ABSTRACT
The western routes to Thailand which had op.:ned for the Vietnamese since 1945 began to close definitively as Chinese communists consolidated their hold on all of southern China throughout 1950. Besides opening a huge northern rearguard and providing the aid vital to the Vietnamese defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Chinese communist victory also ushered the Cold War into Southeast Asia. For our purposes, the Chinese communist victory and the arrival of the Cold War to the region had three major effects on Vietnam's relationship with Thailand in particular and Southeast Asia in general. Externally, the orientation of the ICP and DRV's Southeast Asian operations shifted back to southern China as the Thais, under rapidly increasing American pressure, began to deny the DRV/ ICP access to their emigre and war trading operations, the two deepest layers of the Thai-based networks. Internally, large-scale Chinese aid allowed Vietnamese communists to compensate for the Thai loss by accelerating their efforts to consolidate their hold on all ofIndochina, especially in the eastern parts of Laos and Cambodia closer to bases in western Vietnam (interwar zones IV, V and IX). Ideologically, following important ICP decisions between 1948 and 1951, Vietnamese communists made it clear that they were now taking charge of an Indochinese revolution as part of a larger Southeast Asian socialist movement with which they had lost touch since the early 1930s. This time, however, they intended to start in western Indochina, in Laos and Cambodia, not in Thailand and Malaya.
