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Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled
Hard cover. Set of Vol 1 and 2.
1346 pages, Hardcover, Slipcased
First published January 1, 1967
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August 11, 2021
4.5 stars
In 1887, the French government formally approved the creation of the Indochinese Union (Union indochinoise). Until 1945, this colonial state incorporated Cochinchina, Cambodia, Annam, Tonkin, and Laos (or what would become Laos). Appointed by Paris and based in Hanoi, a governor general ruled what became widely known as French Indochina. Assisting him was the Upper Council of Indochina, which consisted of five directors in charge of the colonial state’s main services. From 1891, the governor general received his orders directly from one source, the Ministry of Colonies.
The governor general’s powers were considerable. He established the Union’s budget and presided over the entire administration — both the Indochinese central services (communications, justice, customs, and police) and the local administration of each of the protectorates, colonies, and military territories. Though the French never created an Indochinese Army, in 1886 the Native Guard was born to ensure internal security. The decision to make Hanoi the administrative capital shifted the political power away from Saigon and Hue back to the Red River delta, as it had been in a much earlier period in the history of the country. The governor of Cochinchina in Saigon became a ‘lieutenant governor’, subservient to the governor general now appointing him.
Having quenched Vietnamese resistance to a certain extent, the Third Republic redoubled its efforts to consolidate Indochina. Leading the charge was the highly motivated Paul Doumer. Thanks to his service as a minister of finance in France, he arrived in Indochina in 1897 with a government loan of 200 million francs and a mandate to give "real life" to the colony. He set to work immediately, equipping the general government with departments in charge of finances, public works, agriculture and trade, the postal and telegraph service, customs and monopolies, and so on. Aiming to bring all the five administrative provinces under the control of the governor, Doumer abolished the viceroy’s position in Hanoi and severely reduced the monarchy’s powers in the north. The lieutenant governor in Cochinchina lost his control over the southern budget. Doumer also created three powerful state monopolies in opium, salt, and alcohol. (Between 1899 and 1922, opium accounted for 20 percent of Indochina’s budget, confirming again the importance of this drug in colonial development.)
The 200 million franc loan from the Third Republic went into major infrastructure and public works projects, which were designed to transform Indochina into a modern state, but which only aggravated the local population's desperate situation. The Indochinese peasants bore the brunt of this colonial development. Doumer's expansion of the salt and alcohol monopolies accentuated poverty, as did the mandatory peasant labor, essential to realizing the grandiose public works projects. He also failed to see Vietnam's true potential – agriculture – and stuck to the production of rice instead of adding new crops to the country's economy. His universal system of taxation increased the financial burden on the rural Viets. Thus, neither the French taxpayer nor the few French settlers financed the making of colonial Vietnam. The Indochinese did.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Vietnamese reformism began to rise. Not all mandarins were corrupt, conservative, or anti-modern. Nor were the French or the Japanese the first to introduce the ideas of modernity and reform to Vietnamese elites. A large number of officials working for the Nguyen dynasty had long been interested in good government, reform, and modernization. In the late 1860s, for example, the Catholic adviser to Emperor Tu Duc, Nguyen Truong To, advocated for West-inspired economic, social, and even political reforms, such as sending students abroad for Western studies, expanding the education system, improving financial, judicial, and administrative institutions, developing modern science, agriculture, and commerce, and even creating a national writing system. "Have we not talented persons able to devise a script which will transcribe our national language?" he asked. While Nguyen Truong To failed to convince the last emperor of the need to reform, reformist debates among the mandarines did not disappear under French rule. According to the author, at the turn of the century Vietnamism comprised an even wider range of sources, ideas, models, and people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the creation in early 1907 of the Tonkin Public School — Vietnam's first modern school, which focused on promoting the desire to learn and the discussion of new ideas and necessary reforms.
However, this early attempt at modern education and socio-cultural change on Vietnamese terms did not last long. When a revolt broke out in February 1908 against excessive peasant-labor demands, the French did the only thing they knew how to do: they cracked down violently. The discovery of a plot to poison French troops a few months later only led to more repression as scared European settlers demanded swift and decisive action. Rather than reflecting on the causes of Indochinese discontent and devising appropriate measures, fear got the better of the French.
