At the Potsdam Conference in Germany in July 1945, the Allies had agreed that China should move more than one hundred fifty thousand troops into Vietnam to disarm the Japanese and control the country north of the sixteenth parallel. The underpaid, undernourished, and ill-disciplined Chinese troops looted and plundered from the northern border to Hanoi, wreaking further havoc on a country already devastated by Japanese occupation and famine.
