The years of French colonial rule began with an effort at modernizing Vietnam. The paths of commerce were built: roads, bridges, railroads and harbors. But the commerce that traveled those paths was French commerce. Taking Indochina had cost the French a lot of money, and they meant to get their money back quickly.
They did this in three ways. First, they took the wealth of Vietnam: the metals and the timber were removed and the rice harvested and taken back to France. Second, they took over the sale of important goods. Salt, alcohol and other products were made the subject of a French monopoly. If a Vietnamese peasant needed to buy Vietnamese salt he had to buy it from the French at the price that the French set. This was an important matter. There were no refrigerators in Vietnam. If you wanted to keep the fish you caught one day to cat at a later time, you needed salt to preserve it. Control of salt was as much a power over the Vietnamese as control of electricity would be over an American.
Third, if the Vietnamese wanted to buy products from another country, those products were generally brought in from France, More than half of all goods brought into Vietnam came from France, and the buyer had to pay a tariff or tax for the privilege.
It is not that the French rule did not improve the economy. It did. But the benefits of those improvements went mostly to the French and to large Vietnamese landowners. The French had turned around the plan to turn land over to the peasants. By 1914, nearly half of the land in Vietnam was owned by only two percent of the people. More than half the people owned no land at all.
In modern western society numbers like these would not be very important. Most people in modern Europe or America live in cities and work in factories or offices. Owning land is important to them, but their lives do not depend on it. But Vietnam was and is a rural and agricultural society. One who owned no land was one who had to lead a life of poverty from which there was no escape.
And an awful poverty it was. Harvests were poor in those early years of French rule and even landowners went hungry. There were no schools for average people and almost no medical care. There was one doctor for every thirty-eight thousand Vietnamese, as compared to one for every thirty-two hundred in the Philippines at the same time.
Not all Frenchmen ignored the plight of the Vietnamese people. One early governor-general (the title given to the French colonial leader), Paul Beau, tried to open opportunities for education and some role in the government to the Vietnamese. But this program came too late to make a real difference and its title, “the moral conquest,” suggests that its real goal was not to benefit the Vietnamese but to secure control of the colony by capturing the souls of the population. When we later talk about the American involvement in Vietnam, we will see similar names for non-military programs such as “pacification” and “winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese.”
This form of colonial rule was bound to have its results. Even before World War I began in 1914, Vietnamese intellectuals began to form secret nationalist groups. The nationalist movement in Vietnam lies at the very heart of much that will follow. But it is not easy to understand, in part because it was so deeply affected by things that happened in other countries, and in part because the very word “nationalism” meant many different things to many different people.
This last point is easier to explain. As we have already seen, Vietnam had no real political tradition. In the United States, people have gotten used to the idea of an elected Congress and president and of judges who are appointed for life. In Great Britain the tradition of Parliamentary rule and a king or queen goes back for hundreds of years.
In those nations those systems are accepted and honored. Americans would laugh at the idea of a queen, though most would happily agree that the British system works quite well. The British, on the other hand, find American presidential politics a strange way to select leaders. But, again, they probably feel that if Americans are happy with it that then they have no reason to complain.
Our political traditions are sacred in a sense, and we would not change them. If some other tradition was imposed upon us, we would seek not merely to be rid of it but to return to the old system.
Many Vietnamese wanted to be rid of the new French system, but they had little to go back to. There had been and still was an emperor. But in a country where the village is more important than the nation, national government, be it an emperor or anything else, has little meaning. Also, as we have seen, the emperor rarely ruled more than a small part of the country at a time.
What kind of government would the new nation of Vietnam have? Would it return to the full power of the emperor? Would it be a democracy? Would it be a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as Karl Marx had been calling for in his new theory of communism?
These questions divided the Vietnamese as much as any previous questions had divided them. The divided nationalist movement was a very weak thing at first, but it drew strength from three events in the early part of the twentieth century: the Russo-Japanese War, the Chinese Revolution, and World War I. Some years later a similar event-World War II-was to provide the movement with the chance it needed to succeed. But let us look at these first three struggles in foreign lands and see how they contributed to the events that were to follow.
For hundreds of years the nations of Europe had been taking control of parts of Asia. By 1900, the European control was nearly complete. Only China and Japan of the major Asian nations were independent, and China was only barely so since the nations of Europe as well as the United States had forced the Chinese to allow them special trading rights and privileges. For a time, the Americans even had courts and post offices in China.
The Westerners believed in, and many Asian people seemed to accept, the concept of Western superiority. Certainly this was true in one sense. The Industrial Revolution had provided the Western world with superior arms and means of transportation. These, in turn, made the nations of Asia easy prey for Western colonial plans. They could not strike back at Europe because they had no real navies and they could not defend their own lands against Europe’s artillery.
