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  Ryan Medeiros

VITA

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“Let the working classes tremble at a Communist revolution.  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.  They have the world to win.  Workingmen of the world, unite.”[1]

            Communism is an ideology that appeals to the poor and the working class of a nation, and Vietnam’s Twentieth-Century population largely fit the image of poor, hard laborers working for others’ gain. Vietnam’s history of oppression dates back over 2,000 years ago when they were conquered by the Chinese.  The Chinese attempted to force their language, politics, and culture onto the Vietnamese over the course of a millennium of occupation.  European imperialism led to the colonization of many countries in Asia and Africa.  European corporations practically enslaved the indigenous peoples of these nations during the course of colonization.  The corporations used copious amounts of land and native labor to produce their goods.  The native people who worked for the corporations were poorly paid, fed, housed, and regularly beaten.  The colonization of Vietnam by France followed this pattern.[2]  A 2,000 year history of being exploited by the Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and especially the French created Communist Vietnam.

            Vietnam’s history, even before France’s colonization, was marked by a period of occupation by China that lasted over a thousand years.  The Chinese administrated Vietnam (Nam Viet- the “pacified south”) by separating the nation into several districts under the rule of military governors.  Many native nobles cooperated with the Chinese by helping to collect taxes and keep order among the people, “but their native land remained at the mercy of Chinese governors whose rule on the outskirts of the Chinese Empire and unchecked by any popular control often degenerated into tyranny and insatiable demands for tribute.”[3]  The Chinese also sent colonies of peasant-soldiers into Nam Viet to maintain peace in the countryside.  Schools in Nam Viet began to teach Chinese language, history, and literature in hopes to assimilate the Vietnamese into Chinese culture.[4]  These tactics were also utilized to break the will of the Vietnamese people, but oppression made them fight that much harder for independence.
            Some of the earliest recorded accounts of the Vietnamese are their attempted rebellions against Chinese rule.  In 39-40 A.D., the Trung sisters led the first rebellion, gaining independence that lasted only three years.[5]  When the tide began to turn against them, like “many of Vietnam’s heroes [who] have killed themselves when the battle turned against them the Trung sisters drowned themselves when defeated.”[6]  Many other attempted rebellions took place, but it was not until 939 that the Vietnamese became independent from China.  Ngo Quyen gained support from both nobles and peasants, and led the Vietnamese to victory in the battle of Bach Dang in 938 because “he used the classic tactic of feint and strike, for which Vietnamese guerrilla fighters have become renowned.”[7]  This victory ended Chinese occupation and ensured a lasting freedom for the Vietnamese.  This unfortunate history of occupation caused Vietnam to become an introverted nation; they concerned themselves only with domestic situations and defense from invasion.

            Vietnam first encountered the West through trade and missionaries early into the seventeenth century.  “Two years before the ‘Mayflower’ put ashore at Massachusetts, a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Cristoforo Borri,  landed with brother missionaries in Faifo,” a port near the modern-day city of Danang.[8]  The priests were relatively well-received when compared to their treatment in other Asian nations.  Very soon to follow were Portuguese traders hoping to expand their trade with the east.  They arrived in the midst of a civil war between the Trinh-controlled northern region and the Nguyen-controlled south.  The Nguyen welcomed the Portuguese, and with their help constructed a heavy arms manufacturing facility.  The Nguyens also gained guns through direct trade with the Portuguese.[9] 

            Dutch traders arrived in Vietnam next and almost immediately sided with the Trinh-controlled north.  The Trinh were at a disadvantage because, “thanks to Portuguese aid, the Nguyen also had a clear-cut superiority in armament, which outweighed the help the Trinh received from the Dutch.”[10]  The trading relationship between the Dutch and the Trinh-controlled north ended when, by 1700, the Dutch left Vietnam due to non-profitable trade.  The European nations that traded with Vietnam encountered this same problem: a lack of profitable trade.  The Vietnamese had no need to develop a trade economy because their main product, rice, provided substantial quantities for domestic consumption with little-to-no surplus.