When it came to governing Indochina, France pushed simultaneously in different directions. For instance, French republicans may have done away with kingship in France, but they had no intention of letting go of their colonial emperors in Hue. In fact, they considered Vietnamese kingship to be an important part of their policy of indirect rule because it continued to influence the majority of the Viet population greatly, so after the First World War they decided to mold their own colonial emperor in the form of a little boy named Bao Dai. A puppet emperor was exactly what the nationalists of Vietnam did not want, though. By the 1920s, an increasingly politicized and nationalist-minded educated youth had appeared in the country's urban centers. Those young people soon learned that opposition to colonial power required the creation of political parties that could operate secretly and take the national message to the countryside ("to the people"). In 1927, a group of nationalist-minded teachers, students, journalists, civil servants, and merchants in the north established the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, known by its acronym, VNQDD (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang). Unfortunately, the VNQDD’s members tended to act brashly and violently. Many were convinced that the poverty and suffering in the countryside were so great that the masses would easily be made to follow them. The assassination of a notorious French labor recruiter in early 1929 was intended to be the spark needed to ignite a rebellion. But instead of triggering an uprising, the killing of this man set off a wave of colonial repression that pushed the leadership into fatal action. On the night of 9 February 1930, Vietnamese Nationalist Party leaders organized a daring attack on the French garrison in Yen Bay in Tonkin. It was a miserable failure — there was no peasant uprising. Instead, the French arrested scores of members of the VNQDD and unleashed the security services. The eventual repression triggered anticolonial demonstrations; French journalists began covering colonial affairs closely and critically. However, no significant changes in colonial policies occurred. The French government continued to back the Bao Dai experiment.
The turning point of Vietnam's fate came in 1940 when France surrendered to Nazi Germany, and Hitler's Axis ally, Tokyo, put pressure on the French authorities in Hanoi to allow the Japanese to station 6,000 troops in Tonkin. In exchange, Japan agreed to recognize French sovereignity over Indochina, but in reality the colony fell under occupation. In May 1941, faced with the possibility of losing Indochina entirely, the French government ceded large swathes of western Cambodia and Laos to Thai expansionists; the Japanese also secured a new agreement which placed the rest of the colony under Tokyo's explicit control.
The Japanese were cruel occupiers and left a decidedly negative impression on the Vietnamese. In spite of all their talk of liberating the "yellow" people from "white" colonial exploitation, the undeniable truth was that the Japanese colonialists had intentionally left the "white man" in power in Indochina. By choosing to rule Indochina through the French, they lost what could have been their most loyal Vietnamese allies. However, Tokyo's policy produced other, unintentional consequences.
The inability of the French government to protect its colony from Japanese atrocities made the Viets realize they were going to survive their greatest moment of need on their own. On top of that, Japan's hypocritical propaganda of Asian liberation unwittingly spurred the creation of a very real nationalist movement. The World-War-II Vietnam wanted nothing to do with its European masters, who had opressed it for decades and then abandoned it to other opressors. Vietnam had learned that it could fight and exist on its own – independently.
The Indochinese Communist Party, which had gone undergound in 1939, now monitored the course of the war at international, regional, and local levels. Ho Chi Minh, its leader, understood that Allied victory over the Japanese, generally viewed as sure to happen in 1946 or 1947, would provide the right moment for taking power. What Ho did not see coming was the rapid Japanese capitulation on 15 August following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet he lost no time. The ICP immediately issued the call for a general uprising as de Gaulle’s intelligence officers and the non-communist nationalists looked on helplessly. On 19 August, the Viet Minh seized power in Hanoi and the northern provincial capitals before extending its control southwards over Annam and Cochinchina by the end of the month. These events are collectively known as the "August Revolution of 1945." What's more, on August 30, Bao Dai, the last emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, formally abdicated, handing over the power to the newly constituted provisional government of Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. The emperor's actions gave a strong source of legitimacy to Ho and his fledgling government. The French were speechless. Bao Dai must have been forced to do that, hoped they. But the emperor had personally written a letter to Charles de Gaulle a few days earlier, begging him to grant independence to Indochina. De Gaulle never wrote back. For the first time in his life, France’s handmade colonial emperor had openly
challenged the French. And the French found themselves in the sorry position of having no Vietnamese partner with whom to rebuild their lost colonial state.
