CHAPTER 8
NGUYEN BINH GREW up poor in the northern province of Hai Hung. He dropped out of school at an early age and drifted to Haiphong in search of work. In 1926, he tried his luck in Saigon, where he found jobs as a laundry boy and dockworker. He also discovered nationalist politics, joining a local branch of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD). Two years later, the colonial police caught up with him and sent him off to Poulo Condor. Binh’s street smarts served him well in the rough-and-tumble world of the colonial prison. Overcrowding was rampant as massive arrests flooded cells with communists and nationalists after the revolts of the early 1930s. Both these groups wanted the French out of their country, but neither trusted the other. Ideological differences got so bad that Binh lost one of his eyes in a cell-block brawl before the new Popular Front government in France freed many political prisoners, including Binh.
Although Binh declined offers to leave the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, some of the most important Vietnamese communists knew who Binh was when he resurfaced in the north years later at the head of an armed group of miners trying to take over the coast near Haiphong from the defeated Japanese. When word of such exploits reached the new president of Vietnam in September 1945, Ho Chi Minh invited him to the capital and made Binh an offer he could not refuse—the command of the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the Mekong delta. Nguyen Binh’s prewar knowledge of the south, legendary charisma, meticulous organizational skills, and burning nationalism trumped his non-communism. Dressed in a Japanese military gabardine and boots, with a long Mikado sabre hanging from his side, Binh accepted Ho’s offer and left for the south in late 1945.
The similarities to the political situation of the 1860s (discussed in chapter 3) are striking. Ho needed Binh to fight an angry war against the reinvading French, but the president also needed his southern general to stop fighting when ordered, so that the government could negotiate a way out of full-scale war. Unlike Truong Dinh (Tu Duc’s commander in the south eighty years earlier), Nguyen Binh respected Ho’s orders to cease fighting in October 1946. But like Truong Dinh, Nguyen Binh had no faith in the invaders’ desire to stop fighting. After the brutal French assault on Haiphong in November 1946, he warned the commanding general in the north, Vo Nguyen Giap, to forget negotiations and to begin a scorched earth-policy from then onward: ‘When we will have won, we will rebuild.’ As it turned out, Binh was right. The French wanted war; but this time they had badly underestimated their adversaries, and it would cost everyone dearly.1
REMAKING COCHINCHINA AS A COLONIAL WEAPON2
The French had no idea when they dislodged the DRV authorities in Saigon in September 1945 that they were embarking on a war that would end their colonial presence in Indochina a decade later. Although the Second World War had generated great global change, leaders of all political colors in France continued to see the maintenance of their empire as an essential, achievable, and an entirely legitimate goal. Vichy and Gaullist France had both relied heavily on the empire during the war. With the Allied liberation of France in 1944, continued control of Indochina and North Africa would help the new French leadership rebuild their war-torn country economically and allow it to remain a player on the world scene. Even French communists eyeing power in August 1944 concurred that the government should not bow to any attacks that ‘would undermine its sovereignty as a great power, nor its strict right to administer overseas territories under its control’.3
For the French in 1945, there was nothing necessarily inevitable about decolonization. The new political class taking over in Paris was willing to reform colonial structures; but leaders on the left and right had no intention of liquidating the empire in Indochina or of transforming it into an independent member of a commonwealth as Winston Churchill’s Labor successor did for India. Charles de Gaulle ordered the re-conquest and the re-establishment of colonial sovereignty to all of Indochina. The Brazzaville Conference of 1944 and the Indochina Declaration of 1945 discussed in the previous chapter would serve as the blueprints for rebuilding France’s Asian colony in the form of a pentagonal Indochinese federation within a French Union. As de Gaulle, the liberator of France, thundered to one of the rare Indochina specialists who dared to give a warning about the dangers of ignoring Vietnamese nationalism: ‘Dear Professor, we will win because we are the strongest’. There was much continuity in French colonial thinking.4
As in the nineteenth century, the military had the job of re-conquering Indochina and rebuilding the colonial state. General Philippe Leclerc, the commander-in-chief of the newly constituted Expeditionary Corps for the Far East, presided over the re-occupation of Indochina as his troops began debarking in southern Vietnam in October 1945. When the former Governor General Albert Sarraut declined the offer to run postwar Indochina, de Gaulle named a naval officer as high commissioner, Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu. Another military man, Jean Cédile, arrived in Saigon in September as Commissioner of Cochinchina, and, with the support of the British, did his best to re-establish French sovereignty. In the north, Jean Sainteny, Sarraut’s son-in-law, landed in Hanoi as the Commissioner of Annam and Tonkin.
