Episode Details

In the late 1970s, wars involving three self-declared socialist countries, China, Vietnam and Cambodia were gleefully reported in the Western press along with lurid allegations of ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia. Many considered that this had sounded the death knell of socialist internationalism.

In this Geopolitical Economy Hour, Radhika Desai is joined by Keith Bennett, co-editor of a new book on China’s foreign policy, to help disinter facts that lie buried under decades of misinterpretation and misunderstanding of these complex events. Our purpose is twofold: to help understand these conflicts in a broadly historical materialist manner, one that makes socialist sense, and on that basis to dig deeper into the complex interrelationship between class and nation in the advance towards socialism. Some of the question we discuss are: Why did Vietnam attack Cambodia and China attack Vietnam? What drove these countries, which had stood shoulder to shoulder against US aggression, apart? Who were the Khmer Rouge and what motivated them? Where did it all go wrong?