LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ARVN: Army of the Republic of Vietnam
ASEAN: Association of South East Asian Nations
ASV: Associated State of Vietnam
BIC: Banque de l’Indochine or Bank of Indochina
CCP: Chinese Communist Party
CIA: Central Intelligence Agency
COSVN: Central Office of Southern Viet Nam (the communist party’s apparatus in southern Vietnam)
DRV: Democratic Republic of Vietnam
FCP: French Communist Party
FULRO: Front unifié de lutte des races opprimées or United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races
GDP: Gross Domestic Product
GMD: Guomindang, or Chinese Nationalist Party
ICP: Indochinese Communist Party
MAAG: Military Assistance Advisory Group
MACV: Military Assistance Command, Vietnam
MEP: Missions étrangères de Paris or Paris Overseas Missions
MRP: Mouvement républicain populaire or the Popular Republican Movement
NLF: National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (under communist control)
PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (under communist control)
PLAF: People’s Liberation Armed Force (army under communist control operating below the seventeenth parallel)
PRG: Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (under communist control)
RV: Republic of Vietnam
SEATO: South East Asia Treaty Organization
SRV: Socialist Republic of Vietnam
SV: State of Vietnam
TLVD: Tu Luc Van Doan or the Self-strengthening Literary Movement
UNHCR: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Viet Minh: short for Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietnamese Independence League
VNQDD: Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang or Vietnamese Nationalist Party
VWP: Vietnamese Workers Party (replaced the ICP in 1951)
INTRODUCTION
MOST AMERICAN READERS will remember ‘Vietnam’ as the decade-long war that bogged down the US Army in a struggle to prevent the Soviet and Chinese communists from marching into Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War ended in a humiliating defeat for the United States in 1975, and to this day, images of helicopters scrambling to evacuate people from the US Embassy in Saigon to aircraft carriers waiting off the Vietnamese coast remind Americans of that loss.
However, the United States was hardly the first ‘great power’ to send their warships into the waters off Vietnam’s coastline. Indeed, if Vietnam is recognizable to so many today, it is largely because this small country is located in one of those coveted parts of the world where the ‘great powers’ repeatedly collide. Attracted by trade with the Indian Ocean and determined to project its power by sea, the Chinese empire ruled northern Vietnam for almost a thousand years beginning around the first century BCE. The Chinese saw in Vietnam a gateway for trading with Southeast Asia and tapping into Indian Ocean markets extending to the Middle East. The Vietnamese regained their independence in the tenth century but briefly lost it again to the Chinese in the early fifteenth century as the Ming dynasty sent its armadas across the Indian Ocean as far as Africa and the Red Sea.
Meanwhile, a new set of imperial powers soon expanded into the region via the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This initially European imperialism assumed a particularly aggressive form in the nineteenth century when the French colonized Vietnam and the British confiscated Singapore, Burma, and Malaya. Meanwhile, the Americans crossed the Pacific Ocean to take the Philippines from the Spanish while the Japanese focused their colonial attention on Korea and Taiwan. Together, these colonial powers also divided up the long Chinese coastline into enclaves, treaty ports, and concessions.
The French were perfectly aware of the strategic importance of their Vietnamese colony in this wider imperial competition, perched as it was at the spot where the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the Eurasian continent converge. At the turn of the twentieth century, they finished building the deep-water port of Cam Ranh Bay, located off the southeastern coast of Vietnam. Russian warships dispatched from the Baltic to stop Japanese colonial expansion into China and Korea gathered there before being defeated by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt closely followed Japanese movements down the Chinese coastline and imposed an embargo on Tokyo as Japanese imperial troops started occupying Vietnam in 1940. His fears of a wider Japanese thrust southward were well founded. In early 1942, having attacked Pearl Harbor and occupied all of Vietnam, the Japanese then concentrated their ships in Cam Ranh Bay before attacking Southeast Asia and striking as far as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. Created in 1942, the American 7th Fleet helped roll back the Japanese empire and remained to protect America’s postwar control of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The 7th Fleet first called on Vietnam in 1950 to reassure the French following the Chinese communist victory of 1949. The Americans went on to station the bulk of their naval forces in Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War. And when they withdrew from the country in April 1975, the Russians took over.1
Today, geopolitical tensions are again on the rise in the waters off Vietnam’s coast. For the first time since the Ming recalled their armada from the Indian Ocean in 1433, the Chinese are actively seeking to expand their naval presence into the Pacific. The United States is in conversation with its former enemies in Vietnam about how best to respond. The Russians have taken a renewed interest in Vietnam and Cam Ranh Bay since the end of the Cold War, and, worried by growing Chinese naval power, the Japanese are also improving their ties with the Vietnamese. Vietnam remains to this day at the center of intense global rivalries, and it is tempting to view the country and its history in terms of the conflicts of the ‘great powers’.