Having been "knocked out" of the war at the start, France could hardly hope to retake their Indochinese colony as easily as the British restored their colonial presence in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, Charles de Gaulle's relations with Franklin Delano Roosevelt were never good, so de Gaulle was kept in the dark about Allied decisions regarding the future of Indochina. However, he was determined to regain France's colony at any cost. He dispatched his delegates to Indochina with clear orders to re-establish French sovereignty. These men entered into negotiations with the British, Chinese, and Vietnamese with the aim of resuming French control. The British, worried about the preservation of their own Asian empire, but also keen to maintain order on the ground, allowed local French forces to execute a coup de force in Saigon on 23 September 1945, pushing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s southern forces into the countryside.
The Vietnamese resisted French colonial reconquest from the outset. In the North the presence of Chinese occupation forces continued to protect the DRV against an immediate colonial attack. Although the Chinese nationalist occupation was burdensome for the Vietnamese people, exactly Chinese republican troops – not Chinese communist ones – helped Ho keep his newborn nation-state intact. Thanks to the Chinese decision not to overthrow his government, until December 1946 DRV authorities were able to mobilize the population and create an army. Thus, for both the French and the Vietnamese foreign aid was vital.
The French understood this and did their best to secure the rapid withdrawal of Chinese forces. Although Chinese withdrawal allowed the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to fortify their respective military positions, it also offered a chance for peace. Ho understood this and threw himself into finding a negotiated settlement that would result in Vietnam’s decolonization. As it turned out, the status of Cochinchina was a major problem. The French now controlled much of it, and in the two conferences made to resolve the question failed to find a peaceful solution. Out of desperation, in September 1946, the DRC signed a preliminary agreement with the Ministry of Colonies for a ceasefire in the South. However, the ever-changing governments in Paris led to France's disrespecting the accord; this led to serious clashes in Lang Son and Haiphong in November 1946. On tye evening of December 19, the Vietnamese lashed out in Hanoi, and the French authorities, which had been waiting for a fight for a long time already, were all too ready to respond with violence. All-out colonial war began that evening in Hanoi. The French had no idea that ten years later this war would end their colonial presence in Indochina.
Another thing the French could not imagine is that the DRV would not only withstand each and every assault of the French army, but also assert its territorial sovereignty, continue to build an army capable of protecting it, and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people. The war was going virtually nowhere for France: no amount of land they seized from the Vietnamese mattered for the war effort. The Viet guerrillas disappeared in the woods and swamps surrounding the villages and cities only to reemerge a few kilometers further, thus leading the French farther and farther away from their supply lines until the hungry and exhausted soldiers had no other choice but to turn back. Then it was the guerrillas' turn to follow them, harassing them for hours. This costly war began to drain France's finances and was the cause of its slow post-World-War-II recovery.
The situation got worse for the French when in thr aftermath of the Korean War, the Chinese committed themselves to helping the communists of Vietnam in order to protect their southern flank, contain American expansionism in the Pacific, and keep a communist-run state alive, as they were doing in Korea. Between May 1950 and June 1954, the Chinese communists provided 21,517 tons of assistance to the DRV Vietnamese. This included machine guns, rifles, ammunition, and artillery. This indispensable aid was what helped the Vietnamese whip the French in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu on which the French military strategists had relied to drain the resources of the Viets. The same day, 7 May 1954, negotiations formally began in Geneva to find a political solution to end the war. France had lost its colonial posession forever.
Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled is an amazing continuation of The Smaller Dragon. Joseph Buttinger has written a meticulously researched, easily graspable, and wonderfully engaging account of the history of French Indochina. A highly recommendable introduction for newbies in the field of Vietnamese history.
