8 See Chou Chet’s confession (Stephen Heder’s translation). It is unclear if Chou Chet knew what “Dazhai” was. It is conceivable that Pol Pot, in a playful mood, merely told him that Tai Chai (in Khmer, “Grandfather Chai”), an important guest from China, would soon be visiting the zone.

9 The details are from FBIS, Daily Reports, December 12, 1977. Chen Yonggui helped with the threshing here and at “several places” along the railway during his journey to Kompong Chhnang. Arranging for the “impromptu” stops (more clean, well-fed workers, more well-maintained irrigation works) had obviously cost Chou Chet much trouble.

10 Compare this with Touch Phoeun’s confession: “I became afraid that we could build Angkor Wat and then be unable to live in it.” The litany of complaints, with starvation added, recurs in survivors’ accounts of the “Pol Pot time.” Chou Chet’s career was similar to Pol Pot’s: recruitment into the Indochina Communist party in 1951, work in Phnom Penh for the Pracheachon Group in the 1950s, flight into the maquis in 1963. Chou Chet’s wife Im Naen cooked for Brother Number One in Office 100 in the 1960s and became a dombon secretary in 1977 (a rare post for a woman and indicative of her revolutionary status). The couple were close friends of Chhim Samauk (Pang), who also was purged in 1978 after serving for years as Pol Pot’s aidede-camp.

11 Dupont, Vietnam-Kampuchea Couflict, p. 16; Becker, When the War Was Over, p. 319; Livre izoir, pp. 74-75; and Democratic Kampuchea, “Evidences,” passim. See also Tung Padevat (May-June 1978): 9. The charge in “Evidences” that Vietnamese military units began to be subjected to anti-DK propaganda in September 1977, preparatory to a sustained attack, is corroborated by other sources. See also New York Times, December 25, 1977, reporting hostilities in “Parrot’s Beak”; and FBIS, Daily Reports, December 28, 1977.

12 Picq, Au delà du ciel, pp. 114ff. For the text of these DK statements, see Vietnam Courier, ed., Kampuchea Dossier I (Hanoi, 1978), pp. 144-158. The last paragraphs in the Khmer text (not contained in the French-language official version) listed the same casualty figures for 1975, 1976, and 1977: enemy losses of “100 killed” and Cambodian losses of “4 killed or wounded.” Chanda, Brother Enemy, p. 209, suggests that the break was intended to force Beijing’s hand. Ross, Indo-China Tangle, pp. 161ff., documents Chinese foot-dragging in offering military support to Democratic Kampuchea. According to Chanda, until mid-February 1978 China was still hoping for a standoff or a negotiated solution. If Stephen Heder’s suggestion that Vietnamese attacks had been provoked by Cambodian infiltrations of Vietnam that had left the frontier undefended are true—and he referred to an “overwhelming amount of evidence” (letter to author, August 1991)—it is possible that the break in relations and the appeal to China were desperate attempts to cover up an enormous strategic blunder for which Pol Pot was directly responsible.