ABSTRACT
Vietnam's invasion of Kampuchea in December 1978, which overthrew the Pol Pot regime and installed a goverment dependent on continued Vietnamese military presence, was a major turning point in the international politics of Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese Communist Party had set up the Kampuchean Communist movement, trained its cadres and sent troops to fight alongside Kampucheans. The irony of modern Sino-Vietnamese relations is that the Vietnamese, with their traditional sensitivities about Chinese claims to cultural superiority and ambitions to dominate Vietnam, looked to China for guidance in carrying out the revolution within Vietnam far more than it ever looked to the Soviet Union. The Lao Communist movement which had developed under the tutelage of the Vietnamese Communists had accepted Vietnamese direction of revolutionary strategy for all of Indochina through the war. By 1977, Vietnam's ethnic Chinese population was becoming a contentious issue in Sino-Vietnamese relations.