In 1887, the French government formally approved the creation of the Indochinese Union (Union indochinoise). Until 1945, this colonial state incorporated Cochinchina, Cambodia, Annam, Tonkin, and Laos (or what would become Laos). Appointed by Paris and based in Hanoi, a governor general ruled what became widely known as French Indochina. Assisting him was the Upper Council of Indochina, which consisted of five directors in charge of the colonial state’s main services. From 1891, the governor general received his orders directly from one source, the Ministry of Colonies.
The governor general’s powers were considerable. He established the Union’s budget and presided over the entire administration — both the Indochinese central services (communications, justice, customs, and police) and the local administration of each of the protectorates, colonies, and military territories. Though the French never created an Indochinese Army, in 1886 the Native Guard was born to ensure internal security. The decision to make Hanoi the administrative capital shifted the political power away from Saigon and Hue back to the Red River delta, as it had been in a much earlier period in the history of the country. The governor of Cochinchina in Saigon became a ‘lieutenant governor’, subservient to the governor general now appointing him.
Having quenched Vietnamese resistance to a certain extent, the Third Republic redoubled its efforts to consolidate Indochina. Leading the charge was the highly motivated Paul Doumer. Thanks to his service as a minister of finance in France, he arrived in Indochina in 1897 with a government loan of 200 million francs and a mandate to give "real life" to the colony. He set to work immediately, equipping the general government with departments in charge of finances, public works, agriculture and trade, the postal and telegraph service, customs and monopolies, and so on. Aiming to bring all the five administrative provinces under the control of the governor, Doumer abolished the viceroy’s position in Hanoi and severely reduced the monarchy’s powers in the north. The lieutenant governor in Cochinchina lost his control over the southern budget. Doumer also created three powerful state monopolies in opium, salt, and alcohol. (Between 1899 and 1922, opium accounted for 20 percent of Indochina’s budget, confirming again the importance of this drug in colonial development.)
The 200 million franc loan from the Third Republic went into major infrastructure and public works projects, which were designed to transform Indochina into a modern state, but which only aggravated the local population's desperate situation. The Indochinese peasants bore the brunt of this colonial development. Doumer's expansion of the salt and alcohol monopolies accentuated poverty, as did the mandatory peasant labor, essential to realizing the grandiose public works projects. He also failed to see Vietnam's true potential – agriculture – and stuck to the production of rice instead of adding new crops to the country's economy. His universal system of taxation increased the financial burden on the rural Viets. Thus, neither the French taxpayer nor the few French settlers financed the making of colonial Vietnam. The Indochinese did.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Vietnamese reformism began to rise. Not all mandarins were corrupt, conservative, or anti-modern. Nor were the French or the Japanese the first to introduce the ideas of modernity and reform to Vietnamese elites. A large number of officials working for the Nguyen dynasty had long been interested in good government, reform, and modernization. In the late 1860s, for example, the Catholic adviser to Emperor Tu Duc, Nguyen Truong To, advocated for West-inspired economic, social, and even political reforms, such as sending students abroad for Western studies, expanding the education system, improving financial, judicial, and administrative institutions, developing modern science, agriculture, and commerce, and even creating a national writing system. "Have we not talented persons able to devise a script which will transcribe our national language?" he asked. While Nguyen Truong To failed to convince the last emperor of the need to reform, reformist debates among the mandarines did not disappear under French rule. According to the author, at the turn of the century Vietnamism comprised an even wider range of sources, ideas, models, and people. Nowhere is this more evident than in the creation in early 1907 of the Tonkin Public School — Vietnam's first modern school, which focused on promoting the desire to learn and the discussion of new ideas and necessary reforms.
However, this early attempt at modern education and socio-cultural change on Vietnamese terms did not last long. When a revolt broke out in February 1908 against excessive peasant-labor demands, the French did the only thing they knew how to do: they cracked down violently. The discovery of a plot to poison French troops a few months later only led to more repression as scared European settlers demanded swift and decisive action. Rather than reflecting on the causes of Indochinese discontent and devising appropriate measures, fear got the better of the French.
