Cambodian-Vietnamese antagonism was also part of a larger picture. Sino-Vietnamese relations had been deteriorating for several years. China felt insulted by having an ally of the “revisionist” Soviet Union on its southern border; Vietnam was insulted by having a Chinese ally to the west. Sino-Vietnamese relations, in many ways, resembled Vietnamese relations with Cambodia. Vietnamese distrust of China was fueled by a sense of persecution that resembled Red Khmer responses to Vietnam. The Cambodians saw nineteenth-century precedents for imperialistic Vietnamese behavior, much as the Vietnamese saw millennial precedents for Chinese attempts to dominate them. Similarly, traditional Chinese views of Vietnam’s unruliness and unreliability paralleled those that Vietnam harbored about Cambodia. To compound the irony, Pol Pot’s scramble for overseas patronage (like Vietnam’s) resembled moves taken by Cambodia’s King Norodom in the 1860s when he welcomed the French protectorate, and later by Sihanouk and Lon Nol when they faced up to what they saw as a Vietnamese threat to their survival. Pol Pot told visitors in 1978 that he was “building socialism without a model,” but like his predecessors he was a victim of Cambodia’s past and its location. He and his colleagues were surrounded and outnumbered by the Vietnamese. Throughout its history, he thought, only outsiders had ever saved Cambodia from Vietnamese encroachment. Like Sihanouk and Lon Nol, Pol Pot miscalculated the lengths to which foreign powers would go to rescue him from defeat.

As Cambodia and Vietnam edged toward sustained hostilities and a diplomatic break, high-ranking officials scurried between Beijing, Hanoi, and Phnom Penh. These visits accomplished little, although Chinese vice premier Chen Yonggui’s trip to Cambodia is of anecdotal interest.

Chen Yonggui was a Politburo member with good Maoist credentials (he had once written a paper titled “Self-Reliance Is a Magic Wand”) who visited Cambodia toward the end of 1977. Ostensibly, he came to teach Cambodians about the Dazhai (Tai Chai) agricultural work brigade in northern China, which he had supervised in the 1960s and which had been praised repeatedly in “Learn from Dazhai” campaigns. During his trip he toured agricultural sites—accompanied everywhere by Pol Pot—and praised Cambodia’s domestic policies as “entirely correct.” He said almost nothing in public to support Cambodia’s conflict with Vietnam.7

Pol Pot’s presence at Chen Yonggui’s side suggests, however, that he did everything he could to display his respect and his desperate need for Chinese military assistance. Pol Pot’s unexpected appearances with Chen in the countryside must also have been intended to demonstrate to cadre that he was in command of the country and had powerful friends.

Nearly everything we know about Chen’s visit is filtered through official statements and radio broadcasts, but a brief, humorous moment came to life in Chou Chet’s confession, written four months later, which showed an unrehearsed Pol Pot and a revolutionary tableau fraying at the edges.