Five years after the 1979 self-defense and counter-attack against Vietnam, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) launched another wave of operations against Vietnam in the Sino-Vietnamese border area of Malipo County, Yunnan Province. In this battle, the first step was to recover the border riding points such as Lao Son and Zheyin Mountain, which had been occupied by the Vietnamese army for many years, and then relied on this place to carry out a round battle that lasted for more than five years. Since then, "Lao Son" has become a key hot word for military researchers and enthusiasts, and there are not only many discussions in China, but also many memories and reviews in Vietnam. Vietnamese Major General Nguyen Duc Huy, who witnessed the battle, believes that China chose Lao Son as the location of the battle for at least four reasons, each of which shows "China's extreme cruelty."
The first reason summed up by the Vietnamese major general
Nguyen Duc Huy joined the Vietnamese army in 1948, initially as an ordinary soldier. Because of his excellent talent and good at learning and summarizing, he established many achievements during his time in the army, was highly trusted by his superiors, and was gradually promoted to a position responsible for commanding battles and controlling the situation.
When the self-defense war against Vietnam broke out in 1979, Nguyen Duc Huy was serving as the commander of the 325th Division of the Vietnamese Army, and led his subordinates to confront the Chinese army head-on. Since then, he has also been one of the witnesses of the Vietnamese army during the Battle of the Two Mountains that broke out in 1984.
Regarding this series of wars, he has the identity of a person who has experienced it, and therefore has a fairly full say.
In Nguyen Duchui's view, there are at least four reasons why the Chinese side chose Lao Son as the key point of "bloodletting Vietnam".
The first is a strategic advantage at the topographical level.
During the period of stability and friendship between China and Vietnam, the Lao Son area did not belong entirely to any one country, but was in a state of equilibrium in which the two sides negotiated and controlled a part of the country: the Chinese side controlled the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 highlands, the Vietnamese side controlled the No. 5, No. 6 and No. 7 highlands, and the No. 4 main peak, which was the most central and geographically important, was jointly owned by China and Vietnam.
It is not difficult to see the strategic value of Laoshan at the geographical level from this detail: it guards the main road between Malipo County in China and Ha Giang Province in Vietnam, and is a key point in land transportation. As a result, neither side is willing to give in completely and hand over control to the other.
However, from a geographical point of view, the strategic advantages of China and Vietnam in Lao Son are not completely equal. If you take the main peak of Lao Shan as the coordinate point, you can overlook the depth zone of about 20 kilometers in China and Vietnam from two directions. However, the terrain on the Chinese side is relatively vast and vast, which is more suitable for the mechanized mobility of large groups of troops, while the terrain on the Vietnamese side is high and densely forested and rugged roads, which is more suitable for guerrilla covert operations and is not suitable for large-scale troops to carry out combat missions.
Geographical conditions determine that once the two sides start fighting, they will inevitably face unbalanced operational conditions. The terrain on the side of Lao Son close to the Vietnamese army was challenging, which made it difficult to resupply logistics. While the rear of the PLA was able to get artillery shells to the front line more easily, it was much more difficult for the Vietnamese side, especially since their logistics channels were within range of the PLA artillery.
The elimination of one advantage will inevitably have a significant impact on the effectiveness of artillery bombardment in actual combat.
Lao Son to Vietnam: Can't give up
The second reason is that Lao Son has an important position for Vietnam, and it is indispensable to fight and have to fight, so even if the Vietnamese side knows that it does not have a geographical advantage, it still has to fight with the spirit.
At that time, there were three main passages from Yunnan to Vietnam, among which Hekou and Jinping were the channels chosen by our army for outbound operations in 1979, and the last passage was the Nala Kouzi area where Laoshan was located. The Pan Long River flows from the mainland into Vietnam, passing through the Na La Pass, and the Lao Son area is like a heavy lock that locks the throat of Ha Giang City, the capital of Vietnam's Ha Giang province, which is only 23 kilometers away.
For Vietnam, once it loses control of the Lao Son area, it is equivalent to leaving the entire city of Ha Giang exposed to a situation without cover, which means a great risk for Vietnam, so Vietnam does not dare to give up Lao Son easily.
Since the end of the self-defense war against Vietnam in 1979, the northern provinces of Vietnam, such as Cao Binh, Lang Son, and Hoang Lien Son, have been severely damaged by the war and have difficulty recovering in a short period of time. Between 1981 and 1984, the areas such as Kuolin Mountain, Bali River Dongshan, and Lao Mountain, which our army successively recovered, were all commanding heights on the Sino-Vietnamese border. These highs are connected in a curve from south to north and support each other, forming a favorable situation with multiple routes pointing to the direction of the river. In other words, under the background of that time, once the military conflict between China and Vietnam escalated, the PLA would attack from the Malipo area through these controlled strongholds, and it would form an offensive threat posture to Ha Giang City and several nearby county towns in Vietnam.
For Vietnam, such a situation is not too much to describe as "unable to sleep and eat". Therefore, in the direction of Lao Son, Vietnam actually gathered more troops than the Chinese army in front of it to confront it, and constantly launched attacks, forming a situation of long-term confrontation.
Choosing such a response strategy will inevitably have corresponding consequences, Vietnam has to throw most of its resources into the war, which consumes a lot of national strength, and the situation in the entire north is not calm and it is difficult to develop the economy. Even if you know that the whole of Southeast Asia is facing strategic opportunities for economic development, you will never be able to squeeze into the car, and naturally you will not be able to enjoy the dividends of economic development and improvement of people's livelihood.
