese soldiers called the fiercely contested Peak 772 a ‘meat-grinder’ (cối xay thịt) and ‘Hamburger Hill’ (đồi thịt băm).Footnote 72
According to Vietnamese sources, 4,000 or 5,000 PAVN soldiers were killed and 9,000 wounded on the Vị Xuyên battlefield—far fewer than the Chinese claimed; official Chinese sources declared that Vietnam suffered 33,500 casualties and the Chinese themselves 4,100, about half of which were deaths.Footnote 73 Contemporary observers called the military clashes in Vị Xuyên district a ‘phony war’ as if only minor military skirmishes had taken place, presumably due to the lack of sources of information at that time.Footnote 74
For the Vietnamese soldiers who fought under very harsh conditions in that remote place, food and drinking water were extremely difficult to obtain. This was often only possible at night because of the Chinese artillery fire during the day. The Vietnamese soldiers mostly subsisted on a diet of dried fish and water. The memory of fierce battles with the Chinese troops, shelling by Chinese artillery and the death of so many of their comrades, especially on 12 July 1984, still haunt Vietnamese veterans to this day.Footnote 75
Digging up the past: Commemorating the war in Vị Xuyên
It seems the Chinese invasion in 1979 had almost been forgotten by the beginning of the 2010s. The war that broke out in Vị Xuyên in 1984 was more recent, but even that fell into oblivion as time passed because the Vietnamese authorities hushed it up. Nowadays, many veterans complain that younger Vietnamese and even quite a few high-level Party cadres and PAVN officers have little or no idea of the military clashes that took place in Hà Giang between 1984 and 1989 and still think that the war against China ended in March 1979. Many people also erroneously think that the battles in Vị Xuyên occurred during the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in February/March 1979; others do not even know where Vị Xuyên is. Many veterans felt and still feel frustrated and upset (bức xúc) that the VCP and the Vietnamese state has not adequately commemorated all those who sacrificed their lives or were wounded in that remote place at the border when defending Vietnamese territory against Chinese assaults in the 1980s.Footnote 76
Like the commemoration of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, which was played down when Sino-Vietnamese relations normalised in 1990, but has been revived in recent years, interest in the war against China in the 1980s has gradually increased and commemorative activities have been stepped up, mainly on the initiative of the veterans themselves, not of the VCP or the Vietnamese state.
Small groups of veterans of the war in Vị Xuyên started to return to the old battlefield to commemorate their fallen comrades in the first decade of the 21st century. As of 2010, a number of veterans from Hà Giang itself and neighbouring provinces such as Yên Bái started to meet in Vị Xuyên on 12 July to commemorate those comrades who had died that day in 1984 during the MB84 campaign.Footnote 77 In the following years, more and more veterans from all over the country flocked to the old battleground in July to commemorate the anniversary of the battlefield deaths, which was also covered by Vietnamese media for the first time.Footnote 78 State-run Vietnamese newspapers also started to introduce their readers to the war in Vị Xuyên although at this time the articles still presented a toned-down version of events.Footnote 79
The veterans who revisited the battlefield near the Chinese border became increasingly dissatisfied with the circumstances under which they had to perform rituals such as burning incense and making offerings for their fallen comrades; there was no proper memorial site on the battlefield. Instead of that, veterans had to commemorate their fallen comrades ‘in secret, like a thief, in front of a small incense burner like one for a victim of a traffic accident’, as one veteran complained in retrospect.Footnote 80 Other veterans remembered that they simply did not know where to perform rituals in commemoration of their fallen comrades.Footnote 81 Furthermore, they were deeply saddened by the fact that the remains of many of their fellow soldiers were still scattered around the old battleground or buried, but not identified, so their tombstones did not have their names on them. These feelings were especially intense when the survivors accompanied family members of fallen comrades to the battlefield.Footnote 82
The emotional bond among the veterans of the war in Vị Xuyên and with their fallen comrades is still very strong today, 35 years later. The surviving soldiers of Division 356 and other units who fought in Hà Giang in the 1980s feel a special moral obligation towards their fallen comrades. This is why many veterans spend much of their free time and their financial resources on returning to Vị Xuyên on a regular basis and trying to find their fallen comrades themselves—on their own initiative.