The problem, however, is that such accounts of Vietnam are driven by the views of those who coveted, occupied, and fought over this country. By casting Vietnam as a former colony or a strategic zone, or reducing it to a single war or a series of wars, the history of Vietnam becomes the story of its relationship with—outside powers. There is nothing necessarily wrong with an external take on Vietnam’s past. However, such accounts tend to present the history of this country in rather one-dimensional ways: Vietnam was acted upon by the big powers; it was not quite an actor itself. In the great power account, Vietnam is the victim of colonization and domination, never a colonizer or a conqueror itself. Its own internal divisions, ethnic diversity, and conflicts are obscured.
Things are changing, however. Thanks to a flood of new research on Vietnam in recent years, the opening of the country to the outside since the 1980s, and the distance now separating us from the heated political debates generated by Western intervention in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it is now possible to write a new history of Vietnam. This book tries to do just that. It still takes into account this country’s position in a coveted part of the world where empires collide, but it also emphasizes Vietnam’s own role in shaping its history and highlights the country’s extraordinary diversity and complexity.
Most importantly, it emphasizes that there has never been one Vietnam but several remarkably varied ones. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at least two polities existed, one anchored in the Red River delta around Hanoi, another pushing southward past Hue into the plains of the Mekong. Vietnam only appeared in something of its present S-like form when, in 1802, the emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, Gia Long, following decades of civil strife, united the country. Even then, Vietnam hardly remained inert. Until the 1840s, Nguyen leaders fairly successfully tried to expand their imperial state to include Cambodia and swathes of today’s eastern Laos, declaring the empire of Dai Nam (the Greater South) as they did so.
French colonizers had no qualms about invoking earlier Dai Nam imperial pretensions to justify their own colonial expansion up the Mekong River in search of a Chinese Eldorado. However, if the Indochinese Union they announced in 1887 placed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia within the same colonial structure, the French divided Vietnam territorially into three separate sub-units—Cochinchina (the south), Annam (the center), and Tonkin (the north). Between 1862 and 1945, the independent Nguyen state that had unified Vietnamese lands in 1802 was no more. That changed as the Second World War drew to a close in 1945, toppled French Indochina, and nationalists declared the independence of Vietnam and reaffirmed its territorial unity along the lines largely established by Gia Long. Such unity was, however, short-lived. Decolonization, the Cold War, and civil conflicts intersected violently to divide Vietnam into several competing states between 1945 and 1975. In its entire history, Vietnam has only existed in its present national form for about eighty-three years and some months (as of 2016)—never before 1802, for forty-three years in the nineteenth century, six months in 1945, and for forty years since 1976. The ‘great power’ take on the Vietnamese past tends to overlook this multiplicity.2
The expansion of Red River Vietnam southward into populous areas also transformed this country into a mosaic of peoples, languages, and cultures. Ethnic Viet, or the kinh, may constitute the majority of the Vietnamese population today (85.7 percent in 1999), but they share the national territory with over fifty other ethnic groups. Centuries before the kinh—‘the people of the capital’—moved out of the Red River basin, the Tai, Jarai, Cham, Khmers, and others were the dominant populations in the highlands which hug the Red River lowlands, along the central coast, and throughout the Mekong delta. Until the late fifteenth century, the history of Vietnam below the Red River—even within it—was a very non-Viet one. There was no ‘S’ shape to Vietnam. And well into the twentieth century, the non-Viet peoples now living within Vietnam’s borders outnumbered the kinh in the highlands, an area comprising over half of the country. It is precisely its multiple territorial forms, ethno-cultural heterogeneity, and diverse colonial experiences—Chinese, French, and Vietnamese—that make the history of Vietnam so fascinating.3
Specialists inside and outside Vietnam know this, and scholars are increasingly fascinated by the country’s diversity. This new general history moves in similar directions. Rather than positing one Vietnam, one homogeneous people, one history, one modernity, or even one colonialism, this book investigates Vietnam’s past through its multiple forms and impressive diversity.4 Let us take a closer look at what this might mean.
