Quotes from Xiaobing Li

They recalled the lyrics word for word. They had sung them before their meals and meetings, before each combat mission, during the drills, seeing comrades off to the hospital or cemetery.

Beginning in 1968, China also sent 110,000 troops to Laos to fight the war.

Even though a few Western historians have speculated about international Communist involvements in the Vietnam War, no primary source or personal accounts had been available for their research.

Chinese and Russian support prolonged the war, making it impossible for the United States to win.

As the historians Jung Chang and Jon Halliday point out, "It was having China as a secure rear and supply depot that made it possible for the Vietnamese to fight twenty-five years and beat first the French and then the Americans.

Chinese intervention and assistance secured Ho's regime in the North from the US Rolling Thunder air campaign and enabled Ho to send more NVA regulars to the South.

Until 1967, when the Soviet Union superseded the PRC, China was the largest Communist state supplier of war materials to North Vietnam, providing about 44.8 percent of Hanoi's total international military aid that year.

Chinese troops did not engage the US forces in ground warfare in the South but provided military assistance to the NVA and NLF in air defense, combat engineering, railroad and highway construction and maintenance, and communication network establishment in the North; and finance and logistics in the South.

The Chinese view of warfare shaped China's military operations and tactics, especially how the high command made war decisions, finalized various objectives, executed battle plans, and evaluated combat effectiveness.

The Maoist politicization of warfare in the 1950s conceptualized a new strategy of active defense.

Many PLA officers sent to Vietnam had fought in the Korean War, or in Mao's words, the war to "resist America, aid Korea, defend the homeland, and safeguard the country."18 The Chinese generals recalled their fighting in Korea as a heroic defense and a continuity of their own struggle against the world imperialism. Chinese history books portray China as a "beneficent victor" of the Korean War.19