This special bond is expressed in the song Về đây đồng đội ơi (‘Come back here, dear comrades!’), which is sung by the veterans of Vị Xuyên whenever they visit the old battleground and remember their comrades.Footnote 83 The song also expresses the torment they feel (day dứt), as they know that the remains of around 2,000 of their comrades are still scattered across the battlefield.
The local war cemetery that was built in 1991 and upgraded in 2004 does not offer a proper alternative for commemorating the fallen soldiers as it is located in the district town of Vị Xuyên about 20 km south of Hà Giang City and 40 km from the old battlefield near Thanh Thủy commune.Footnote 84 The lack of a proper memorial site to perform commemorative rituals for their fallen comrades was not the only thing the veterans worried about, however. When Major General Nguyễn Đức Huy and other commanding officers involved in the battles in Hà Giang returned to the former battlefield and Vị Xuyên War Cemetery for the first time in 2013, they were ‘particularly shocked’ (đặc biệt bất ngờ) and upset when they realised the following: only 1,700 fallen soldiers had been buried and about half of those men still had not been identified yet,Footnote 85 and after 30 years, the remains of just 20 or 30 fallen soldiers had been discovered on the battlefield. This was because the military headquarters of Hà Giang province had not assigned the task of finding soldiers’ remains to a specific unit of the army, but had delegated it to a non-military company that had mainly cleared landmines and unexploded shells there.Footnote 86
As a result of this negligence and lack of interest, the remains of approximately 2,000 soldiers who fell at Vị Xuyên are still unaccounted for.Footnote 87 Since the Vietnamese state had not paid due attention to finding and burying the fallen soldiers, many of their surviving comrades felt deeply obliged to fill the gap and consequently set about the task of finding fallen comrades themselves using their own limited resources.Footnote 88 Finding the remains of their comrades and building a site where they could be commemorated in an adequate way were two closely related issues, of course.
The veterans first made progress in building a proper memorial site: several veterans of Division 356 from Hà Giang and Yên Bái decided to make a small incense burner in 2010 to provide a more adequate environment for the commemoration of their fallen comrades. They chose Peak 468 (điểm cao 468) in the middle of the old battlefield near the commune of Thanh Thủy as the location for a small memorial site. It took two more years to gather enough donations to start implementing the plan. There was no paved road there at that time, so all the construction material had to be carried uphill to Peak 468.Footnote 89 The incense burner was finally inaugurated in November 2013. The commemoration site was entirely financed by donations made by war veterans; the state was not involved in any way.Footnote 90
According to one of the initiators at the time, the veterans did not submit a proposal (đề xuất) to the authorities because nobody there would have dared to agree and sign it. The veterans carried out the project themselves instead, in secret (làm chui). Fortunately for them, the commune turned a blind eye to what was going on at Peak 468.Footnote 91
The site was further enlarged for the 30th anniversary of the MB84 campaign in 2014, and what was initially a modest place to burn incense and make offerings was gradually transformed into a more fitting war memorial (đài tưởng niệm). As luck would have it, Trương Tấn Sang, then president of Vietnam, had heard about the activities of the veterans of the battle of Vị Xuyên and invited representatives of Division 356 to his office for a talk. During the discussion, the veterans made four suggestions to the VCP and state authorities in charge:
1. Take measures to clear any remaining mines on the old battlefield of Vị Xuyên so that the local people can farm the land safely;
2. Find and collect the remains of fallen soldiers;
3. Help veterans who have lost their papers to assert any financial claims to which they are entitled; and
4. Allow a memorial site to be built on the battlefield for the fallen soldiers.
President Trương Tấn Sang agreed to these points and proposed that the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, and the Province of Hà Giang should comply with the veterans’ requests.Footnote 92 As a result, in 2015 the province of Hà Giang agreed that the veterans should go ahead with the project of enlarging and upgrading the memorial site and use ‘socialised funding’ (nguồn vốn xã hội hóa) for the project, which simply meant ‘private funding’ or donations. When the first donations arrived, the veterans used the money to pave the road on the site, which made the construction of the memorial on Peak 468 much easier.
