After a year surrounded by death in Vietnam -gripping a machine gun between diving for cover from howitzer fire -Zhou Feng decided to spend the rest of his days protecting life, not ending it.

The former infantryman said the shame he felt at all the death pushed him to study animal medicine when he returned from the front.

Zhou, 45, now works at a veterinary clinic and at home he shelters 30 stray dogs -by coincidence one for each year since the war.

"In China, the government respects history about as much as they respect these dogs," Zhou said.

Chinese academics are prohibited from studying the war, in part to avoid damaging relations with former foe Vietnam, said Xiaoming Zhang, an associate professor at the US military's Air War College in Alabama.

Zhang is writing a book about the conflict that he hopes will be the closest thing to a Chinese account of what happened.

"It was Deng Xiaoping's war," Zhang said, adding study of the bloody and inconclusive war may also be banned to prevent it from becoming a "black stain" on the record of the father of China's economic reform.

China attacked Vietnam, according to non-Chinese accounts, to punish it for invading Cambodia in December 1978 and bringing down genocidal tyrant Pol Pot and his Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge communist regime.

Bad blood with the Soviet Union and Moscow's support for Hanoi, which Beijing saw as increasingly aggressive after beating the United States and South Vietnam, was also an important factor.

"(Deng) used the war against Vietnam to convince the US that China was a reliable ally for countering Soviet expansion," Zhang said.

Despite China declaring victory after a month of fighting, a low-intensity conflict smouldered for most of the 1980s.

"It was a bleeding strategy to burden Vietnam while China was able to carry out economic reforms," Zhang said.

Like Zhou, Xu Ke fought on the frontlines in 1984 as part of that bleeding.

He later spent two-years researching a memoir about the war, but found library after library had nothing about the conflict and even army historians turned him away.

"History is just like a wall, made up of different bricks," Xu said. "But the brick that should contain our history has been deliberately removed. That's why I wrote the book, I wanted to put it back."

The 44-year-old finished the book about five years ago, but has since given up finding a publisher to take it.

There are no figures for how many died in the extended conflict, but losses were massive. Non-Chinese scholars estimate for the first month alone 25,000 to 63,000 Chinese were killed and 20,000 to 62,000 Vietnamese died, said historian Peter Worthing, author of "A Military History of Modern China".

"Clearly the 1979 war served as a warning or wake-up call to the Chinese leadership that the PLA needed improvement," Worthing said, referring to the People's Liberation Army.

Despite its advantage in numbers and strength, China fought to a bloody stalemate and had no effect on Vietnam's foreign policy, he said.

The Chinese government "saw little to boast about and this undoubtedly helps explain the lack of official acknowledgement of this war and those who fought in it," Worthing said.

Wu, a former propaganda officer who served in Vietnam 25 years ago, said he used to leaf through his teenage son's history textbooks, searching in vain for a mention of the war.

"Why should this war be hidden from history? It's so unfair to us," he said, asking to be identified by his surname only because of the topic's sensitivity.

The 45-year-old has recurring nightmares about being shelled, but has never spoken to his son about his experiences.

"How could he understand our time and the war?" Wu asked. "He would feel like he was hearing someone else's story even though it would be coming from me."

Agence France Presse - February 18, 2009

China downplays anniversary of Vietnam border war

BEIJING - China on Tuesday sought to downplay the 30th anniversary of a short but bloody border war with one-time close Communist ally Vietnam, barely mentioning it in the media and seeking to deflect questions.

China invaded Vietnam on February 17, 1979, to punish Hanoi for toppling the Beijing-backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia one month earlier. China had previously given Hanoi steadfast support against U.S. forces in the Vietnam War.

The month-long border war in which some say 60,000 soldiers or more were killed is a memory both governments are happy to suppress.

Neither country, run by stability-obsessed Communist parties, wishes to stoke any expressions of strident nationalism among their people, and both are keen to expand trade bilateral trade, which last year grew to $21 billion.

"China and Vietnam have had a period of unhappiness in their past," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters.

"But what's important is that the leaders and people of both countries have a broad wish and consensus to create a bright future together. History has already reached its conclusions," she added, declining to say if China planned to mark the day at all.

Chinese media made little mention of the anniversary, though the website of the Global Times (www.huanqiu.com), an outspoken tabloid published by Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, carried a series of old pictures from the war.

The war was "forced" on China following Vietnam's mistreatment of ethnic Chinese and its invasion of Cambodia, all of which "seriously threatened and damaged China's modernisation and border security," it said.

The war "punished and taught a proper lesson to the Vietnamese invaders," the newspaper added.

"People say that a war between two socialist countries is the hardest to comprehend, and that war between two Eastern countries is the bloodiest," said the article on the "counter-attack in self-defense war."

Two comments by online readers of the piece, also carried on a Shanghai-government linked website, www.eastday.com, did not mince their words, though.

"China's old generation of leaders believed that struggle was necessary to protect territory. Today's officials should learn from that!" wrote one.

"I really don't understand why veterans of the war have to go to Hong Kong to get their books on the war published," wrote another.

Vietnamese newspapers did not mention the war at all, though at a small park near the Chinese embassy in Hanoi, about 40 Vietnamese police did marching drills.

The embassy has been the scene of a few protests over the years, including one with a few hundred youth when China reportedly set up a county-level government to administer the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

Both governments claim ownership of the islands, which are thought to sit on valuable oil and gas deposits.

Hanoi and Beijing have agreed not to upset the status quo, but both are firm in their claims of sovereignty.

Last July, China pressured Exxon Mobil Corp to pull out of an oil exploration deal with Vietnam that it saw as a breach of Chinese sovereignty. In May, BP Plc halted plans to conduct exploration work off the southern Vietnamese coast, citing territorial tensions.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang also defended China's ties with Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, saying it was part of normal diplomatic relations, as a trial began in Phnom Penh of the group's chief torturer.

By Ben Blanchard & John Ruwitch - Reuters - February 17, 2009