            While trade may not have been economically satisfying for Europe, European Christians found spiritual satisfaction through the establishment of missions.  The first mission established by Borri in 1618 at Faifo was successful because “Father Borri came as a friend and was so received.”[11]  The Portuguese and Dutch may not have done much to exploit the Vietnamese, but the news of the success of their missions spread, which led to France making its initial contact with the Vietnamese.  Jesuit Priest Alexandre de Rhodes created a mission in the Trinh north, and was described as “brilliant and hardworking...[and] began to preach in Vietnamese only six months after his arrival.”[12]  Speaking Vietnamese helped Rhodes to reportedly baptize nearly 7,000 people in the first two years of the mission.  In 1662, Rhodes expanded his missionary efforts in the Trinh-controlled north and entered the Nguyen-controlled south.  This caused the Vietnamese factions to believe the Catholics were engaging in espionage.  Soon, both kingdoms of Vietnam ordered all foreign missionaries out of their country, burned all Catholic books, and sentenced anyone caught practicing any form of Christianity to death.[13] 

            The French returned en mass during the Tay Son rebellion in the 1770’s.  The three Tay Son brothers had captured both the Trinh and the Nguyen capitals by 1786 and declared themselves masters of Vietnam.  Nguyen Ahn, nephew of the murdered Nguyen prince, escaped from the Tay Son and sought French assistance in the war.  The Versailles Treaty of 1787 allocated for French men and arms to be sent in defense of the Nguyen in return for unhampered French trade in Cochin China.[14]  A revolution in France in 1789 guaranteed less French support for the Nguyen.  However, the Tay Son rebellion began to splinter, and was dealt a crushing blow by the deaths of the three brothers in 1792 and 1793.  Nguyen Ahn, in 1802, declared himself Emperor Gia Long, ruler of a united Vietnam.  It has been stated that “only the outbreak of the French Revolution… had saved Vietnam from French domination during… the Tay Son rebellion.  But the new dynasty established by [Gia Long] would not escape renewed French demands for trade and religious toleration.”[15]

            Gia Long’s acceptance of French aid greatly helped him in his quest of uniting Vietnam; however, by involving the French, Long was forced to accept many of France’s demands.  This gave the French the grounds on which to poise for the conquest and colonization of Vietnam.  France began its invasion of Vietnam under the guise of the protection of their missionaries and the avenging of executed missionaries.  The French initiated their conquest by fighting to capture the port city of Danang, and “on September 1, 1858, after a short resistance Da Nang fell into the hands of Admiral Rigault de Genouilly.”[16]   The French then focused on South Vietnam and inflicted heavy losses and captured the important city of Saigon, which would cause the Vietnamese government in Hue to cede Saigon and much of the south to the French in 1867, giving them complete control over the area known as Cochin China.[17] 

            In 1883, the French shifted their focus to the north, and sent forces into the Red River Delta.  The French separated the north into two protectorates, Tonkin in the extreme north, and Annam in central Vietnam.  Vietnam’s independence was officially lost, and the country was no longer called ‘Vietnam,’ but was referred to by the names given to the three geographical regions by France (Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China).  In Tonkin, French military leaders directed the control of larger towns.  Annam was different in that the emperors and their officials still controlled internal affairs, except for customs and public works, but they were kept under close surveillance by the French.  China officially recognized France’s protectorate of Tonkin and Annam in 1885.  France consolidated their colonies in Southeast Asia in 1887 with the formation of the Indochinese Union.  This “union” consisted of Tonkin, Annam, Cochin China, Cambodia (a French protectorate since 1863), and Laos (added in 1893).[18]

            The chief administrator of the colonial government was the Governor General, whose power “was very great when he chose to exercise it.”[19]  Between 1868 and 1879, there were eleven Governor Generals.  “As of 1887, Vietnam had ceased to exist for all practical purposes,” because it was divided into six provinces, which were in turn divided into 24 districts.[20]  The districts were headed by an ‘inspector of native affairs’ picked from the French military in Vietnam.  The turnover rate for inspectors was much higher than that of the Governor General because the inspectors were only required to serve office until their military tour ended.  The results were many rapid changes of policy and that the inspectors never understood the people they were administrating.  In 1880, the Colonial Council was formed.  It was comprised of ten Frenchmen, six of them were elected by the French in Vietnam and four were chosen by the Governor General, and six Vietnamese ‘representatives of the conquered race.’  The French administrators did not bother to learn Vietnamese; in 1910, a survey found that only three officials knew sufficient Vietnamese.  Alternately, very few Vietnamese were fluent in French, which often caused frustrated officials to strike the Vietnamese when the language barrier proved too impermeable.  France’s policy in the governing of Vietnam was one of assimilation and subjugation.  The French saw the Vietnamese as children who needed to be brought up in the image of their parents.[21]  The only way to impose and sustain this unthinkable policy of assimilation was through force, but “it was equally unthinkable that the Vietnamese people would acquiesce to French domination.”[22]