The French armed forces did what every army does when involved in colonial conquest—they immediately became involved in state-making. Once troops had dislodged enemy forces, officers began restoring new provincial and district administrations and village councils. The government’s instructions to commanding officers in the field were clear: ‘to re-establish everywhere a Franco-Annamese administration like the one prior to 1939’. Most welcome were former Vietnamese civil servants, ones who had avoided the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), left it, or got off the fence once it was clear that the balance of power had favorably changed. Their bilingualism, contacts, and detailed knowledge of the local administration and villages made them priceless intermediaries for the French officers, who, with a few exceptions, knew little of Indochina.5
Unlike the situation in the nineteenth century, these newly arriving officers could also rely on a group of French colonial civil servants to help them. These men had served for years in Indochina. Whereas many in the British colonial service in Southeast Asia had perished under the Japanese or were sidelined by the arrival of a new generation of colonial administrators, the Japanese had kept on the colonial civil service in Vichy Indochina until March 1945 (in order to rule indirectly through the French). Despite icy first encounters with Gaullists suspicious of such collaboration, the practical matters of colonial conquest almost always trumped intra-French ideological differences. Cédile, Sainteny, and Thierry d’Argenlieu needed these experienced French administrators as badly as they did the Vietnamese notables in the countryside. Few in the end were purged. As a member of the special committee in charge of this question said of one zealous defender of Pétain’s former national revolution: ‘He’s a monarchist, a Maurrassian. He has his views, but we can’t hold them against him’. Instead they transferred him into the army as a political advisor. In 1948, he became the chief of cabinet to the high commissioner in Saigon.1945 was not always a point of rupture in French colonial rule. Again, there was much continuity.6
Indeed, these French Indochinese hands not only returned to their positions, but they actually advanced their careers and exercised great influence over colonial policy and state-building. Who were they? Highest on the list was Léon Pignon, a graduate of the elite Colonial Academy. He had begun his administrative career in Indochina in the early 1930s under Pierre Pasquier. He returned to France in the late 1930s, joined the Free French, and became one of de Gaulle’s top colonial advisors in Algiers. He participated in the Brazzaville Conference and helped craft the Indochina Declaration. He returned to Indochina in 1945 as the highest-ranking political advisor to Jean Sainteny and High Commissioner Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, and then became high commissioner himself in 1948. Upon arriving in Hanoi, he immediately contacted his longtime colleagues and, thanks to his Resistance credentials, began recruiting them into the new colonial project. Pignon’s close collaborator and specialist in colonial law, Albert Torel, began fleshing out the Indochinese Federation and its constitution. Marcel Bazin and Charles Bonfils rebuilt the police and security services, while Jean Cousseau helped resuscitate the pre-existing administration. Despite their different politics and wartime experiences, these administrators were all agreed, like the Gaullists they joined, that they had to restore the colonial order and that the Indochinese Federation was the best way to do it. Deeply influenced by the ideas of Sarraut and Pasquier, not to mention a heavy dose of Orientalism, these men were also diehard supporters of colonial monarchy, convinced that the peasant masses were deeply conservative and would follow their kings once order was restored. The only thing the peasants wanted, Torel told anyone who would listen, was ‘the return of French peace’.7
Unable to retake northern Indochina at the outset, French authorities concentrated first on creating the federal state for Indochina and its local governments below the sixteenth parallel. The Indochinese Federation would consist of eleven administrative bodies each run by a French commissioner (these bodies would cover economy, security, political affairs, diplomacy, etc.). A new French high commissioner (the former governor general) would lead the federal government, assisted by five more commissioners (formerly résidents supérieurs) in charge of each of the five territorial governments of the federation—Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin, Laos, and Cambodia. Although plans began for creating an Indochinese parliament to provide an increased voice for the colonized in local affairs, the French controlled the colony’s diplomacy, defense, and commerce. The Indochinese piastre remained the official currency. Ho Chi Minh’s new national currency, the dong, would have to go, as would the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s government bulletin which announced its decrees. On 3 January 1946, the Indochinese Federation’s official bulletin (the Journal officiel de la Fédération indochinoise) appeared in Saigon. Two states, one national under Ho Chi Minh in the north (see chapter 7), the other colonial under Thierry d’Argenlieu in the south, co-existed and were in competition with each other in 1945–6, violently in the south, indirectly in the north. Each entity claimed territories and people it did not fully control in the other’s domain. It was an explosive condominium of rival sovereignties that simply could not last.8
