Privately, Pol Pot spoke about the conflict with Vietnam. As he had told his own standing committee the year before, he believed the growing strength of pro-Chinese Asian Communist parties—including those of Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia—worked in Cambodia’s favor. He expressed confidence in victory. Presumably, one reason he had made this trip was that he believed Chinese help would make his forces invulnerable or would force the Vietnamese to be cautious. He never considered the alternatives of defeat, compromise, or negotiation.3

Another reason for Pol Pot’s trip was to display the “human face” of his country and to counter charges emerging in Thailand and the West of human rights violations, terror, and starvation in Cambodia. To this end, the Chinese released a glossy magazine—Democratic Kampuchea Is Moving Forward —to coincide with the visit and a documentary filmed earlier in the year. Both depicted crowded work sites, thriving industries, and newly constructed irrigation dams; the well-fed workers were usually smiling. Other aspects of “opening up” included inviting sympathetic visitors to Cambodia and seeking diplomatic relations with Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia—the countries where Pol Pot claimed privately that revolutionary movements were on the march.4

In North Korea, Pol Pot was decorated by Korea’s leader, Kim Il Sung. On the day he arrived, the North Koreans broadcast a biographical sketch about him, the first to reach the outside world. The sketch gave his year of birth as 1925. His primary schooling was dated from 1930 to 1935 and “primary and middle” schooling from 1940 to 1948. From 1937 to 1939, it seems, Pol Pot worked on his parents’ farm. “Prior to World War II,” the text continued, “he developed a love for the fatherland and people and—through discussions about patriotic struggle and progressive books—a hostile feeling toward the nation’s enemies.” “Progressive books” in pre-1940 Cambodia would have been difficult to find, but a studious, future-oriented youth (and a stint as a farmworker, which none of his brothers remembered in the 1980s or 1990s) were suitable ingredients of a revolutionary persona.5

From 1949 to 1952, the sketch maintained, Pol Pot “participated in organizing a Marxism-Leninism team among college students” in an unidentified country before heading into “jungle areas ... during the armed struggle against France.” The sketch then listed the posts Pol Pot held in the Communist party of Kampuchea between its congress in 1960 and his election as prime minister sixteen years later. From his own people, however, Pol Pot remained concealed. The biography was not rebroadcast in Khmer.

Cambodia’s War with Vietnam