But Japan was different. It was extremely well organized as a nation. Moreover, once Japan opened contact with the West, it lost little time in catching up with industrial development. But Japan was a nation isolated from others both by the water that surrounded it and by choice. The Western world was not fully aware of the powerful nation that was developing off the coast of China.
During the late 1800s the Russians began to ease their way into Chinese territory. By 1904, they controlled most of the area surrounding the then-Japanese province of Korea. The Japanese felt that a move on Korea was next and that if that happened the Russians would use Korea as a jumping-off place for the invasion of Japan itself. The Japanese went to war to stop this.
The results shocked the world, for the Japanese did not just defeat the Russians, they humiliated them in a very short time and even forced the Russians to give up some of their territory to Japan.
The Russo-Japanese War destroyed the idea of Western superiority. It also caused many Asians to see the Japanese as a friend against Western imperialism.
The second event, the Chinese Revolution, took place in 1911, under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. His National People’s Party-the Kuomintang-sought to free China from control by foreign nations and to establish a program of social justice with a democratic government. With the help of some army officials, Sun was able to overthrow the emperor, but the leaders of many of the provinces would not accept his rule, and the revolution was really more of a long civil war. Nonetheless, for a number of years, China became a place where Vietnamese nationalists could seek safety and where many of them adopted the democratic principles of the Kuomintang.
World War I was fought far away from Vietnam, of course. But it had very important effects there. More than one hundred thousand Vietnamese were moved to Europe to fight on the French side. They found a society that was, to them, wealthy even in the midst of war. They found peasants who owned their own land and could make a living out of it. They found a democracy where even peasants had a vote. They learned that progress was possible.
Without that simple idea there may have been no real nationalist movement in Vietnam. After all, there was no benefit to the large number of peasants in Vietnam to fight and die for the nationalist cause if it only meant that leadership would change from the French, who were cheating them, to their own countrymen, who would do the same. If, on the other hand, a revolution offered them the promise of a better life for themselves and their children, then it might be worthwhile after all. The war also provided what seemed to be a good opportunity to strike while the French were weak and distracted.
There had been several nationalist leaders and movements before World War I. Listing them all would only show that the movement was divided and weak. In 1916, though, in the midst of World War I, a new nationalist effort was mounted by educated government officials in support of the eighteen-year-old emperor, Duy Ton. This effort was better organized and more broadly based than the previous nationalist revolts had been, but its strategy involved open rebellion against French troops with their superior arms and training. And, while the French were quite busy fighting the Germans in Europe, their weapons and skills were still such that they had little trouble with the Vietnamese. The 1916 rebellion failed and hundreds of Vietnamese were executed.* Many more were sent into exile, including Emperor Duy Ton. In his place the French elevated Khai Dinh to the throne.
Of course, not all of the educated Vietnamese opposed the French colonial rule. Many of them found that by cooperating with the French they could make substantial profits for themselves. Similarly, some wealthy Vietnamese, either hoping to protect their positions through allying themselves with the French or hoping to provide their families with a better education than was available in Vietnam, sent their children to France to study. Many of these children returned as young adults with revolutionary attitudes. Just like the soldiers in World War l, they saw things in France that they wanted for their own people, and they felt that these things would never come to Vietnam SO long as the French ruled the nation.
In this they were correct, for while some governors general sought to liberalize colonial rule and to allow Vietnamese participation in the government of the colony, their efforts along this path were not very significant. For the most part they involved allowing the Vietnamese to form political parties such as the Constitutionalist Party, which sought to influence but not really end French colonial rule.
The French did not allow true nationalists to start political parties, but this did not stop them from doing so. One could spend many chapters telling the story of these organizations and their leaders. But for our purposes we can look to those founded by Ho Chi Minh.
Ho was born in the northern part of Vietnam in the year 1890. The name he is best known by is simply the last of a series of names he took during his lifetime, changing it to express some political thought (as when he called himself Nguyen Ai Fuocor “Nguyen the Patriot”) or to avoid capture by the French.
He left Vietnam in 1911 and traveled throughout Asia and Europe, finally settling in Paris in 1919. Many Vietnamese were in Paris at the end of World War I, and Ho preached a national revolution to them and edited the newspaper Le Paria. While Ho was certainly a nationalist at this time, it is difficult to say what sort of nation he envisioned. Certainly his own ideas were changing rapidly.
At first he joined the Socialist Party, which in Europe at that time was not a terribly radical thing to do. But very soon after that, Ho switched views and joined the Communist Party. And that was indeed radical. While the socialists believed in government ownership of industry, communists argued for an almost complete control of the lives of the people.