MULTIPLE VIETNAMS
Until recently, Vietnam has commonly been understood to mean today’s Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), first declared independent by Ho Chi Minh in September 1945 as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The conventional narrative moves rapidly from the French attack on Nguyen Vietnam in 1858 to the emergence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 by way of a discussion of French conquest, colonial development, and modernity, and the rise of Vietnamese anticolonialism, nationalism, and communism. Ho Chi Minh stands out as the main character in this narrative of modern Vietnam, allowing historians to follow him (and his Vietnam) from Saigon in 1911 to Paris in 1919, and then on to Moscow and Hong Kong as he embraces communism as the best ‘road’ to attaining Vietnam’s national independence in 1945. This popular account then culminates in the French and American military defeats in Indochina as the DRV marches to final victory over the Republic of Vietnam in 1975. It’s the story of one Vietnam.
American journalist Frances FitzGerald’s highly influential and Pulitzer prize-winning book, Fire in the Lake, went furthest in establishing what has become the standard account of modern Vietnam in the English language. Even before the communist victory in 1975, she had proclaimed Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam as the real one. Not only were the Americans supporting the wrong Vietnamese leaders, first Bao Dai, the French-backed leader of the Associated State of Vietnam, then Ngo Dinh Diem, who replaced it with the Republic of Vietnam in 1955, but in so doing they were also placing themselves on the wrong side of history—Vietnamese history, as defined by FitzGerald, as being a timeless, deep-seated culture of resistance to foreign invasion and colonial domination which Ho and his Vietnam incarnated. Like other righteous rulers before him, in FitzGerald’s hands, Ho became the rightful new sovereign, who had emerged in a time of great disorder to seize the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, with the support of the people. Published at the height of the anti-war movement, Fire in the Lake sought above all to show how the Americans and their empire, just like the French and theirs, were doomed to failure.5
Whether one is for or against American intervention in Vietnam, there are serious problems in terms of how American-focused accounts of the wars like this represent the Vietnamese past. By assuming that Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam of 1945 incarnated a timeless, traditional Vietnam with its roots deep in an antiquity which was destined to win in the present, Fitz-Gerald gives us a very essentialized, unchanging Vietnam. This teleological framing of the Vietnamese past prevents us from seeing the multiplicity and complexity of Vietnamese historical experience and the different possibilities for the future that were present at the time. Communist nationalists led by Ho Chi Minh were certainly important, as this book will demonstrate; but communist Vietnam was but one of several possibilities. No history of this country is complete without taking into account competitor states and their leaders, such as French Vietnam (1858–1955) under men like Albert Sarraut, Pierre Pasquier, and Léon Pignon; the Associated State of Vietnam led by Bao Dai (1949–1954), the Republic of Vietnam forged by Ngo Dinh Diem, Nguyen Van Thieu, and others (1955–75), and highland Vietnams marshalled by Léopold Sabatier, Deo Van Long, and Y Thih Eban.
These alternative polities undeniably failed, often miserably so, but their stories spanning more than a century deserve our attention if we are to understand today’s Vietnam. After all, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam had to engage with each in order to prevail, starting with Sarraut’s in the 1910s. As one astute observer put it in relation to the American Civil War, ‘to exclude all thoughts of the alternative is to lose contact with how it felt to peer into the inscrutable future’. In short, it is no longer necessary to write the history of ‘Vietnam’ as the unique story of the winners. We need to recognize that the history of Vietnam, like any other place in the world, is a series of interlocking forces and people, occurring and acting at specific points in time and space, each generating its own range of possibilities and eliminating others at the same time. So let us try in the pages that follow to peer into the Vietnamese past with at least a few ‘thoughts of the alternatives’.6
MODERN VIETNAMS
We might also try to think of ‘modernity’ in similar terms. Much ink has been spilled over the rather slippery notions of the ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’, to say nothing of ‘postmodernity’. For many, ‘modern’ simply means something ‘recent’, not ‘old’. For partisans of this periodization, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries usually fit the bill best for delineating modern Vietnam as something recent. For others, ‘modern’ refers to a specifically Western historical transformation which culminated in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century with the advent of industrialization, urbanization, secularization, scientific and bureaucratic rationalization, capitalism, and the rise of the nation-state. One can quibble over a precise definition—and there may never be one—but most would agree that these are the main ingredients making the ‘modern’.
