ON THIS DAY ·
Sino-Vietnamese War
17 Feb–16 Mar 1979 — China invades northern Vietnam to punish it for invading Cambodia and for its treatment of the Hoa, taking Lang Son before withdrawing. Tens of thousands of soldiers die, and the war speeds the expulsion of the north’s Hoa by sea.
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The moment in context
The exodus surged in 1978–79 because departures became organised, profitable and urgent all at once. In the South, officials let ethnic Chinese leave if they paid in gold, and syndicates bought rusting freighters to carry thousands at a time: the Hai Hong anchored off Malaysia in November 1978 with about 2,500 people, and the Huey Fong reached Hong Kong in December with 3,318. Then two wars made the pressure worse. Vietnam invaded Cambodia on 25 December 1978 and took Phnom Penh on 7 January, and China, Cambodia’s patron, invaded northern Vietnam on 17 February, seizing Lang Son before withdrawing in March. Northern Hoa, the ethnic Chinese of the North, now treated as enemies, sailed along the coast to Hong Kong, which received 68,748 boat people, refugees arriving by sea, in 1979. By mid-1979 about 350,000 people were waiting in first-asylum camps, the temporary camps of the countries where they had landed, while Western countries were resettling, or permanently admitting, about 9,000 a month, so every month the camps grew fuller.
From Vietnamese boat people, chapter 9 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1979).
The place: Sino-Vietnamese War — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Departures sold for gold. Departure became a business that the state itself ran. From 1978 Vietnamese officials allowed ethnic Chinese to leave in return for payments in…
- The turn — Pulau Bidong and the closing of the shore, June 1979. Malaysia’s announcement in mid-June 1979 that it would push new boats back to sea, made while about 40,000 people crowded onto Pulau Bidong, is the…
- What it changed — The Geneva meeting. The push-backs and the ASEAN declaration led the UN Secretary-General to call a conference in Geneva for 20–21 July 1979. Western states doubled…
Then ask the room: Who bears the greatest responsibility for the boat-people crisis of 1979: Vietnam, its neighbours or the countries of resettlement? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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