Communism was an annoying but powerless political concept until 1917, when, in the midst of World War I, a communist government took control of Russia. This event shook the old European order nearly as much as the war did, for Russia had been the home of conservatism. The wealthy and the nobles ruled the nation as though they owned it all. It was the most politically backward nation in Europe, and to find it suddenly changed into a home for radicals was quite a shock.
In 1923, Ho went to Moscow, where he spent at least two years preparing for a return to Vietnam. In 1925, he went to Canton, China, where many Vietnamese nationalists had gone into exile. There he established the Revolutionary Youth League. Ho’s group was not large, but its members were well trained and disciplined, and if a vacuum were to come in the leadership of the nationalist movement, Ho and his followers were ready to fill it.
In 1930 the opportunity came. The Vietnam Quoc Dan Dong (the Vietnam Nationalist Party or “VNQDD”) set off a rebellion in the north that was quickly crushed. The VNQDD leaders were executed or imprisoned by the hundreds, and Ho’s newly formed Indochinese Communist Party moved in to take over the leadership of the nationalist movement.
The 1930 revolt is an important event, not so much in what happened, for it was just one of many failed revolts in Vietnam, but in the lesson that can be drawn from it.
The VNQDD was a fairly moderate organization, yet the French opposed it and eventually destroyed it. They did this because they wanted to hold the colonies they had in Indochina. Yet history and common sense should have told them that they had very little chance of doing this.
The Vietnamese had a very important advantage. They did not have to capture and control Vietnam. They already controlled most of it except for French military Outposts. All they had to do was to make it so uncomfortable for the French that staying and fighting would not be worth the trouble. The success of the nationalist movement might be put off for decades but it would come.
In destroying the moderate VNQDD, the French destroyed the last group that they might have made a good deal with; one that would have allowed them a major role in the economy of Vietnam. Destroying the VNQDD could not and would not end the nationalist movement. Rather, it pushed the remaining moderate nationalists into the camp of the Indochinese Communist Party, a far more radical group that would not settle with the French for a small price.
The French must have had some idea of the trouble they were in, because in the next year they brought the boy-emperor Bao Dai back from France, where he had been studying, and they established a Commission of Reforms headed by the Vietnamese Ngo Dinh Diem. While Diem (whose name we shall see again) made a genuine effort to bring reform into the colony, the French blocked all of his efforts and he quickly resigned his position.
The Commission of Reforms was another major French mistake that would be repeated in later years. The idea may have attracted the interest of moderate Vietnamese nationalists for a while, but when it proved to be no more than a trick, any confidence that they had in the French disappeared with it.
This was unfortunate for the French. The series of small storms that were to join to form World War II had already begun to stir. Hitler had come to power in Germany. Mussolini ruled Italy and was invading Ethiopia. And the Japanese had launched their plan to create a huge Asian empire by invading the Chinese province of Manchuria.
In 1939, war broke out in Europe, and while Japan was not involved in that fighting, it was allied to Germany, a nation whose troops would soon be storming across the French border. The French feared for their position in Vietnam for two reasons: First, their main goal was to beat back any German invasion. To do that they had to commit all possible military resources to the defense of France. This left them militarily weak in Indochina.
Second, they feared that any weakness in Asia would open the door to the Japanese, and in this they were quite correct.
France fell to the invading Germans on June 16, 1940. The surrender terms allowed a French government, under strict German control, to rule most of the nation and its colonies. The government was called “Vichy” France from the town where it had its seat.
After the fall of France, the Japanese sent troops into Vietnam. The Vietnamese nationalist leaders expected that the Japanese would support their aims. But, as once before, when the Japanese had sold out the nationalists for a loan from France, they were disappointed.
If anything, the Vietnamese were in worse trouble than they had been before. The Japanese worked with the governors appointed by the Vichy French government. In effect, they supervised their work. So instead of dealing with one set of colonial masters, the Vietnamese now had to contend with two. Opposition of any sort was brutally put down and what had seemed like the great opportunity for nationalist dreams in Vietnam turned instead into a nightmare.
It seemed as if the Vietnamese were alone against the whole world, and in many ways they were. Even Ho Chi Minh must have given up hope for a moment, for his former friends in Moscow were allied at the beginning of the war with Germany, which of course supported both the Vichy French and the Japanese.
But there were other forces at work. Many French resented the Japanese presence because they regarded Japan as the enemy of France. They worked quietly to liberalize colonial rule and to provide an opportunity for the nationalists to cause trouble for the Japanese and the Vichy French.
Ho Chi Minh, once more in exile in China, formed a new nationalist organization called the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh-or the Viet Minh, This group would last and would leave its mark in Vietnamese history.
*In 1916, the Irish tried to throw the British out of their country, too. They also felt that World War I gave them a chance to strike while their rulers were weak. They failed to do so. In 1917, Russian revolutionaries began their civil war for the same reason. The Russians were successful, though.