all I know is that vietnam was doing border raids or something and that the pla took over vietnam in like a month then left and withdrew all their technical assistance. more information would be appreciated.
Here are a few pages from the PRC side (link 1, link 2).
Looks like there were 10 years of conflict of varying degrees after the initial fighting. The original war saw extremely heavy casualties from both sides and within a month the PLA was withdrawn. From sources, scorched earth tactics were employed by the PLA before and during the original retreat back (roughly 1 month after the fighting). Roughly translated, it involved taking everything they could, burning everything else that they couldn’t (supplies, machinery etc.) and killing everyone they encountered (mainly retreating Vietnamese forces).
Naturally with the brutality of this fighting, there’s still some bad blood present at least from civilian sentiment with Vietnamese people understandably furious about the damage that was done to their nation and people especially after its hard fought victories against the west (some may cite the thousand years of Vietnam vs the imperial Chinese dynasties too). From some on the PRC side, there are sentiments that consider Vietnam, like Albania as ungrateful after all the aid that was given to them (the term 白眼狼 being used).
Hoping some other users here might have access to some Vietnamese or other different sources to go through as well. Please note any of the above are just from some of the PRC side I’ve gathered while trying to avoid any bias as I’m also not very familiar about the whole picture too.
Do you know what started this conflict?
At least from the PRC side, the border raids that OP mentioned were part of the reason that kicked off the conflict.
From the same PRC sources above, it starts with the Sino-Soviet split in the background and beginning to establish foreign relations with the US, many of the smaller socialist nations were in the tough position in their attitudes towards either the PRC or USSR (with the west egging it on in the background).
With the Vietnamese victory over Cambodia in 1978 and winning further Soviet support, the PRC was making preparations to prevent being sandwiched by the north and south neighbours. The PRC side believed that with this victory, Vietnam would take further steps to create a powerful alliance in South East Asia to threaten them.
With Soviet support, border raids and small scale skirmishes began at the same time. These were initially quietly endured until Deng and the party decided to reform with the open door policy in 1978. The decision was then made to attack, with the claimed goals of damaging/punishing Vietnam, putting the USSR in check, gaining time and room for the reforms and establishing foreign relations with non socialist nations.