The mid-2010s clearly marked a watershed in the commemoration of the war in Vị Xuyên. Popular interest in Vietnam's wars with China in the past, such as the invasion of February/March 1979 and the fierce battles between 1984 and 1989, has intensified in view of Beijing's increasingly aggressive attempts to enforce its territorial claims in the South China Sea. The turning point in the public commemoration of these events was the ‘oil-rig crisis’ in mid-2014, which refers to tensions between Vietnam and China after Beijing sent an oil rig to the waters near the Paracel Islands, which Hanoi also lays claim to. This incident caused widespread anti-Chinese protests and demonstrations in Vietnam.
Consequently, the repressed memory of past military clashes with Vietnam's northern neighbour resurfaced and veterans of the Vị Xuyên battlefield started to push their agenda of achieving a more pronounced commemoration of the war they had fought 30 years earlier. Veterans such as Nguyễn Đức Huy emphasise this strong connection between the development of Sino-Vietnamese relations in the mid-2010s and the growing interest in the forgotten military clashes between the two countries.Footnote 93 Thus, on 7 May 2016, around 20 mostly high-ranking officers involved in the battles in Hà Giang in the 1980s established the ‘Nationwide Liaison Committee of the Veterans of the Battle of Vị Xuyên-Hà Tuyên’ (Ban Liên Lạc Cựu Chiến Binh Toàn Quốc Mặt Trận Vị Xuyên-Hà Tuyên). This organisation was set up in Hanoi with official permission from the Vietnamese minister of defence, Ngô Xuân Lịch.Footnote 94
The decision to establish such a body was sparked by the general disinterest in the war in Hà Giang, as Nguyễn Đức Huy explains in his memoirs. According to him, for about a quarter of a century the war to defend the border in Vị Xuyên was rarely mentioned because of ‘a foreign-policy issue’ (vì một lý do đối ngoại); official Vietnamese histories and school textbooks were not even allowed to mention the event, and a national ceremony to pay tribute to the ‘heroic martyrs’ of the Vị Xuyên battlefront was never organised.
Since the war had almost been forgotten, former officers such as Nguyễn Đức Huy and other veterans understood that it was necessary to establish an organisation that could serve the veterans as an official mouthpiece, enabling them to ‘have a voice’ (có tiếng nói) and help to promote their demands of the Party and the state, such as stepping up the task of finding and burying the remains of fallen soldiers.Footnote 95
Approximately 600 delegates representing the veterans of the Vị Xuyên battlefront held the first meeting of the Liaison Committee in Hanoi on 14 July 2016.Footnote 96 Major General Nguyễn Đức Huy acted as chairman of the Committee. In his inaugural address, he made various recommendations to the VCP and the Vietnamese state in the hope that they would do the following:
1. Propagate the ‘victory of the war for the defence of the border in Vị Xuyên-Hà Tuyên’.
2. Clear landmines and other unexploded ordnance so that the area can be used safely for agricultural production.
3. Find the remains of fallen soldiers still lying on the battlefield and identify the remains of unknown martyrs in the Vị Xuyên War Cemetery.
4. Get those units that had engaged in the battle of Vị Xuyên to write a history of the war.
5. Get museums and memorial sites to display exhibits about the war in order to commemorate the sacrifices of those who fought in it.
6. Transform the war cemetery of Vị Xuyên into a national war cemetery worthy of the large number of soldiers killed on the battlefield there.