According to this school of thought, Western colonial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exported these components to the non-Western world in one form or another. It could be done independently as in the case of Japan, Thailand, and Turkey, or it could arrive through direct Western colonial connections as in Vietnam, Burma, or Algeria. Until recently, most histories of modern China began in 1842, with the Chinese defeat at the hands of the British during the First Opium War. Only then, the story goes, did China embark on the road to ‘modernization’ and ‘progress’. As one specialist of China has pointed out, we tend to use the term ‘un-modern’ to refer to ‘what existed in Europe before 1800 and what existed in the rest of the world until Europeans arrived and changed the way people did things or alternatively, until European ideas and opportunities were made available to people in other parts of the world to adopt and adapt to fit their local situations’. The history of ‘modern Egypt’ starts the same way, with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion in 1798 and the opening of the country to the West.7
A number of scholars writing on Vietnam and colonial Indochina subscribe to this Western-centric conception of modernity and its accompanying periodization. Pierre Brocheux goes so far as to make the French ‘colonial moment’ the cornerstone of his recent history of modern Vietnam. In their landmark general history of French Indochina, he and co-author Daniel Hémery insist on the modernizing nature of the French colonial project. While they certainly recognize colonialism’s exploitative character and the importance of pre-colonial Vietnam’s achievements, the authors conclude nonetheless that French colonialism introduced modernity in the form of infrastructure, urbanization, science and medicine, capitalist development, bureaucratic rationalization, and the nation-state. Like the 1842 date for those writing on China or 1798 for Egypt, Brocheux and Hémery’s account begins with the point of Vietnam’s colonial contact with the French in 1858. More than anything else, they argue, French colonialism created modern Vietnam from that point in time. They are by no means alone. I myself once attached similar importance to French colonial modernity in the making of Vietnamese nationalism at the expense of exploring pre-existing connections and modernities.8
That Western colonialism was a major modernizing force in Vietnamese history, few would disagree. I do not. However, the periodization, defining, and framing of all that is modern in Vietnam in such terms comes with real problems. For one, they create a ‘great divide’ in Vietnamese history between a ‘pre-colonial’ or a ‘pre-French’ past and a much more detailed ‘nineteenth- to twentieth-century Vietnam’ during which the country becomes ‘modern’. Secondly, by assuming that modern Vietnam began with the French attack of 1858, we lose sight of the complex set of pre-existing historical phenomena and a plurality of ‘lost’ or ‘multiple modernities’ that went into the making of a series of ‘new Vietnams’. The meritocratic Confucian examination system and the rational though contested bureaucracies it nurtured were essential components of modernity present in China, Korea, and Vietnam. Voltaire waxed lyrically over China’s laws, institutions, and secularism in the eighteenth century, contrasting them favorably to the things he so wanted changed in France. Thirdly, far from replacing the pre-existing bureaucracy and its civil servants, French administrators often grafted their colonial state on to it as an effective mechanism of social control, an efficient method of political administration, and a source of information without which ‘the colonial moment’ would not have lasted for long. French efforts to develop Vietnam’s roads, canals, dikes, and the lucrative Asian rice trade also built on pre-existing projects. Minh Mang’s reign in the early nineteenth century deserves perhaps more than a footnote in the history of ‘modern Vietnam’. His administrative policies were aimed at territorial integration, state centralization, bureaucratic rationalization, economic development, and ideological homogenization. This is not to say that he achieved all of this (he did not!), but rather to suggest that modernity is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. It exists in multiple forms, at different points in time and space, and often blends with and builds upon pre-existing ones. It can disappear as fast as it arrives. It can even co-exist with the ‘un-modern’. French and Vietnamese women did not obtain the right to vote until 1945.9
While there is no need to construct an Asian-centered approach to modernity in the place of the Western-centered one, it is useful to keep these wider spatial and temporal considerations in mind in the pages that follow, for they allow us to see the Vietnamese past in new ways. This is why I have intentionally left open the precise timing of modernity’s birth in Vietnam, rather than insisting that ‘modern’ Vietnam only emerged from 1858 onward. This makes room for multiple modernities, colonial grafts, and wider connections that the Franco-centric approach misses. It is admittedly a more complicated story, pushing ‘the modern’ further into the past than most are accustomed, but such an open-ended periodization makes it a much more interesting one. One of the reasons why the brief Chinese colonization of Vietnam in the early fifteenth century was so important was because it provided the Vietnamese with access to some of the most modern gunpowder weapons of the time, a sophisticated bureaucratic model, and a colonial ideology needed for their own rethinking and building of a new Vietnam long before the French arrived on the scene.10
IMPERIAL VIETNAMS
This latter point is important; for by starting in 1858 one would not know that today’s Vietnam is the product of its own colonial history, not just the French one. One need only look a little before 1858 to see that the French were not the first colonizers in the Mekong delta or the Red River basin. The latter zone, the cradle of Vietnamese civilization, was part of a Chinese empire for a millennium. Once independent of China, the Vietnamese began building and pushing their own empire southward, establishing protectorates over far-flung regions, promoting settlement colonies, alternating between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ methods of rule over distant, multi-ethnic peoples, testing cultural assimilation, and developing their own mission civilisatrice. They were far from finished when the French arrived. And rather than stopping Vietnamese expansion in its tracks, the French often reinforced the Vietnamese imperial project in many places by making them their privileged partners in building another colonial state. The French colonial project in Indochina thus carried within it a second, pre-existing Asian one, that of the Vietnamese themselves. These intersecting imperial projects are central to understanding modern Vietnam.