When it came to governing Indochina, France pushed simultaneously in different directions. For instance, French republicans may have done away with kingship in France, but they had no intention of letting go of their colonial emperors in Hue. In fact, they considered Vietnamese kingship to be an important part of their policy of indirect rule because it continued to influence the majority of the Viet population greatly, so after the First World War they decided to mold their own colonial emperor in the form of a little boy named Bao Dai. A puppet emperor was exactly what the nationalists of Vietnam did not want, though. By the 1920s, an increasingly politicized and nationalist-minded educated youth had appeared in the country's urban centers. Those young people soon learned that opposition to colonial power required the creation of political parties that could operate secretly and take the national message to the countryside ("to the people"). In 1927, a group of nationalist-minded teachers, students, journalists, civil servants, and merchants in the north established the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, known by its acronym, VNQDD (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang). Unfortunately, the VNQDD’s members tended to act brashly and violently. Many were convinced that the poverty and suffering in the countryside were so great that the masses would easily be made to follow them. The assassination of a notorious French labor recruiter in early 1929 was intended to be the spark needed to ignite a rebellion. But instead of triggering an uprising, the killing of this man set off a wave of colonial repression that pushed the leadership into fatal action. On the night of 9 February 1930, Vietnamese Nationalist Party leaders organized a daring attack on the French garrison in Yen Bay in Tonkin. It was a miserable failure — there was no peasant uprising. Instead, the French arrested scores of members of the VNQDD and unleashed the security services. The eventual repression triggered anticolonial demonstrations; French journalists began covering colonial affairs closely and critically. However, no significant changes in colonial policies occurred. The French government continued to back the Bao Dai experiment.
The turning point of Vietnam's fate came in 1940 when France surrendered to Nazi Germany, and Hitler's Axis ally, Tokyo, put pressure on the French authorities in Hanoi to allow the Japanese to station 6,000 troops in Tonkin. In exchange, Japan agreed to recognize French sovereignity over Indochina, but in reality the colony fell under occupation. In May 1941, faced with the possibility of losing Indochina entirely, the French government ceded large swathes of western Cambodia and Laos to Thai expansionists; the Japanese also secured a new agreement which placed the rest of the colony under Tokyo's explicit control.
The Japanese were cruel occupiers and left a decidedly negative impression on the Vietnamese. In spite of all their talk of liberating the "yellow" people from "white" colonial exploitation, the undeniable truth was that the Japanese colonialists had intentionally left the "white man" in power in Indochina. By choosing to rule Indochina through the French, they lost what could have been their most loyal Vietnamese allies. However, Tokyo's policy produced other, unintentional consequences.
The inability of the French government to protect its colony from Japanese atrocities made the Viets realize they were going to survive their greatest moment of need on their own. On top of that, Japan's hypocritical propaganda of Asian liberation unwittingly spurred the creation of a very real nationalist movement. The World-War-II Vietnam wanted nothing to do with its European masters, who had opressed it for decades and then abandoned it to other opressors. Vietnam had learned that it could fight and exist on its own – independently.
The Indochinese Communist Party, which had gone undergound in 1939, now monitored the course of the war at international, regional, and local levels. Ho Chi Minh, its leader, understood that Allied victory over the Japanese, generally viewed as sure to happen in 1946 or 1947, would provide the right moment for taking power. What Ho did not see coming was the rapid Japanese capitulation on 15 August following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet he lost no time. The ICP immediately issued the call for a general uprising as de Gaulle’s intelligence officers and the non-communist nationalists looked on helplessly. On 19 August, the Viet Minh seized power in Hanoi and the northern provincial capitals before extending its control southwards over Annam and Cochinchina by the end of the month. These events are collectively known as the "August Revolution of 1945." What's more, on August 30, Bao Dai, the last emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, formally abdicated, handing over the power to the newly constituted provisional government of Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. The emperor's actions gave a strong source of legitimacy to Ho and his fledgling government. The French were speechless. Bao Dai must have been forced to do that, hoped they. But the emperor had personally written a letter to Charles de Gaulle a few days earlier, begging him to grant independence to Indochina. De Gaulle never wrote back. For the first time in his life, France’s handmade colonial emperor had openly
challenged the French. And the French found themselves in the sorry position of having no Vietnamese partner with whom to rebuild their lost colonial state.