7. Organise an academic conference on the war.Footnote 97
In June 2016, the memorial site known as Đài hương 468 (‘House of Offerings 468’) or Đài tưởng niệm 468 (‘Memorial Site 468’) was inaugurated, just in time for the ‘death anniversary’ of the MB84 campaign (fig. 1). The memorial site not only has a temple and a number of incense burners for praying, but also a stone carving ‘in commemoration of the heroic martyrs of Division 356 at the Vị Xuyên front’. At the top of the stone carving there is a further inscription that says ‘When [you are] alive, hang on to the stones. When [you are] dead, [you will] become a stone [and be] immortal’.Footnote 98 This is the unofficial ‘oath of the soldiers of Vị Xuyên’; a private called Nguyễn Viết Ninh had carved these words on the butt of his rifle before he was killed.Footnote 99
Memorial Site 468 in Thanh Thủy, Vị Xuyên, Hà Giang province, July 2019 (© Martin Grossheim)
The inauguration ceremony sparked off a whole series of newspaper articles, not only on the event itself, but on the almost forgotten war in Vị Xuyên.Footnote 100 State media also started to report about the pressing issue of the great number of unaccounted fallen soldiers.Footnote 101 All this happened at the same time as the upsurge in coverage of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
The staging of the inauguration ceremony did not mean that the problems had all been solved, though. On the contrary, in August 2016 the Construction Department in Hà Giang announced it would visit the memorial site to check whether the architectural plan that had been agreed on had actually been implemented properly. During the on-site visit, the provincial cadres who were also attending it claimed this was not the case because the main building with the incense burner ‘interfered with the beauty of the area’ (phá vỡ mỹ quan khu). In the end, the veterans gave in to their arguments and the whole building was subsequently pulled down, leaving only the four main pillars behind.Footnote 102 The provincial authorities obviously wanted to put obstructions in the veterans’ way, although it is not clear why. Thus, the veterans had to start the construction project again. In July 2018, the Liaison Committee of the Vị Xuyên veterans handed over the management of Memorial Site 468 to the Department of Work, War Invalids and Social Affairs of Hà Giang province.Footnote 103
The commemoration of the previously forgotten war in Vị Xuyên continued to expand. During the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the war against China in February 2019, the battles of the 1980s in Hà Giang saw unprecedented media coverage in Vietnam: a whole series of articles, documentaries about the war and interviews with veterans appeared in the Vietnamese state media.Footnote 104 Several articles and films focused on the pressing issue of locating the remains of fallen soldiers on the old battlefield of Vị Xuyên.Footnote 105 In a long interview, the chairman of the Liaison Committee, Nguyễn Đức Huy, said he welcomed the fact that the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence had provided Military Zone 2 with 200 billion Đồng to finally set up a special group in charge of finding the remains of fallen soldiers in Hà Giang.Footnote 106 This is exactly what the Liaison Committee of the Vị Xuyên veterans had suggested in 2018. Some of the soldiers’ remains had already been located by the time the interview was shown. In a later documentary, the former commander nevertheless reminded his interviewer that no large-scale or systematic attempt had been made to find the remains of the fallen martyrs in the 34 years since the bloodiest battle was fought in Vị Xuyên.Footnote 107 Other veterans are even more outspoken today, expressing their astonishment about why it took the Vietnamese state 30 years to start looking for the remains of its fallen soldiers at Vị Xuyên when it had tackled the same kind of task as soon as the First and Second Indochina Wars ended, especially in view of the fact that finding the remains of fallen soldiers gets harder and harder from day to day.Footnote 108
In contrast to the veterans’ criticism, a documentary made by a local TV station in Hà Giang in 2019 claimed that the provincial authorities had focused on implementing tasks such as finding the remains of fallen soldiers and were continuing to do so.Footnote 109 This is simply not true, as Hà Giang province had done nothing in this respect until 2018. The self-congratulatory tendency of the TV documentary is in line with the false claim that the VCP and the Vietnamese state had always commemorated the war against China and always taken care of the veterans and fallen soldiers.Footnote 110
In July 2019, the veterans of Vị Xuyên celebrated the 35th ‘death anniversary’ of the MB84 campaign. The same year witnessed celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the war against China in 1979 and the bloodiest battle against Chinese troops in Hà Giang in 1985. On 11 July 2019, thousands upon thousands of veterans came to Hà Giang from provinces all over Vietnam. Many of them were previously part of Division 356, which had suffered the highest casualties back in July 1984, but representatives of all the military units that had participated in the battles from 1984 to 1989 set out for the old battlefield near the Chinese border.