            Corruption was rampant in France’s administration of Vietnam.  The policy of assimilation required that French officials comprise the vast majority of the bureaucracy in Vietnam, and fifty percent of the colony’s budget was used to pay the bureaucrats.  In 1925, there were as many French officials to govern 30 million Vietnamese as there were British officials to govern the 325 million people in India.  The bureaucrats administered and controlled funds, granted promotions, and even reviewed the bureaucracy themselves.  The French Inspection Service reported many instances of corruption: one official embezzled 400,000 francs, immorality of teachers, lack of supervision of Vietnamese public workers, unqualified personnel sent in due to lack of competence elsewhere, poor prisons, high taxes, and secret budgets that spent the tax dollars without receipts.  The colonial courts were also incredibly corrupt, and “always ruled in favor of the [French] landlords.”[23]  France’s governing of Vietnam was weak and inefficient to say the least, which caused more condemnation by the Vietnamese.[24] 

            France’s colonial mission in Vietnam was to create a profitable trading ally, but France deliberately did not allow Vietnamese industrialization for fear of competition.  Rice production, Vietnam’s largest “industry,” experienced massive growth.  Between 1880 and 1937, the area cultivated for rice farming increased 421 percent; rice exports from Saigon increased 545 percent, while the population of Cochin China increased only 267 percent.  Even though rice production increased faster than Vietnam’s growth of population, the per capita domestic consumption of rice remained about the same or even decreased in some areas due to France’s over-exportation.  Rubber production was introduced into Vietnam by the French, and by 1930, 250,000 acres of land were cultivated for rubber production.  Vietnam became one of the world’s greatest exporters of raw rubber, but, because of France’s policy of non-industrialization, the nation had only two rubber-processing factories with only 150 workers.  By 1940, six companies owned 90 percent of all rubber plantations, and those six companies were French-owned.  Michelin’s Phu-rieng plantation was one such French corporately owned plantation with overseers that “were executioners – the terrible cruel demons of this hell on earth.”[25]

Working conditions were deplorable in Vietnam.  At Phu-rieng, “The most common forms of punishment were to make the person drop his pants, then beat him on the buttocks, or beat his feet until the soles were in ribbons.”[26]  For rubber production, workers were contracted from the north and taken to the south for three-year terms.  Almost no workers stayed beyond three years, and many deserted before their three years were finished.  Deserters could be captured and returned with force, and plantation managers offered rewards for the return of deserters to persuade indigenous villagers near the plantation to cooperate.  Until 1931, one in twenty workers died of malaria.  Malaria plagued coal miners in the north at almost the same rate that it infected rubber workers.  Miner’s wages were typically twenty to twenty-five Vietnamese cents a day and they were paid to the contractors, who only gave a small portion to the workers and retained the difference.  It was not until 1927 that the French passed laws protecting workers by having part of their wages paid directly to them, and the remainder was placed directly into a bank account, but this was still not enough.[27]

Government monopolies over the sales of opium and salt proved disastrous for the Vietnamese.  Opium was forced onto the people because they had to buy specific and large quantities of this dangerous and addictive drug.  This was not, however, as devastating as the monopoly of the sale of alcohol.  Alcohol was a necessity for many religious ceremonies, and the peasants had always distilled their own small quantities of alcohol.  Under French rule, private distillation became illegal, and “village consumption quotas” were established.  If a village failed to consume its quota of high-priced alcohol, authorities assumed bootlegging occurred and automatically fined the village.[28] 

            According to historian Helen Lamb, “No aspect of Vietnamese life escaped the disturbing and corrosive influence of the French presence,” and this fact caused resistance to French colonization to become highly organized.[29]  The first of such rebellions was the Scholar Revolt, which began in 1885 with the ‘Loyalty to the King Edict’ enacted by thirteen-year-old emperor Ham Nghi. Even after Ham’s capture and subsequent exile to French Algeria three years into the revolt, the guerrilla resistance continued until the French defeated the last fighters nine years later.  In late 1907, Phan Boi Chau formulated the ‘poison plot.’  High-ranking French military officers were to be poisoned by lower-ranking Vietnamese troops, and the capital was to be seized.  One of the poisoners went to a confessionary, and the priest notified authorities, thus ending the poison plot.  On Christmas night of 1927, Nguyen Thai Hoc founded the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, which consisted of students, small merchants, and some landlords.  Peasants killed the French supervisor of labor recruitment in Indochina, and the French assumed the VNP was to blame and arrested many members and sentenced the party’s leaders to death. 

