"We're Very Sexy People"

[Randy W]

from ChinaFile - a little bit of history and reading material - if you're interested - about Deng Xiaoping and Jimmy Carter and China's invasion of Vietnam as a means of cozying up to the U.S.

 

‘We’re Very Sexy People’: How the U.S. Miscalculated Its Allure to China

 

 

 

 

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China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam demonstrated that Beijing stood on the American side in the global Cold War—a message that President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, embraced. China may have been a brutal dictatorship, but the fact that it went to war against America’s erstwhile enemy, Vietnam, pointed to a commonality of interests between China and the United States.

 

. . .

 

In D.C., Deng informed U.S. President Jimmy Carter that war was coming. Invasion had become necessary, he said, because the Vietnamese were “extremely arrogant.” He added, “they now claim to be even the third most powerful military nation in the world, after the United States and the Soviet Union.” If they were allowed to continue unopposed, Deng implied, they would soon be threatening the rest of Southeast Asia, and even China itself. He asked Carter for “moral” support.

 

Carter was taken aback. On January 30, 1979, he handwrote a note, which he then read out to Deng, calling the proposed war a “serious mistake,” and suggesting that it would “cause serious concern in the United States concerning the general character of China.” Deng ignored him. When China invaded, the White House deplored the violence—but not too strenuously. Indeed, Carter revealed at a meeting of the National Security Council that he “feels more sympathy for the Chinese in this conflict.” There were also perfectly sound geopolitical reasons to sit back and watch the war unfold: Vietnam was the Soviet Union’s ally in the Cold War. China, though, was Moscow’s implacable enemy.

 

Deng understood that by fighting Washington’s sworn enemy and a Soviet proxy, he was anchoring China on the American side of the Cold War. That was exactly what he wanted.

 

. . .

 

At the end of 1978, Deng had set China on a course towards economic modernization. The goal was to catch up with the advanced countries of the West; the means of getting there: the import of technology. In the months after the Sino-Vietnamese war, Beijing flooded the United States with purchase requests, including of the most sensitive military kind.

 

Now that China had fought the Vietnamese, Deng felt entitled to better treatment. When Defense Secretary Harold Brown visited Beijing in January 1980, his Chinese counterparts asked him for state-of-the-art computers and components, infrared sensors (which the U.S. was not even selling to its allies in Western Europe), a laser guidance system, pulse Doppler radar, and other items of obvious military application. The P.L.A. also wanted to send students to study at Los Alamos, the Livermore National Laboratory, and underground nuclear testing stations—in other words, access to the very core of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 16, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Greg.D.]

And, the context for the article title:

 

The tilt towards China in 1979-1980 had its detractors in the Carter Administration. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, for instance, preferred a more even-handed approach. So did the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow Thomas J. Watson, who worried the Chinese, “had a tendency to jump around from bed to bed.” Brzezinski had an answer: “You have to remember,” he told Watson, “that we are very sexy people.”