Leclerc’s men quickly overthrew the nationalist government Son Ngoc Thanh had created in Cambodia under the Japanese in mid-1945. Having been crowned by Vichy and then sidelined by the nationalists, King Norodom Sihanouk was only too happy to welcome the French back while the Indochinese administrators were thrilled to have a monarch on their side. A preliminary accord signed in January 1946 made Cambodia the first of the five projected free states (‘Etats libres’) to join the emerging Indochinese Federation. A few months later, with the withdrawal of the Chinese, the French reoccupied Laos, drove out the Lao Issara (‘Free Lao’) government that had taken power, and signed another preliminary accord adding Laos (and a second monarch, Sisavang Vong), as the second of the five projected free states.
From Saigon, Colonel Cédile began assembling a provisional government for what the French still considered to be their formal colony of Cochinchina. Unlike in Laos and Cambodia, however, the French had no emperor to whom they could turn. Bao Dai had joined the nationalists. So had the southern leaders of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen. The assassination of Sarraut’s ‘faithful few’, Bui Quang Chieu and Pham Quynh, further reduced the field and left many moderates sitting on the fence. A former Constitutionalist, Nguyen Phan Long, steered clear of the French in 1945, warning them of the dangers of their hostility to ‘Vietnam’—the word that everyone now knew to mean a unitary nation-state.
The French settler population did anything but stand still. Europeans had lived in Cochinchina since the late nineteenth century and by 1945 were concentrated in its urban centers. Like their counterparts in Algeria, they were hostile to the rise of colonial nationalism and tried to contain it at every turn. The advent of a nation-state would end their privileged positions at the top of the colonial ladder. Most also opposed the democratization of colonial institutions, fearful that the ‘native’ majority would vote them out of Indochina. Compared to the European population in Algeria, whose numbers in 1954 totaled one million out of a total ‘native’ population of eight and a half million (11.5 percent), in 1945 only 32,000 French lived among a population of twenty-four million in ‘Vietnam’, a miniscule 0.13 percent. Moreover, the Japanese occupation had humiliated the settlers and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s one-month chaotic rule over the south had struck fear into their hearts. The outpouring of joy the French showed upon welcoming General Leclerc to Saigon in October 1945 was as real as the shame one young nationalist felt on witnessing French troops arrive in Hanoi to start replacing withdrawing Chinese ones six months later: ‘On the sidewalks French civilian residents of Hanoi stood cheering. On the balcony each one of us was brushing away tears’. Emotions on all sides ran high.9
Leading figures in the French community like William Bazé, Maurice Weil, and Henry de Lachevrotière lost no time presenting themselves to arriving Gaullist officials as the experts on all things Indochinese. Bazé and Lachevrotière published the main newspapers for French settlers in Saigon; had important economic interests in the Mekong delta; and were both the offspring of Franco-Vietnamese marriages. All three had avoided the stain of collaboration during the war and forged good relationships with Gaullist officers. Although these local politicians welcomed de Gaulle’s desire to re-establish colonial rule by force, a federation was not enough. Aware of their vulnerability, settlers promoted a strategy of Cochinchinese separatism designed to prevent the colony’s absorption into any Vietnamese unitary state—colonial, national, or federal. For Weil, Bazé, and Lachevrotière, this meant insisting on Cochinchina’s special legal status as a French colony and playing up the uniqueness of the ‘south’. Pignon’s civil servants backed them and together they brought Cédile and Thierry d’Argenlieu on board. Separatism seemed all the more necessary for all of them when the French government agreed in the March 1946 accords to hold a referendum on the unification of Cochinchina with the unitary ‘Vietnam’ of the DRV above the sixteenth parallel. Not only would this transform French Indochina into a triangular entity (DRV Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), but it would also force the settlers and French civil servants to share power with Ho Chi Minh’s entourage in a unitary colonial Vietnamese state housed within an Indochinese federation. Such a modification was illegal, they insisted, since, as a colony, only the French parliament could change Cochinchina’s status.
