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China and the Escalation of the Vietnam War the First Years of the Johnson Administration MaoChina Lin and the Escalation of the Vietnam War China and the Escalation of the Vietnam War The First Years of the Johnson Administration ✣ Mao Lin Introduction: The China Factor Reconsidered Scholars now agree that the period from November 1964 to July 1965 was pivotal in Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam.1 During this time, Washington fundamentally deepened the U.S. commitment to Saigon by initiating the regular bombing of North Vietnam and by sending Ameri- can ground combat troops to South Vietnam. Yet historians often disagree about why and how U.S. leaders chose to do what they did in Vietnam in this important period.2 The connection between Vietnam and the Johnson ad- ministration’s concern about China has failed to receive sufªcient emphasis from most scholars. The Johnson administration, this article shows, escalated the war in Viet- nam to protect America’s global credibility as the leader and defender of the non-Communist world in the face of the threat posed by China’s “wars of na- tional liberation” strategy in Vietnam. The Johnson administration evaluated this threat in the context of the broadening Sino-Soviet split. This thesis goes 1. See, among many scholars who hold this position, H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Ken- nedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000); and George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Viet- nam, 1950–1975, 4th rev. ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002). 2. For useful historiographical articles about the Vietnam War literature, see Robert A. Divine, “Viet- nam Reconsidered,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 12, No. 1 (January 1988), pp. 79–93; Gary R. Hess, “The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (April 1994), pp. 239–264; Robert J. McMahon, “U.S.-Vietnamese Relations: A Historiographical Survey,” in Warren I. Cohen, ed., Paciªc Passage: The Study of American-East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 313–336; and David L. An- derson, “The Vietnam War,” in Robert D. Schulzinger, ed., A Companion to American Foreign Rela- tions (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2003), pp. 309–329. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring 2009, pp. 35–69 © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2009.11.2.35 by guest on 29 September 2021 Mao Lin beyond merely conªrming the conventional wisdom that U.S. ofªcials re- garded Communist China as a major enemy in Vietnam. In fact, the Johnson administration’s perception of the Chinese threat to America’s global credibil- ity was much more complicated. In the early years of the Johnson administration, Washington saw con- trary trends in the ongoing Cold War. On the one hand there was détente be- tween Washington and Moscow after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. On the other there was a radical Chinese ideological offensive toward the Soviet Union that had the potential to drive Moscow back to a Stalinist hard line. In 1964 and early 1965, a series of international events convinced Washington that China’s “wars of national liberation” strategy must not be allowed to be- come the wave of the future. Should Hanoi, a regime openly supported by Beijing as a star in the “wars of national liberation,” take over South Vietnam, Johnson and his advisers believed, the Soviet Union might then be forced to discard the “peaceful coexistence” principle and the trend toward détente would be reversed. In sum, concerns in the Johnson administration that a fail- ure to contain China in Vietnam would induce the Soviet Union to return to a hard line toward the West greatly contributed to the escalation of the Viet- nam War. The China factor looms large in the literature on Vietnam. Pioneered by authors such as Harry G. Summers, the so-called revisionist critique of the limited war efforts in Vietnam dwells on Washington’s concern about a possi- ble massive Chinese intervention on behalf of Hanoi. According to these au- thors, American leaders’ unreasonable fear of direct Chinese intervention pre- cluded a more decisive military option in Vietnam. Because the United States “allowed (itself) to be bluffed by China throughout most of the war,” Sum- mers writes, the gradual escalation actually granted Hanoi time to adjust to U.S. pressure and lost the war by making American soldiers ªght with one hand bound behind their backs.3 Although the debate over whether the fear 3. Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Dell, 1984), p. 94. Allen Whiting has a slightly different view. He regards America’s concern about Chinese inter- vention more as a successful case of deterrence by the Chinese than a failure of American policymakers to see through China’s bluff. See Allen Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Indochina (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975). This revisionist school includes Dave Richard Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam In Perspective (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978); U. S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978); Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (New York: Dell, 1980); Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: Amer- ica’s Military Role in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984); Shelby L. Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965–1973 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985); Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946–1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988); C. Dale Walton, The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam (London: Frank Cass, 2002); and Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For a review article about the revisionist school, see John W. Garver, “China 36 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2009.11.2.35 by guest on 29 September 2021 China and the Escalation of the Vietnam War of Chinese intervention was well-founded is far from settled, historians now generally agree, especially after the appearance of Yuen Foong Khong’s Anal- ogies at War,4 that this fear played a crucial role in the Johnson administra- tion’s war planning. U.S. concern about Chinese intervention is at least partially justiªed by historians who, from the early 1990s onward, documented China’s involve- ment in the Vietnam War based on newly released Chinese sources. Histo- rians now recognize the depth of China’s involvement, especially Beijing’s assistance to Hanoi and the link between the war and China’s domestic revo- lution.5 However, these works mainly focus on the foreign policy of China and deal with how Chinese leaders viewed the war in Vietnam, not how U.S. policymakers regarded China’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Revisionist or not, historians who deal more exclusively with the Ameri- can side focus on the impact of concerns about China on military strategy in Vietnam, not on how concern about China contributed to the escalation of the war in the ªrst place. As a result, a crucial dimension of the Johnson ad- ministration’s deliberations on the U.S. stake in Vietnam is missing. The need to reexamine the Johnson administration’s concerns about China becomes even more urgent when one turns to the vast body of scholar- ship scrutinizing factors that prompted the escalation. Most scholars empha- size long-term factors when they explain the origins and developments of the war. Some explain the war in terms of American cultural imperatives.6 Others and the Revisionist Thesis,” in William Head and Lawrence E. Grinter, eds., Looking Back on the Viet- nam War: A 1990s Perspective on the Decisions, Combat, and Legacies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp. 105–117. 4. Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 5. Chen Jian, “China’s Involvement in the Vietnam War, 1964–1969,” China Quarterly, No. 142 (June 1995), pp. 356–387; Qiang Zhai, “Beijing and the Vietnam Conºict, 1964–1965: New Chi- nese Evidence,” Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Bulletin, No. 6/7 (Winter 1995/ 1996), pp. 233–250; Zhang Xiaoming, “The Vietnam War, 1964–1969: A Chinese Perspective,” Journal of Military History, Vol. 60, No. 4 (October 1996), pp. 731–762; and Qiang Zhai, China and The Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 6. Loren Baritz, for example, argues that a national myth, created out of a combination of cultural and technological superiority, encouraged U.S. involvement in Vietnam and made defeat unthinkable. See Loren Baritz, Backªre: A History of How American Culture Led Us into the Vietnam War and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: W. Morrow, 1985). See also James William Gibson, The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), p. 23. Lloyd C. Gardner asserts that “fascination with technocratic solutions to political problems” was the underlying impulse of Johnson’s escalation.
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