Cao Daism and Catholicism proved to be successful in gaining mass support from peasants.  Cao Dai was a religious movement that was considered an “occult syncretic religion…created on the traditional techniques of secret societies.”[30]  Cao Daism attracted a following of half a million people in Cochin China out of 3.5 million.  This religious movement had widespread following in rural areas, but never had much of a presence in cities.  Catholicism had the support of twenty percent of the peasants in Tonkin and Annam.  Both religions helped spread anti-French sentiment, but they each lacked a political program.[31] 

            Through peasant support of religious sects came the foundation of Vietnamese Communism.   Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), with Phan Boi Chau, founded the first Vietnamese communist organization in June 1925: The Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam.  Recruits were educated both generally and militarily, and then they returned to factories and plantations to gain the trust of native laborers.  After other communist groups arose, Quoc called for the fusion of them all into the Vietnamese Communist Party, which was renamed six months later to the Indochinese Communist Party.  Support for communism spread rapidly through villages, practically eliminating France’s rule in the countryside.  The communists called for the adherence to five specific points: developing peasant associations, organizing village militias, annulment of all taxes and the lowering of all taxes, redistribution of former communal land taken by village notables, and the distribution of rice to the needy.[32]  Communism appealed to the masses because of its commitment to improve the lives of youth, women, and workers.  France had exploited the Vietnamese people for too long, and the workers were uniting to overthrow French rule.

            During World War II, Japan hoped to gain influence in the Asian sphere by taking over Vietnam.  The Japanese set its sights on Vietnam immediately following the Franco-German Armistice of 1940 and Germany’s occupation of much of France.  A 1941 treaty with the Vichy (French) government of Vietnam guaranteed the Japanese eighty percent of Vietnam’s rice export, which then put more demand on workers and took more rice from the mouths of the Vietnamese.  In July of 1941, the Japanese gained near-total control of Vietnam and virtually all of Vietnam’s rubber, rice, and mineral exports.[33]  While other countries abused their relationship with Vietnam, the Japanese were far worse because “the country’s wealth, long exploited by the French, was now bled dry by the Japanese.”[34]

On May 10, 1941, Vietnamese communists, headed by Quoc, held a conference to discuss an attempt at independence.  The communist’s political goal became to gain all Vietnamese’s support, whether they were workers, peasants, wealthy peasants, landlords, or the native bourgeoisie.  The Vietminh were established as communist freedom fighters, and “this organization would unite everybody – workers, capitalists, peasants, and landlords – who wanted to fight the French.”[35]  The Vichy government capital of Hue was taken by the Japanese in March of 1945; the Japanese arrested the French Governor General and placed Bao Dai as the emperor of an “independent” Vietnam.  The Vietminh continued to fight for complete independence, and the Japanese surrendered to them in August of 1945.  The Vietnamese had no time to rest as the French took immediately took up arms against the Vietnamese to regain their colonies.  China aided Vietnam to support a communist revolution, and the United States supported France, not in support of France’s colonialism, but in contest of communism.  The French lost the major battle of Dien Bien Phu in March of 1954, and then Vietnam became an independent nation split along the seventeenth parallel as a result of the Geneva Accords of 1954.  Vietminh troops were to be removed from the south, French troops were to be removed from the north and then the whole nation in 300 days, and general elections to reunite the country were to be held in the summer of 1956.[36] 

After the elections of 1956 were cancelled, Ho Chi Minh and Nguyen Vo Giap established the National Liberation Front/Vietcong to infiltrate southern cities and create disunity and anti-governmental sentiment.   The NLF, as a communist organization, naturally appealed to the peasants in the south, but it “announced itself as a broadly based resistance movement… moderate enough to enlist the support of democrats and nationalists as well as Communists.”[37]  The first objective of the NLF was to “bring a sense of unity to the different classes of people in the South, regardless of their position in society or their political or religious views.”[38]  Even though South Vietnam’s first leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, was generally repressive and introverted, the United States supported the south due to Diem’s staunch anti-communist beliefs.  Diem was brutally assassinated and replaced, but the United States never backed a popular South Vietnamese leader that could gain widespread support; however, the NLF quickly gained support among the southern villages.  The “interference” of the United States helped promote communist expansion in the south and created solidarity among the Vietnamese populace as a whole.  This solidarity strengthened their will to fight to unite Vietnam under communism, a goal reached in April 1975 with the fall of the south.[39] 

Vietnam’s struggle for independence throughout its more than two thousand year existence is remarkable.  The Vietnamese never allowed their spirit to be broken in the face of adversity.  The Chinese could not pacify the south over the course of a millennium, and their attempts to assimilate and subjugate were met with constant resistance.  The Portuguese and Dutch failed to reap benefits through trade with Vietnam, but succeeded in establishing missions.   This success brought in the brutal French, but even with their superior military equipment and training they could not subdue the “Annamites.”  The Japanese, while perhaps even more brutal than the French, could only occupy Vietnam for less than six years when the French attempted to regain its colony.  Everything that foreign invaders attempted in order to subdue the Vietnamese backfired.  Instead of breaking their will, force and subjugation caused the Vietnamese to fight even harder.  The ideals of Communism supplied the missing link to unify the Vietnamese in their fight for independence and freedom from exploitation.

Last modified: 01/21/06