From mid-March, this triumvirate—the French settlers, the High Commissioner, and his Indochinese hands—accelerated its efforts to create a local Cochinchinese government as the next ‘free state’ of the Indochinese Federation, before any referendum could be organized or Ho could reach a separate deal in France to unify ‘Vietnam’. The settlers formed Cochinchinese political parties, mobilized their papers for the separatist cause, recruited like-minded ‘native’ southerners (usually those with French citizenship), and fired off scores of petitions to politicians in Paris to make sure that Cochinchina remained French and retained its own identity. Separatist journalists fanned a virulent ‘anti-Tonkinese’ campaign in the press. For them it was important to stress that Cochinchina was unique, different from its northern counterpart, and to promote the idea that ‘Cochinchinese’ and ‘Tonkinese’ Vietnam were so different that the unification of these two territories (Cochinchina and DRV Vietnam) would be impossible. In so doing, they conveniently forgot that the ‘native Cochinchinese’ had substantially migrated to Cochinchina from the north over the centuries. Even Lachevrotière’s mother had been born in Tonkin.
The triumvirate leaders understood that they could not establish an ‘all white’ Cochinchinese regime. Faced with a de facto national government in Hanoi, as well as many pro-unification Vietnamese moderates in Saigon, not to mention the infinitesimal French population, they felt compelled to bring on board like-minded southerners for a Cochinchinese solution to work. Settlers turned to ethnic Viet elite members with whom they had worked before 1945. Most were bourgeois, large landowners, held French citizenship, shared the settlers’ anticommunism, had served in the French army, or had protected the French population against Japanese and nationalist molestation. Thanks to his Freemason contacts, Maurice Weil had the greatest success in recruiting a core group of ‘native’ partners, like Nguyen Van Thinh and Nguyen Van Xuan.10
These southerners had their own reasons for joining, however. Nguyen Van Thinh was a doctor, a Freemason, and head of the Democratic Party. A committed republican, he was convinced that the new leadership in France would finally introduce long-promised democratic reforms that would protect bourgeois interests the best. He wanted, above all, to end the chaos the Japanese and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had unleashed over the summer. He spurned national revolution and its attendant radicalism. He was a large landowner and a major rice-grower (who had tried to organize famine relief for northern peasants in 1944–5). His close collaborator, Nguyen Van Xuan, was also a Freemason and a colonel in the French army (Pétain had personally decorated him for bravery during the First World War). A member of the French Socialist Party, he too believed that this ‘new France’ would implement liberal change. Nguyen Van Tam was a hard-working rural administrator whose virulent anticommunism attracted everyone in the triumvirate community. In 1940, he had played a central role in helping the colonial police smash the communist uprising in Cochinchina. His hate for the communists was visceral. His loyalty to the French was unshakeable. The Japanese tortured him for it, and that was before forces loyal to the DRV killed two of his sons, something Tam never forgave. He had committed himself to helping the French return. All of these men had ties to the French and important economic interests to protect; but they were not a monolithic or static group.
Thierry d’Argenlieu accepted the settlers’ separatist strategy and their Cochinchinese recruits as long as that fitted with de Gaulle’s orders to rebuild a pentagonal Indochinese federation. Like so many French officers of the time, the admiral had also served in the empire and shared settler hostility toward the rise of native nationalism. In February 1946, Thierry d’Argenlieu supported the creation of the Cochinchinese Consultative Council under the leadership of the (French) Commissioner for Cochinchina. Like his Vichy predecessor, the high commissioner appointed all the council’s members on the recommendation of the Cochinchinese commissioner, Jean Cédile. Nguyen Van Thinh became its president, seconded by Nguyen Van Xuan. But what troubled the triumvirate most was that Ho Chi Minh could try and go around them all, by reaching a deal in Paris to make Cochinchina a part of ‘DRV Vietnam’ and keep it in the federation for a few years, in order to try and nudge the French out later on. This was exactly what Ho hoped to do by holding the French to the accords which they had signed in March 1946. And this is also why, on 1 June, the day after the DRV president left for France, the high commissioner announced the creation of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Cochinchina without formal approval from Paris. This was the first of several faits accomplis the French authorities in Saigon engineered to prevent an accord on Cochinchina from being reached above their heads in Paris.
