China, Vietnam Make Money, Not War; Border Tensions Remain : Asia: Many fear the dispute over Friendship Pass and more than 200 other sites could reignite fighting between the longtime enemies.

Trucks rumble across on lucrative trade runs. Chinese and Vietnamese tourists chatter and laugh as they pose for photos. In the pauses between, a bird’s song twitters from the thick greenery along the road.

The sounds of peace have taken the place of gunfire at this meeting point between two of Asia’s most heavily armed nations--China and Vietnam.

But there are also clues here to the tensions that remain below the surface.

Both countries’ final checkpoints are several hundred yards from the boundary, which is unadorned by gates, guards or flags. This is because Vietnam disputes the location, accusing China of having moved the border marker 990 feet in its favor during the two countries’ 1979 war.

Four years after their 1991 detente, the countries are still arguing over the location of the boundary, along with more than 200 other locations along the 905-mile border.

Until the location of Friendship Pass is settled, Vietnam is refusing to resume cross-border rail service there. It was cut in 1979.

“The Vietnamese people still have to watch out for the Chinese. They are bigger than Vietnamese and we don’t know when they will strike us,” said Nguyen Thi Nhung, who works as a porter at the border, voicing what Vietnamese officials will only say privately.

Off the record, the officials speak bluntly about their fears of China. They note that the United States fought in Vietnam for less than two decades, but China occupied it for more than 1,000 years and repeatedly invaded after being driven out in the year 938.

China sent Hanoi arms during the war with the United States, but Vietnamese history books say the Chinese also supported Vietnam’s division in 1954 and tried to maintain the split in the 1970s.

It is chiefly fear of China, which now claims parts of Vietnam’s continental shelf and a vast stretch of sea on Vietnam’s southeastern flank, that has pushed Hanoi to seek broader international ties.

This summer, Vietnam gained long-sought U.S. diplomatic recognition. It also joined the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, founded in 1967 as a buffer against communism in Asia and now seen as a buffer against Chinese expansionism.

But Vietnam still sees benefits from the peace with China. All along the mountainous border, towns and villages remote from other trade routes are achieving new prosperity from trading with China.

“I don’t know if the Chinese are friends or not, or whether we will have war again or not, but if they trade with us, we are happy,” said Truong Thi Tinh, 36, a former teacher who now distributes Chinese beer.

Smuggling also has grown, bringing in an estimated $1-billion worth of Chinese consumer goods each year and sending somewhat less Vietnamese rice, fruit and other agricultural products in the opposite direction.

Officially, China is only Vietnam’s sixth-largest trading partner, with two-way trade of about $500 million last year. Most was conducted between state-owned companies, but growing numbers of private business owners and tourists also are venturing, albeit timidly, across the border.

At Friendship Pass, two young Chinese women crossed to the Vietnamese side, posed for pictures, then turned back.

“We just came to have a look and have some fun,” said one, who would give only her surname, Lin. Her tight blue-jean shorts and high heels would have drawn stares in relatively conservative Vietnam if she had lingered.

At Tam Thanh Pass to the west, two Chinese women squatted in the dust on their side of a low barbed-wire fence and waited for Vietnamese porters to carry across a shipment of lychees, a type of fruit.

“They put stones in the fruit to make them heavier. But they say whatever we sell is poison, no matter how nice it is,” grumbled one of the Chinese women, surnamed Xu.

Her impressions of Vietnam from brief visits: “Their lives are no good, just too hard. Their houses are poor and their children have diseases you never see in China.”

Many Chinese regard Vietnam with the same superiority that Westerners often bring to China. They see it as dirty and backward and in need of economic reform.

“Chinese law is lacking compared to the West, right? Well, Vietnamese law is lacking compared to China’s. There’s so much bureaucracy and a lot of corruption,” said Pang Budan, manager of the Kim Son Hotel, one of just three Vietnamese-Chinese joint ventures in Lang Son province in Vietnam, which adjoins Friendship Pass.

“They haven’t had much contact with the outside world, not like us Chinese who have been open for more than a decade,” he said.

Pang said about a third of his guests are Chinese businessmen, but many are only looking things over, waiting for better investment opportunities.

Construction might be a good choice. New buildings are going up all over the province and its capital town, also named Lang Son. Few signs remain of the devastation wrought in 1979, when more than 200,000 Chinese soldiers attacked.

China declared it was punishing Vietnam for invading Cambodia and toppling the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge. China pulled its troops back after a month, but the total death toll was 56,000. Both sides kept up cross-border shelling through the late 1980s, preventing rebuilding.

Residents said Dong Dang, a market town about two miles from Friendship Pass, stayed in ruins until the 1991 rapprochement.

“The Chinese took everything they could and what they couldn’t carry, they destroyed,” said a government employee who gave his name as Phi. “They carried back electric poles, telephone poles, railroad tracks. We didn’t rebuild because the border wasn’t stable. I lived in a thatch house for more than 10 years.”

Several hundred thousand ethnic Chinese who lived in Vietnam fled or were pressured to leave. Among them was Chen Jinrong, then 18. His father’s ancestors had come from China generations earlier. His mother was Vietnamese.

“We were afraid. We couldn’t take anything. We just ran,” he said. “We sneaked into China.”

Now he comes back to trade, traveling on a Chinese passport, and says he bears no ill will.

“If we can make money, we’re happy,” he said, surveying a load of olives he planned to send north.

“The things of the past are past,” he added.

Not entirely. Chen said his family has not told anyone in China that his mother is ethnic Vietnamese. They pretend she belongs to a border-region minority group.

At one of the few pre-1979 buildings still standing in Lang Son town, a Vietnamese man echoed Chen’s philosophy.

“If I think of the past I still feel angry. But the best thing now is to forgive and forget, because we are neighbors,” said Dang Long, a city judge. “We should build peace.”