In the wake of the invasion, Communist cadre fled their villages and work sites to join the retreating columns or to resume their lives elsewhere. Those who delayed their departure were often cut to pieces by enraged inhabitants. Hundreds of thousands of liberated people soon took to the roads themselves, looking for relatives, native villages, houses, and possessions. Thousands of them died as they crisscrossed the country on foot. Others, exhausted by hardship and drawn by rumors of prosperity in Thailand, headed west. In the chaos that ensued, much of the 1979 rice crop went unharvested, and famine broke out in many parts of the country.1

Meanwhile, in Phnom Penh the Vietnamese had established a satellite Cambodian government that called itself the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Its high-ranking officials were a mixture of DK cadre who had fled to Vietnam in 1977-1978 and Khmer who had been in exile there since the 1950s. Over the next few years, the regime also gave a few bureaucratic positions to noncommunist survivors of the Pol Pot era, but its main efforts in 1979-1980 were to bind the new government closely to Vietnam and prevent Pol Pot from regaining power. Until 1989, when the Vietnamese withdrew their forces, the People’s Republic was protected by up to 200,000 Vietnamese troops and overseen by Vietnamese cadre. When the Vietnamese took over, the ordinary Cambodians offered little or no resistance. It was as if they had been bankrupted by the previous regime; politically, the Vietnamese were their receivers.

The new regime quickly dismantled some of the most offensive aspects of Democratic Kampuchea. By mid-1979 it had permitted or reestablished markets, schools, hospitals, freedom of movement, and family farming. In 1980, money and Buddhism were reintroduced, although access to the monkhood was restricted to people over fifty. Political pluralism and freedom of expression were discouraged, but most Cambodians were too preoccupied with reconstructing their lives and families to notice. Most of them saw the new government as a sharp contrast to that of Democratic Kampuchea. Many of those who detected a Marxist-Leninist agenda in the regime’s pronouncements and were unhappy about it found it easy to escape to Thailand. Others who fled believed that Cambodia had become a colony of Vietnam. Still others swallowed their pride, concealed their views, and worked alongside the Vietnamese to bring Cambodia back to life. The new government attracted aid from the Soviet Union and its allies and from India, but it remained desperately poor. The PRK was deemed to be ineligible for development assistance, because Democratic Kampuchea retained Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations—the only government-in-exile to be so honored. The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia led the United States, China, and other powers hostile to Vietnam to punish Cambodia for Vietnam’s action.2