That said, the high commissioner had no intention of transferring power to a Cochinchinese government either. The French ruled through the federal level, being in charge of the colony’s security, budget, diplomacy, and defense. The Cochinchinese solution was designed foremost to serve as a weapon to protect the colony from the nationalists and as a lever to force the French government’s hand if need be. As DRV and French delegates met in Fontainebleau to follow up on the March accords, Thierry d’Argenlieu and his Indochinese supporters unilaterally organized a conference in Dalat in the summer of 1946 to move ahead on the Indochinese Federation, including the consolidation of Cochinchina as a ‘free state’ within that polity. Paris acquiesced again, ensuring the failure of the negotiations in Fontainebleau. Led by Lachevrotière and Bazé, the settlers organized a vocal lobby to push the separatist cause—the Union for the Defence of French Achievements in Indochina (Union pour la défense de l’oeuvre française en Indochine). Cochinchina, they repeated, was a French colony and thus had to remain autonomous in the federation. There could be no referendum, no unification, and there was no place for it in for the DRV.
This was a very hard line leading straight to war and Thinh, Xuan, and their like-minded allies began to plead for moderation during the Fontainebleau Conference. They objected to the ethnic divisions the triumvirate promoted, its implacable opposition to negotiations with Ho, and started talking about the need to bring union-minded, non-communist Cochinchinese moderates on board in order to expand the government’s support beyond the French settlers. Widely read newspapers in Saigon favorable to the cause of union had already been making the case for negotiations. However, such talk drew the immediate wrath of the Cochinchinese French, who suspected these moderates of ‘nationalism’ and condemned their policy as dangerous ‘appeasement’. Politicians like Thinh suddenly found themselves suspected of being ‘anti French’ by one group and ‘anti-Vietnamese’ by the other. Compared to Ho, who could openly embrace the nationalist cause, symbols, myths, and a state, Thinh could do little. Timid and uncharismatic, he had no popular support among the southern Vietnamese. His only political base and military guarantee was that of the triumvirate. Unlike Le Van Duyet’s revolt against Minh Mang’s unification project in the early 1830s, it was French settlers who led the southern separatist charge in the late 1940s. Meanwhile, Vietnamese moderates distanced themselves, unwilling to compromise themselves with such colonial hardliners or run the risk of assassination by DRV supporters. For many Francophile Viet, it was this ferocious colonial hostility to Vietnamese nationalism even in its tamest forms that led them to avoid the French or to join the DRV, not their support of communism.11
Nguyen Van Thinh was extremely naïve to think he could change the triumvirate’s tack. He learned this in November 1946, when his opponents on the Cochinchinese Consultative Council demanded that he reshuffle his cabinet by the fifteenth of the month in order to get rid of the ‘appeasers’ and ‘nationalists’. Colonial authorities closed pro-unification newspapers, imposed strict censorship, and harassed those favorable to negotiations with Ho. When Thierry d’Argenlieu refused to meet a desperate Nguyen Van Thinh on 9 November, the president now recognized his Cochinchinese republic for what it really was—a colonial political weapon designed to stop all Vietnamese nationalists, including himself. Upon arriving at work the next morning, Thinh asked his collaborators not to disturb him as he walked into his office. There he quietly threw one end of a rope around the lock of an elevated window, fastened the other around his neck, and hung himself. The note he left behind read: ‘If the majority of our people did not understand me, I want you my friends, the intellectuals from the North, South and Center, you who carry the destiny of the country on your shoulders, to stop playing a criminal wait-and-see game. You must react. I die in order to show you the path of duty, liberty, and honor’. This would not be the last non-communist nationalist to die in such tragic circumstances, trapped by powerful partners, overcome by events, and misled by political naiveté.12
