Word: nams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Then came Viet Nam's lightning conquest of Cambodia. Within a month of its full-scale invasion on Christmas Day, pro-Hanoi insurgents backed by Vietnamese regulars routed the barbarous China-supported Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. Few international tears were shed as Pol Pot and the straggling remnants of his army were driven into western jungle pockets. From these redoubts, the Khmer Rouge has carried on vigorous resistance against the new regime, a pro-Vietnamese government headed by a former Khmer Rouge defector, Heng Samrin, and propped up by an estimated 130,000 Vietnamese troops. For China...
...rapidly developed two main, logical prongs of attack: one in the northwest on the railroad line leading south to Hanoi, the other in the the east on the major rail link that parallels Highway 1, the jugular thoroughfare from Friendship Pass. Both thrusts appeared to aim directly at Viet Nam's capital. At the same time, an auxiliary Chinese force, spearhead units of an estimated three more divisions, probed toward the coast for a possible end run aimed at cutting off Highway 4 to Lang Son and later, perhaps, the main Vietnamese reinforcement and supply route of Highway 1, which...
Hanoi radio blared that Viet Nam's defense of Lang Son had inflicted more than 3,000 Chinese casualties, and that in just one coastal battle 50 miles southeast, Vietnamese forces had "trounced three battalions and wiped out 700 Chinese aggressors." In all, Viet Nam announced, its forces had killed 5,000 to 8,000 Chinese in five days, while losing less than half as many. The lopsided claims were remindful of the inflated enemy "body counts" reeled off each day by U.S. briefers during the Viet Nam War. Western sources in Peking estimated that the Vietnamese had suffered...
...fuse under the China-Viet Nam explosion had been sputtering for nearly a year. Last spring, intent on consolidating their purer-than-thou socialist revolution, the Vietnamese authorities decided to root out "bourgeois trade" and "dangerous elements," namely ethnic Chinese who had lived for years in northern mining areas, in Danang and in the bustling Cholon district of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). An estimated 160,000 Chinese refugees fled the country, aboard fishing boats or on foot across Friendship Pass, to resettle on communes in Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces. Meanwhile, a sporadic series of raids and skirmishes that...
Tension mounted meanwhile along the border with Viet Nam. China alleged that Hanoi's troops had intruded into its territory on 1,100 different occasions. Viet Nam accused China of almost daily incursions. Charges and countercharges enlivened every artillery barrage and exchange of small-arms fire, not to mention kidnaping, livestock rustling and planting of poisoned bamboo stakes. In its loud political buildup to the invasion, China underscored the border aggravations to anyone who would listen?at the U.N., in diplomatic exchanges, and in a shower of communiques. Peking also claimed that Viet Nam was mobilizing for war by drafting...