China considers: economic development first
The third reason was China's own considerations, which at that time were making great efforts to develop its economy, so it decided to keep the war on the southern frontier within a certain range. The scale of the war cannot be too large, let alone allow the scope of the conflict to spread, so China's "selection" of Laoshan as the combat site is not a natural result of the development of the situation, but one of the proofs of taking the initiative to control the direction and scale of the war.
If the Central Military Commission's original operational plan had been carried out, the scale of the 1984 operation against Vietnam would have been much larger than the actual one, and the planned use of troops, troops, and resources would have been greater than the actual one. As a result, more resources were involved on the Vietnamese side, and the scale of the war as a whole inevitably expanded.
The top brass of the Chinese armed forces and even the Central Military Commission have long anticipated this possibility, and have drawn up a standby plan for some possible situations. For example, the 32nd Division of the 11th Army was originally supposed to carry out a pull-out operation on the Miao Emperor Mountain in Malipo as planned, but due to a sudden large-scale counterattack by the Vietnamese army at the front, it temporarily changed its mission and took over the 40th Division to defend the direction of Nala Pass.
The situation on the battlefield is ever-changing, and it is necessary to respond in the most timely manner at any time. But even against this backdrop, the Chinese side still controls the number of troops to be put into the war and keeps the scale of the war within the predetermined range. Because it was not in China's own interest to conduct large-scale combat operations at the time, the pressure exerted on Vietnam was enough to make it difficult for the latter. This is a typical demonstration of the confrontation between large and small countries.
Considerations regarding international implications
The last reason is to focus on the impact of war at the international level.
Lao Son is located on the border between China and Vietnam. Nguyen Duc Huy believes that the reason why China has specially invested troops to deliberately attack the Vietnamese army in Lao Son is that its deep-seated purpose is to suppress Vietnam's efforts to enhance its international status and deplete Vietnam's national and military strength, with the intention of preventing Vietnam from becoming strong and prosperous.
Based on this perception, Nguyen has always considered China's decisions and tactics to be "very ruthless and cruel."
In order to create a certain international impact, China even deliberately chose to launch a pull-out operation against Vietnam during US President Ronald Reagan's visit to China to ensure that military action could have sufficient international impact.
From China's point of view, the essential reason for the outbreak of the war of self-defense and counterattack against Vietnam is that neighboring Vietnam has inflated its ambitions, embarked on a "pro-Soviet and anti-China" line, and frequently infringed on the mainland's national territory and sovereign dignity.
After realizing its own national reunification, Vietnam gradually shifted from the "aggressor" to the role of "expander". In order to realize the dream of the so-called "Indochinese Federation", it embraced the thigh of the Soviet Union and was hostile to China, and invaded its military control into Cambodia, Laos and other countries.
The reason why China is actively improving its relations with the United States is, on the one hand, for its own national interests, and on the other hand, it is also to strike at and weaken the alliance between the Soviet Union and Vietnam, reduce the pressure on the security of the mainland between the Soviet Union and Vietnam, and support the Cambodian people's struggle against Vietnam.
When both China and the Soviet Union were interested in improving relations between the two countries and easing the atmosphere of hostility, "Lao Shan" was also regarded as one of the targets of attention. In an effort to strike Vietnam with precision, China has claimed that if Vietnam does not rein in its aggression against Cambodia, it will remain one of the "three major obstacles" to improving Sino-Soviet relations.
It should not affect strategic cooperation with the United States and effectively contain Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia and Thailand, but at the same time, it should avoid excessively provoking Vietnam's backer, the Soviet Union, and undermining the situation of improving Sino-Soviet relations. China has always focused on controlling the scale and scope of this operation, and its relationship with other major powers is also an important consideration.
Because of the special geographical location of Lao Son, the conflict here is regarded as a border dispute between China and Vietnam, and the international community has not paid much attention to it, which is also conducive to China's continuous "round war" for several years, which continues to deplete Vietnam's national strength.
Nguyen Duc Huy's view
Nguyen Duc Huy, who himself belongs to the Vietnamese army and has personally experienced the years-long conflict between the two countries, is bound to be influenced by his own position. However, from an overall macro point of view, the four reasons he summarized and put forward are still of reference value.
Like his colleagues in the Vietnamese army, Nguyen Duc Huy did not see the outcome of the '79 war as "the defeat of Vietnam," but rather as a continuation of the battle that took place in Two Sons a few years later.
According to Nguyen Duc Huy, China has mobilized as many as 500,000 troops from eight different military regions to participate in the operation. In order to effectively confront each other on the Lao Son battlefield and not fall behind, Vietnam at that time had to mobilize the whole country and pull up dozens of independent divisions.
The Vietnamese wanted a quick victory, or pinned their hopes on a decisive battle with the Chinese People's Liberation Army on their own soil, but the Chinese side did not do what they expected, and continued to use intensive artillery fire to wear down the Vietnamese army on the Lao Son front.
Nguyen Duc Huy has said that the PLA's purpose is not to fight the Vietnamese army, and if they had taken control of Lao Son for a short time and pushed the Vietnamese army back home, the conflict between the two countries might have ended long ago.
However, the reality was that the artillery battle between the two mountains lasted for many years, and the shells claimed the lives of a large number of Vietnamese soldiers. After the ceasefire between the two sides, the Vietnamese side measured a position under the "key care" of the PLA artillery, and the results showed that the height of the hill was cut by artillery fire by a full three meters. This data itself is enough to prove that the artillery battle was fierce at that time.
epilogue
To sum up, under the international and domestic background at that time, the where, when, and to what extent the Sino-Vietnamese border conflict should occur served China's overall national interests. This is the most essential reason for "choosing" the old mountain.