The ceremonies on the 35th anniversary of the MB84 campaign consisted of two parts. First of all, the veterans met at Memorial Site 468 on 11 July 2019 to commemorate their fallen comrades (fig. 2).Footnote 111 Veterans from different military units and different provinces who had come to Vị Xuyên together gathered in front of the incense burners to make offerings. A former officer gave a short speech in commemoration of the fallen men. After the ceremony, some of the groups visited the border gate of Thanh Thủy and then returned to Hà Giang to have dinner. On that day, then, the veterans performed their commemorative rituals alone at the memorial site financed solely by private donations; no official representatives of the VCP or Hà Giang province were present.
‘Death Anniversary’ at the Memorial Site 468 in Thanh Thủy, Vị Xuyên, Hà Giang province, July 2019 (© Martin Grossheim)
Interestingly, since 2018, the term ‘death anniversary’ has been criticised by some veterans as being too ‘compassionate’ (thương), presumably because it paints a bleak picture of the war instead of emphasising the heroic feats and sacrifices of the Vietnamese soldiers. One suggestion was to call 12 July the ‘Opening of the MB84 campaign’ to make it sound more positive (Ngày mở đầu Chiến dịch MB84).Footnote 112 However, the old term ‘death anniversary’ still prevails.Footnote 113
Secondly, on 12 July 2019, another ceremony took place at Vị Xuyên's war cemetery to commemorate the soldiers who fell in the war against China from 1984 to 1989. Former president Trương Tấn Sang visited the war cemetery the day before the event together with the chairman of the VCP Committee of Hà Giang province in order to make offerings and burn incense, but he also attended the ceremony at the war cemetery the next day together with the Vị Xuyên veterans.Footnote 114
The fact that the country's former president had made the long trip to Hà Giang to attend the ceremony was welcomed by the veterans, many of whom still remembered that it had been Trương Tấn Sang who had actively supported their cause in 2014. However, the fact remains that he attended the ceremonies as the former president of Vietnam and not as the acting one; no high-level representative of the VCP or the Vietnamese state went to Hà Giang to take part in the ceremony.Footnote 115
Phạm Minh Chính, head of the Central Organising Commission of the VCP, did visit Memorial Site 468 at the beginning of July 2019, but the coverage of his visit was rather restrained; it was not linked to the 35th death anniversary of the MB84 campaign, but to Veterans’ Day on 27 July when Vietnam commemorates its fallen soldiers.Footnote 116 Thus, when commemorating the war in Vị Xuyên, the Party and the state kept an even lower profile than when it commemorated the war against China in 1979. What took place in Vị Xuyên on 12 July 2019 was certainly not a ceremony at state level commemorating the soldiers who fell on the battlefield in Hà Giang, which is what many veterans had called for.
