This book examines the Sino-Vietnamese conflicts of the late 1970s and 1980s, attemtpting to understand them as strategic, operational and tactical events.

The Sino-Vietnamese War was the Third Indochina War, and contemporary South Asia cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge that the Vietnamese fought three, not two, wars to establish their current role in the region. The war was not about the Sino-Vietnamese border, as frequently claimed, but about China’s support for its Cambodian ally, the Khmer Rouge, and this book addresses both US and ASEAN involvement in the effort to support the regime. Although the Chinese completed their troop withdrawal in March 1979, they retained their strategic goal of driving Vietnam out of Cambodia at least until 1988, but it was evident by 1984-85 that the Chinese army, held back by the drag of its “Maoist” organisation, doctrine, equipment, and personnel, was not an effective instrument of coercion.