Thinh’s suicide did nothing to halt Saigon’s march to war against Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. Two weeks later, Thierry d’Argenlieu, fully backed by his new general, Jean Valluy, focused their attention on the north when they challenged the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s right to collect customs duties in Haiphong. (It was a perfect example of how one state moved in on the other’s sovereignty.) In so doing, these men intentionally transformed what could have easily remained a minor altercation into a pretext for conquering this strategic port city by force and setting off a war. When the Vietnamese delayed, Valluy authorized the shelling and aerial strafing of Haiphong and its surroundings on 23 November, resulting in 3,000 mainly civilian deaths. One month later, the DRV Vietnamese lashed out in Hanoi to protect their shrinking territorial sovereignty. At 20:00 hours on the evening of 19 December, their backs to the wall, they attacked. Full-scale war in Indochina was now underway. The high commissioner now had the excuse he needed—Vietnamese ‘perfidy’—to force the French government’s hand (a liberal-minded socialist, Léon Blum, was taking over in Paris) and destroy the nation-state which was blocking the restoration of French sovereignty to all of Indochina. From the sidelines, the now retired de Gaulle, the man most responsible for starting the First Indochina War, cheered on his admiral, as did the old Indochina hands led by Léon Pignon. The high commissioner immediately prohibited the official use of the term ‘Vietnam’ in favor of ‘Cochinchina’, ‘Annam’, and ‘Tonkin’. To colonial minds, one said ‘Annamese’, not ‘Vietnamese’, with the semantic significance being all about territorial sovereignty. The French did not go to war on 19 December 1946 in order to stop communism. They went to war to stop Vietnamese nationalism and to rebuild their Indochinese colonial state. And had war not happened on the nineteenth, it would have occurred on another day.13
Meanwhile, French authorities sought feverishly to win over groups disenchanted with the DRV. In early January 1947, as fighting continued in Hanoi, the mastermind of French policy in Indochina, Léon Pignon, wrote to the high commissioner: ‘Our goal is clearly fixed: Transfer to the internal Annamese level the quarrel we have with the Viet Minh party and involve ourselves as little as possible in campaigns and reprisals which must be the work of the native adversaries of this party [. . .].’ Within weeks, French civil and military officials opened secret negotiations with the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen leaders in the south. That the first two groups had collaborated with the Japanese and that the third had massacred French civilians in Saigon in September 1945 mattered little in this classic divide-and-rule strategy. By mid-1947, the French had rallied most of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao forces (the Binh Xuyen crossed over to support them a year later), setting off a ferocious, albeit already simmering civil war with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam supporters in the south. (See chapter 7).14
A SAVAGE WAR OF SOVEREIGNTIES15
What the French could not fathom as Valluy’s troops went on the attack in 1947 was that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam would survive the assault, assert its territorial sovereignty, continue to build an army capable of protecting it, and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to maintain a state of war. Upon taking power in mid-1945, the DRV leadership did everything possible to train, outfit, and deploy an army. The protective cover provided by the Chinese occupation troops contributed greatly to this process. In mid-1946, the Vietnamese Defense Force (Ve Quoc Doan), the first independent Vietnamese army since the late nineteenth century, came to life. The Defense Force numbered around 100,000 troops, with 60,000 active in the north and 40,000 in the south. It operated under a general staff and was divided into organizational units (mainly battalions and platoons). Added to this were around 50,000 young militiamen and women operating mainly in the cities at the outset. Unsurprisingly, many came from Franco-Japanese youth and colonial scouting organizations.16
All of them were badly trained, poorly armed, and militarily inexperienced. With the outbreak of full-scale war, the army received strict instructions to avoid set-piece battles with the French, whose superior firepower and experience could destroy the fledgling army at the time when the state needed it most. Guerilla warfare was the mot d’ordre. Texts on partisan struggles in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the French Resistance during the Second World War circulated widely in quoc ngu translation. The head of the fledgling army, Vo Nguyen Giap, adapted Maoist ideas to the Vietnamese context while the party’s general secretary, Truong Chinh, explained why their resistance would inevitably win by relying on its own strength and self-sufficiency. Japanese fighters who had crossed over to the DRV cause, European deserters, and colonially trained Vietnamese officers provided crash courses in military science and command. Meanwhile, dozens of French-trained technicians and engineers created cottage industries to produce rudimentary but operational guns, grenades, and even bazookas. What they couldn’t produce they tried to recover from the enemy, or import clandestinely from the French-occupied zones. Until the Chinese communist victory in late 1949, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had no committed foreign backers and few modern arms.17