Having been "knocked out" of the war at the start, France could hardly hope to retake their Indochinese colony as easily as the British restored their colonial presence in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, Charles de Gaulle's relations with Franklin Delano Roosevelt were never good, so de Gaulle was kept in the dark about Allied decisions regarding the future of Indochina. However, he was determined to regain France's colony at any cost. He dispatched his delegates to Indochina with clear orders to re-establish French sovereignty. These men entered into negotiations with the British, Chinese, and Vietnamese with the aim of resuming French control. The British, worried about the preservation of their own Asian empire, but also keen to maintain order on the ground, allowed local French forces to execute a coup de force in Saigon on 23 September 1945, pushing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s southern forces into the countryside.
The Vietnamese resisted French colonial reconquest from the outset. In the North the presence of Chinese occupation forces continued to protect the DRV against an immediate colonial attack. Although the Chinese nationalist occupation was burdensome for the Vietnamese people, exactly Chinese republican troops – not Chinese communist ones – helped Ho keep his newborn nation-state intact. Thanks to the Chinese decision not to overthrow his government, until December 1946 DRV authorities were able to mobilize the population and create an army. Thus, for both the French and the Vietnamese foreign aid was vital.
The French understood this and did their best to secure the rapid withdrawal of Chinese forces. Although Chinese withdrawal allowed the French and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to fortify their respective military positions, it also offered a chance for peace. Ho understood this and threw himself into finding a negotiated settlement that would result in Vietnam’s decolonization. As it turned out, the status of Cochinchina was a major problem. The French now controlled much of it, and in the two conferences made to resolve the question failed to find a peaceful solution. Out of desperation, in September 1946, the DRC signed a preliminary agreement with the Ministry of Colonies for a ceasefire in the South. However, the ever-changing governments in Paris led to France's disrespecting the accord; this led to serious clashes in Lang Son and Haiphong in November 1946. On tye evening of December 19, the Vietnamese lashed out in Hanoi, and the French authorities, which had been waiting for a fight for a long time already, were all too ready to respond with violence. All-out colonial war began that evening in Hanoi. The French had no idea that ten years later this war would end their colonial presence in Indochina.
Another thing the French could not imagine is that the DRV would not only withstand each and every assault of the French army, but also assert its territorial sovereignty, continue to build an army capable of protecting it, and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people. The war was going virtually nowhere for France: no amount of land they seized from the Vietnamese mattered for the war effort. The Viet guerrillas disappeared in the woods and swamps surrounding the villages and cities only to reemerge a few kilometers further, thus leading the French farther and farther away from their supply lines until the hungry and exhausted soldiers had no other choice but to turn back. Then it was the guerrillas' turn to follow them, harassing them for hours. This costly war began to drain France's finances and was the cause of its slow post-World-War-II recovery.
The situation got worse for the French when in thr aftermath of the Korean War, the Chinese committed themselves to helping the communists of Vietnam in order to protect their southern flank, contain American expansionism in the Pacific, and keep a communist-run state alive, as they were doing in Korea. Between May 1950 and June 1954, the Chinese communists provided 21,517 tons of assistance to the DRV Vietnamese. This included machine guns, rifles, ammunition, and artillery. This indispensable aid was what helped the Vietnamese whip the French in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu on which the French military strategists had relied to drain the resources of the Viets. The same day, 7 May 1954, negotiations formally began in Geneva to find a political solution to end the war. France had lost its colonial posession forever.
Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled is an amazing continuation of The Smaller Dragon. Joseph Buttinger has written a meticulously researched, easily graspable, and wonderfully engaging account of the history of French Indochina. A highly recommendable introduction for newbies in the field of Vietnamese history.
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