The Vietnamese state has pledged to enlarge the war cemetery of Vị Xuyên and the works are currently in progress. In addition, in response to proposals made by the Liaison Bureau of the Vị Xuyên veterans, there are now plans to erect a triumphal column in the war cemetery in commemoration of the whole war against China at the northern border and in recognition of the fact that the war in Vị Xuyên lasted from 1979 until 1989.Footnote 117 An official decision has also been made by the VCP and the state to the effect that the whole former battlefield of Vị Xuyên should become a national memorial site. However, apart from Hà Giang province announcing back in 2016 that it would build a historical site to commemorate those who had previously fought there, nothing concrete has been done yet and veterans are concerned, as they feel the plans will be difficult to implement.Footnote 118
The special team in charge of finding the remains of fallen soldiers continues to do its task. Some remains have now been found, but those of thousands of other soldiers are still lying on the old battlefield of Vị Xuyên.Footnote 119
Conclusion
The Vietnamese state and the Vietnamese Communist Party are still trying to control the commemoration of historical events in the country. The case of the commemoration of the Sino-Vietnamese War, however, shows that non-state actors in Vietnam such as former soldiers are also actively shaping the commemoration of the war. It attests to the multivocal character of remembrance in Vietnam.
The toning down of the remembrance of past military clashes with China that started with the normalisation of relations with Beijing in 1991 ended about twenty years later when China's more aggressive stance in the South China Sea led to greater interest in the Sino-Vietnamese War among many Vietnamese and ultimately triggered a commemorative turn in their country. Veterans of the Vị Xuyên battlefield whose memories of the conflicts had been marginalised in previous decades benefited from this change. They managed to break the silencing of the war by organising commemorative activities such as building a proper memorial site in the remote province of Hà Giang and by carrying out yearly pilgrimages to the former battlefield of Vị Xuyên in July, which is not part of the official state-sanctioned ceremonies. In other words, the veterans of the Hà Giang battlefield commemorated the war in their own ways. They succeeded in keeping the memory of the Sino-Vietnamese war alive by avoiding a confrontational approach and by reaching out to political leaders such as former president Trương Tấn Sang and enlisting their support. Furthermore, they reached out to state media and also made wide use of new communications technologies, particularly social networking sites like Facebook® that present new opportunities and spaces for airing and discussing their war memories. It certainly also helped that the Vietnamese authorities could not challenge the nationalist or political credentials of the veterans—many of the leading activists are party members and fully support the leading role of the VCP in Vietnamese society.Footnote 120
Although social media platforms have eroded the Vietnamese state's ability to dominate the agenda on war memory, the Vietnamese ‘memory machine’ run by the Department of Propaganda and Education has not kept silent; it has stepped up the official commemoration of the Sino-Vietnamese War—the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the war in 2019 is clear evidence of this. At the same time, it is obvious that on this occasion, the state and the VCP also tried to circumscribe the remembrance of the war by keeping it low-profile and presenting it as a patriotic struggle for the defence of the fatherland without mentioning ‘China’.
Recent developments, however, indicate that the Vietnamese ‘memory machine’ might favour a bolder approach when it comes to the commemoration of the Sino-Vietnamese War: at the beginning of 2020, the official TV channel of the Party newspaper, NhânDânTV, started to upload documentaries on YouTube that were each dedicated to one year in Vietnam's history in the second half of the twentieth century. It is certainly no coincidence that the documentary on 1979, which mainly covers the Chinese invasion, has received the most views so far.Footnote 121 In fact, it has been praised highly by many Vietnamese viewers. It was shown by VTV1 in August 2020 at prime time.Footnote 122 Half of the documentary covers the war against China, and although phrases like ‘war to defend the northern border’ are used, it mainly quotes from contemporary newspaper articles, resolutions and other material that frequently refer to ‘invading Chinese troops’ (quân xâm lược). Thus, the documentary is quite outspoken and lacks the restrained tone of the 40th anniversary celebrations in 2019. The documentaries on the years 1984 and 1985 also cover the ferocious fighting at the battlefront of Vị Xuyên.Footnote 123 The latter documentary commemorates those soldiers who sacrificed their lives during the battles against China and shows Vị Xuyên War Cemetery and the memorial site built by the veterans in Thanh Thủy.
It seems that 40 years after the end of the war, the veterans of the Hà Giang battlefield who have ‘fought’ to break the state-sanctioned silence for decades as agents of remembrance have achieved a victory on the commemorative front.Footnote 124