Some will object to this focus on ‘pre-French’, Asian empires in the making of modern Vietnam. However, such critics forget that colonial connections and empire-states were not unique to the West or to the nineteenth century. They are part of a wider global history made up of empires running from one end of Eurasia to the other since antiquity. Qing colonial expansion into central Asia—Tibet, for example—in the eighteenth century is vital to understanding China today. Indeed, by ignoring the role of pre-existing Asian colonialisms, we fail to pick up on the complexity of countries such as China and Vietnam and the novelty of their territorial forms. This wider view of imperial projects helps to guard against projecting homogenizing notions of ethnicity and national identity back into and on to a much more diverse and, in the end, fascinating past. It also provides a glimpse into state formation as a work in continual progress and sheds light on how power operated in Vietnam across time and space before, after, and often right through ‘1858’. And lastly, like their Chinese, Russian, American, and French counterparts, Vietnamese colonialism generated a complex historical experience marked by violent confrontations with indigenous peoples whom they conquered as well as peaceful exchanges with them, each of which has had important ramifications to this day. Today’s nations are often the historical products of pre-existing, multi-ethnic empires. Vietnam, like the United States and the Russian Federation, is the product of several imperial pasts, including its own.11
DIVIDED VIETNAMS
The need to go beyond 1858 is important for a final reason of periodization. For if one ventures one last time beyond this conventional date, it becomes rapidly clear that Gia Long’s creation of a unitary Vietnam in 1802 was in fact more the exception than the rule. After breaking with each other violently in 1627, the Trinh and Nguyen military lords came to rule Vietnam as two separate states (but under the nominal unitary rule of the Le dynasty) until the Tay Son brothers charged out of the central highlands to add a third polity in the late eighteenth century. That is over a century and a half of a divided Vietnam. There was thus nothing necessarily aberrant about the existence of ‘two Vietnams’ during the second half of the twentieth century. Nor was the twentieth century the only time during which Vietnamese fought each other. Internecine conflicts racked Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and long before), some of which expanded into regional conflagrations with the Thais and the Chinese, as they would in the late twentieth century. Nor was inter-ethnic violence unheard of as non-Viet peoples, like the Cham, Tai, and the Khmer, resisted Vietnamese conquest, or attacked the Viet to expand their own empires. The implications of all of this are important to understanding Vietnam to this day.12
While this book admittedly zooms in on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the three pre-1858 chapters provide more than just rapid ‘historical background’ on the ‘pre-French period’. They are an important part of this book’s goal of providing a new account of the plurality of Vietnams from the past to the present, one that avoids creating a great divide at the ‘French colonial moment’ of 1858, between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘modern’ and ‘un-modern’, ‘before’ and ‘after’, ‘unified’ and ‘divided’, ‘Viet’ and ‘non-Viet’. Some will object that by exploring Vietnam’s colonial, diverse, and divided past, I’m engaging in a postmodernist fetish for ‘deconstructing’ or, worse, that I will end up legitimating ‘conservative’ justifications for foreign intervention in Vietnam. I politely disagree. If I take issue with anything in the politics of writing the Vietnamese past, it is a persistent tendency inside and outside Vietnam to exceptionalize it. This is particularly the case in American diplomatic history where the Vietnam War remains central to critiquing—or defending—‘American empire’ and ‘American exceptionalism’. While I have no problems taking American empire and nationalism to task, I do not believe that we have to exceptionalize the Vietnamese and their past to do so. Those who do so run the risk of practicing a form of Western-centered Orientalism that Edward Said warned us against.13
Balancing all this has been extraordinarily difficult. I have inevitably left out things some would have wanted to see. I certainly could have solved this problem by increasing the size of the book and the level of detail. However, I remain convinced that bigger is not always better. The reader will be the judge of how well I have done. Will specialists of Vietnam find anything of interest for them in this book? I do hope so, for I owe each of them my deepest gratitude. For those specifically wishing to teach and study from this book, I have created a website which includes an online bibliography and material on the historiographical debates about Vietnam, as well as short essays on differences in interpretation among scholars.