In response to this perceived growing threat against the regime, on 2 December 1980 the Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo issued Resolution 31-NQ/TW on maintaining internal political security and law and order in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, with a specific focus on increasing the power and the responsibilities of Vietnam’s Public Security and Police forces, which were subordinate to the Ministry of Interior. 

This resolution on combatting “ideological sabotage” lumps Chinese ideological propaganda, Western propaganda operations, international human rights and humanitarian relief activities, and religious radio broadcasts and religious missionary activities all together with the spreading influence of Western culture and music in Vietnam as part of a vast, insidious effort by Vietnam’s enemies designed to corrupt Vietnam’s society and to weaken its “revolutionary” spirit in order to cause the overthrow or collapse of the Vietnamese Communist Party and government. 

The over-the-top rhetoric used in this resolution illustrates the widespread paranoia that infected the upper ranks of Vietnam’s Party and security apparatus during this period of the Cold War.  It was not until six years later, in December 1986, that the pressures of growing internal dissension (even within the Party), the country’s desperate economic situation, and reductions in Soviet military and economic to Vietnam resulted in the decision by the Communist Party’s 6th Party Congress to shift to a policy of reforms, called “Renovation” [Đổi Mới] reforms and to new Vietnamese efforts to normalize relations with China and the United States.

Propaganda guidance for Chinese officials to rely upon when discussing the Sino-Vietnamese conflict with foreign nationals.

A report on negotiations between China and Vietnam ongoing in Hanoi. Document outlines China's positions, as well as how China interprets Vietnam's positions, in the talks.

A summary of a conversation where Deng Xiaoping said, "We are now teaching a lesson to the Cuba of the East -- Vietnam."

Comments made by Deng Xiaoping regarding Vietnam, or the "Cuba of the East."

In light of "anti-China crazed behavior on the part of Vietnam," the Chinese Foreign Ministry and Public Security Ministry have decided to abrogate a visa agreement with Vietnam.

On July 2, 1957, US senator John F. Kennedy made his perhaps best-known senatorial speech—on Algeria.

Home to about 8 million Muslims, 1.2 million European settlers, and 130,000 Jews, it was from October 1954 embroiled in what France dubbed “events”—domestic events, to be precise. Virtually all settlers and most metropolitan French saw Algeria as an indivisible part of France. Algeria had been integrated into metropolitan administrative structures in 1847, towards the end of a structurally if not intentionally genocidal pacification campaign; Algeria’s population dropped by half between 1830, when France invaded, and the early 1870s. Eighty years and many political turns later (see e.g. Messali Hadj’s 1927 speech in this collection), in 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) launched a war for independence. Kennedy did not quite see eye to eye with the FLN.

As Kennedy's speech shows, he did not want France entirely out of North Africa. However, he had criticized French action already in early 1950s Indochina. And in 1957 he met with Abdelkader Chanderli (1915-1993), an unaccredited representative of the FLN at the United Nations in New York and in Washington, DC, and a linchpin of the FLN’s successful international offensive described in Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). Thus, Kennedy supported the FLN’s demand for independence, which explains its very positive reaction to his speech.

And thus, unlike the 1952-1960 Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) that officially backed the views of NATO ally France and kept delivering arms, the Democratic senator diagnosed a “war” by “Western imperialism” that, together with if different from “Soviet imperialism,” is “the great enemy of … the most powerful single force in the world today: ... man's eternal desire to be free and independent.” (In fact, Kennedy’s speech on the Algerian example of Western imperialism was the first of two, the second concerning the Polish example of Sovietimperialism. On another, domestic note, to support African Algeria’s independence was an attempt to woe civil-rights-movement-era African Americans without enraging white voters.) To be sure, Kennedy saw France as an ally, too. But France’s war was tainting Washington too much, which helped Moscow. In Kennedy’s eyes, to support the US Cold War against the Soviet Union meant granting Algeria independence. The official French line was the exact opposite: only continued French presence in Algeria could keep Moscow and its Egyptian puppet, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, from controlling the Mediterranean and encroaching on Africa.

In 1988 a classified Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security’s in-house professional journal published this article offering ideas on how to utilize the “psychological characteristics” of the ethnic Chinese in the interrogation of suspected “Chinese spies”.  At the time the article was published, the once-close alliance between the Vietnamese and Chinese Communist Parties, which Mao Zedong described in 1967 as being “as close as between lips and teeth”, had deteriorated into a vicious military and political conflict between the two former allies.  Chinese efforts to collect intelligence on and to foment internal opposition against the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party were of special concern to Vietnam’s security service, and ethnic Chinese residents of Vietnam naturally became a primary focus of Vietnam’s counter-espionage efforts.

This article, published in a classified Vietnamese Ministry of Interior publication, asserted that Vietnam’s economy required international cooperation and support, saying “no country can close its doors and still expect to be able to develop and make progress.” The article also states that the Ministry was now gradually allowing identified “spies” to enter Vietnam so that their activities could be covertly surveilled by the Ministry’s counter-espionage officers