Xi’s Fake History Lesson for HE
Eager to appease his benefactor in Beijing, the Cambodian leader is excluding China’s role from the Khmer Rouge narrative.
By Charles Dunst | March 10, 2020, 5:19 PM

Last month, Cambodian Prime Minister HE met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in a show of solidarity amid the coronavirus crisis. HE was the first foreign leader to visit China after the outbreak began, calling Cambodia and China “steadfast friends” and criticizing other countries for restricting travel to China. The visit was another example of how Phnom Penh has grown closer to Beijing in recent years, while drifting further from the West.

Cambodia appears increasingly like a Chinese vassal state. China is Cambodia’s biggest investor—best evidenced by the coastal city of Sihanoukville, transformed by the construction of apartments, casinos, and hotels for Chinese nationals. Cambodia seems to have handed over large swaths of its coastline to China for military purposes. And as China has backed major infrastructure projects and pledged around $100 million in military aid, Cambodia has vetoed Association of Southeast Asian Nations resolutions opposing China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea.

It’s unsurprising then that HE has shaped Cambodia’s domestic and foreign policy to support Beijing’s interests. He has now taken the alliance a step further, mirroring Xi in rewriting Cambodia’s official Khmer Rouge-era history: exempting Beijing’s wrongdoings and emphasizing those of the United States instead. The shift seems intended to enable China’s influence-building process in Cambodia.

HE was just a low-level commander in the Khmer Rouge when he defected to Vietnam in 1977. Vietnam occupied Cambodia in 1979 and placed HE in power in 1985, and he has remained there ever since. He now rebukes the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed nearly a quarter of the population between 1975 and 1979—a reign of terror from which HE claims to have delivered Cambodia. “The January 7 victory saved millions of Cambodians who were already at the brink of death,” he said last year during annual celebrations commemorating the Khmer Rouge’s defeat. “It restored the spiritual and physical value of the Cambodian people.”

Recently, HE has excluded China from the Khmer Rouge narrative, revealing where his loyalties lie. In a 2018 propaganda film that presents the ruling party’s version of history, the prime minister emphasizes the U.S. clandestine bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, just before the Khmer Rouge gained popular support. He does not mention Chinese aid. HE is also eager to blame other Asian countries for supporting the Khmer Rouge, such as Singapore, which he says has a “wish for its return to Cambodia.” Singapore, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian countries—deeply divided by the Cold War—opposed Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge.

Yet the Chinese leader Mao Zedong did support the Khmer Rouge, seeking to preserve the ideological similarities between his Communist Party—struggling at home in the wake of the Cultural Revolution—and Pol Pot’s Cambodian analogue. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, Mao won a vital ideological victory, gaining a proxy in the developing world as many other China-backed groups, such as those in Malaysia and Myanmar, struggled.

The details of China’s support for the Khmer Rouge are still debated, but Chinese officials have conceded that Beijing provided Cambodia’s Maoists with “food, hoes and scythes.” Andrew Mertha, the author of Brothers in Arms: China’s Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979, contends that it was more than that: Based on interviews with Cambodians and Chinese officials, he estimates that China provided at least 90 percent of the Khmer Rouge’s foreign aid. “Without China’s assistance, the Khmer Rouge regime would not have lasted a week,” Mertha told the New York Times in 2015.

Some Cambodian experts agree. “China supported the Khmer Rouge during the 1970-1975 war and was the sole critical supporter throughout the 1975-1979 Democratic Kampuchea period of genocide,” Diep Sophal, a Cambodian professor at the University of Cambodia, told Voice of America. “With Chinese money and support, Pol Pot carried out the period of murder, starvation and brutality.”
Full article: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/10/xi ... mer-rouge/

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Wed Mar 11, 2020 7:50 am Cambodia seems to have handed over large swaths of its coastline to China for military purposes.

speculations which has no basis in facts

IraHayes wrote: ↑Wed Mar 11, 2020 8:46 am

fazur wrote: ↑Wed Mar 11, 2020 8:12 am

CEOCambodiaNews wrote: ↑Wed Mar 11, 2020 7:50 am Cambodia seems to have handed over large swaths of its coastline to China for military purposes.

speculations which has no basis in facts

We won't be turning that old aircraft carrier we bought from russia into a working aircraft carrier.... and we won't militarize those islands we're building in the south china sea.

China lies and the instances where they contradict themselves ate numerous and frequent.

agreed but this is about cambodia, journos were invited to go and have a look regarding claims, I think?

which super power country has a good record for being truthful about politics and military? wmd?prosecute assange and others for showing war criminals and politicians up?

The Chinese were deeply involved with the KR. They helped build the airport in Kompong Chanang and lots of stuff was exported to China in exchange for arms. Probably included pangolins.
I remember when the journos crossed the border in 1979 to interview Cambodian resistance leaders my mate had photos of Chinese soldiers who escorted the group across the border and then around the camps. The CIA were on the Thai side in white Holdens with black windows I saw these cars on a previous trip to Aranyapratet.