None of this stopped the government from militarizing the villages it controlled, creating militias, flooding villagers with hate-filled nationalist propaganda, or even organizing war games for children. Besides harassing the Expeditionary Corps with hit-and-run operations, the DRV also launched attacks on those who they thought would collaborate with the French and their state-making project. The government had already assigned this task to their commander-in-chief in the south, Nguyen Binh. This legendary, one-eyed non-communist from Tonkin we met above directed a war of terror against provincial and districts towns to ensure that the Vietnamese did not participate in French separatism or undermine the national government’s control over people, resources, and territory. By 1947, the southern military and security services had killed hundreds of colonially trained Vietnamese bureaucrats who had been working with the French and kept even more on the sidelines. This is where Vietnamese partisans hurt the French most during the first half of the conflict—on the administrative front. As in the late nineteenth century, the French had little choice but to employ under-qualified people in their place, with all the risks this entailed for good governance and colonial legitimacy.18
Hanoi and Saigon became important strategic targets, too. Hanoi, the former capital of French Indochina and now of the DRV, was the site of a brutal two-month urban battle which initiated the thirty-year-long war for Vietnam. Between 19 December 1946 and 17 February 1947, two thousand young civilian militiamen running on high levels of patriotism, but with few arms and little experience, held out in a maze of streets, houses, and shops making up the capital’s old quarter, as French tanks and paratroopers moved in under the cover of artillery barrages and aerial bombing. On the outskirts of the town, a handful of DRV battalions did their best to block French reinforcements rushing in by road. Intense firefights resulted. When the battle ended, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had lost around a thousand civilian militiamen and soldiers. The French probably lost 500 soldiers. The old quarter of Hanoi lay in a heap of rubble and remained largely deserted until 1948. If sovereignty over the capital had returned to the French, the battle nonetheless allowed the DRV to transfer its national capital to the countryside, along with several thousand civil servants, engineers, radio operators, nurses, and doctors.19
Saigon was just as important. Between 1946 and 1950, Nguyen Binh conducted a terrorist assault on Saigon, targeting French installations and Vietnamese collaborators. Bombs went off in milk bars, while agents lobbed grenades where settlers were living. In April 1946, in a spectacular raid designed to stop separatists in the south, Binh’s commandos blew up part of the French naval arsenal built in the 1860s. ‘Destroying Saigon’, he told his subordinates later, ‘is a legitimate and humane action’. While this ‘grenading’ of the city never halted Saigon’s bustling activities, it affected the way people went about their daily lives. Protective fencing and iron mesh went up around establishments. ‘All of Saigon has shut itself up behind bars’, the French war correspondent Lucien Bodard later recalled. ‘It was then that Saigon became something of a prison. It wrapped itself in wire netting—boutiques, bistros, and dancing halls enrobed themselves in a veil of metal. Safe on the inside, the French could hear the detonations as they ate and drank’. One Chinese restaurant owner serving a settler clientele finally decided to ‘enclose his establishment in a thick wall of iron’. One dined in peace, but one did so ‘in a cage’.20
Vietnamese civilians in the countryside had no such cages to protect them in a war that was in so many ways all about them. And this is why the First Indochina War is not a simple tale of urban terrorism, rural counterinsurgency, or the well-known story of two armies locked in an epic showdown at Dien Bien Phu. It was above all a sustained and increasingly savage battle about controlling people, occupying territory, gathering information, and building states—in the cities to an extent, but especially in the countryside. Unlike the European wars pitting two pre-existing states and their conventional armies against each other in a battle to knock the other out, the Indochina War was the home to embattled embryonic states, colonial, national, and hybrid ones, each of which was determined to contest or indeed suppress the other’s sovereignty. Armies thus fought not just to defeat the adversary’s troops in the field, but also to extend their states’ control in the most minute of ways on the ground, in collaboration with frontline administrators, security services, and propagandists. The French army would carry this baggage with them to Algeria; the Vietnamese would soon take it to Laos and Cambodia, and, like the Chinese, export their models of control still further into the non-Western world.21
