Contacts between Ho’s government and Mao’s forces, for a long time modest because of geographic separation and because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been too preoccupied fighting its own war to provide direct and substantial support, increased markedly beginning in late 1948. In January 1949, Truong Chinh told the Sixth Plenum of the ICP that Mao’s army might soon conquer all of China and that “we must be ready to welcome it.” In April, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces fled Nanjing and the Red Army crossed the Yangtze, and in midyear the Vietnamese dispatched about a thousand men to
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