ABSTRACT
On February 17, 1979, more than 400,000 soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)1 attacked across the Sino-Vietnamese border. Responsibility for the assault on the low, steep hills along the National Highway 4 in Vietnam’s Lang Son province fell in part to the Chinese 165th Division, a body of more than 12,500 men, including almost 1,300 cadres.2 As the campaign dragged on, the division tallied its losses and discovered that during the slow, painful advance it had “promoted on the firing line” – to replace casualties – 243 cadres.3 Although some of the surviving cadres attributed their casualties and battlefield problems to inadequate training or weak leadership, this study shows that the fundamental cause of their problems was the Maoist ideology that in 1979 permeated the PLA. The 165th Division, like all other PLA divisions, had followed the Maoist line, holding the requisite meetings and teaching its conscripts the key tenets of Maoist ideology. But when its poorly trained cadres led the massed formations of the 165th into the waiting guns of the Vietnamese Army in the fields near Hill 339, ideology was not enough.