In the countryside, where in 1945 at least 80 percent of the Vietnamese population resided, civilians did their utmost to keep themselves, their families, and their loved ones out of harm’s way. The French Expeditionary Corps doubled in size from 53,000 troops in January 1946 to 110,245 in 1947 before reaching its peak of 204,000 men in 1954. Most of the troops came from outside France—above all from French Africa and from Vietnam itself. Seventy-three thousand battle-hardened troops from the Second World War’s European front served in the French Foreign Legion during this conflict. Together, the southern militias of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen counted 50,000 men and women (perhaps more) organized into militias, outfitted and armed by the French. The Expeditionary Corps rolled into villages in jeeps, armored trucks, and tanks. Troops touted machine guns, lobbed grenades, and carried flamethrowers as barking German shepherd dogs pulled at their chains during search-and-destroy missions. Officers radioed in mortar barrages, while the air force dropped paratroopers, bombs, and, from 1950 onward, American-supplied napalm.
Despite the advantages of such firepower, French forces were spread too thinly to control all of Indochina all of the time. When paratroopers launched the attack at Cao Bang in October 1947 to capture Ho Chi Minh’s retreating forces, the nationalist government and army simply melted into the jungle. French troops soon found themselves dispersed over vast, rugged territories they could never hold for long, for lack of sufficient numbers. As a result, the remote hills of the north, the deepest jungles of the Mekong, and a vast stretch of central Vietnam were left still in the hands of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Commanders in Indochina would repeatedly request more troops, but the French government could hardly match the resources in men and materials that the Americans would later deploy. French commitments to other parts of their disintegrating empire made it harder for the regime to free up men and machines. In 1947, troops destined for Indochina had to divert to Madagascar to smash the nationalist resistance there. And yet Paris refused to impose military service on its population in France or to allow their Vietnamese allies to create their own army until 1951. The DRV also avoided imposing the draft until late 1949, for fear of alienating populations whose support it needed.
As a result, neither the French and their allies, nor the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and theirs, ever possessed sufficient force or weapons to control all of Vietnam all the time. Instead they all administered competing, archipelago-like states, whose sovereignties and control over people and territories could expand and shrink as armies moved in and out and the balance of power shifted accordingly. Borders among these competing states expanded and contracted like sponges being squeezed. In 1952, the DRV only administered 25 percent of the southern population as opposed to 75 percent in central Vietnam and 53 percent in the north. Of the total estimated population of 22.3 million people living in Vietnam in 1950, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam controlled perhaps half of them. Even in supposedly French-controlled villages, the DRV often sent in its security agents, spies, and administrators during the night to affirm their sovereignty and then ceded the same zones during the day to their adversaries. But it could work the other way, too. This also meant that hundreds of thousands of villagers passed from the control of one state to another during the First Indochina War—and often back again, several times. And this perpetual transfer of sovereignty and the attendant people was hardly a peaceful one. All of this affected religious fiefdoms and highland zones, too. Out of loyalty, fear, or a rational calculus to ensure security, villagers dealt with a variety of agents running these invisible but very real and always perilous middle grounds. As one nationalist later recalled, these were spaces where sovereignties intermeshed and gun-toting administrators competed for people’s loyalty:
Still, life in the buffer zone became more and more difficult and risky. In every village, there were some people who worked as spies for either side. In my village, a man of thirty years old volunteered to play a double agent to protect the village from both French and Viet Minh terrorism. With help from villagers, he regularly reported military intelligence information to the French by a ‘secret letter box’, an intermediary, in the adjacent village. At the same time, he provided the Viet Minh intelligence services with what he collected in the French-controlled areas. Sometimes the French paid him money for his information. Among the teen[ager]s, I was the only one he trusted. He told me about some of his tasks in exchange for my help in writing short messages for reports. I was sure that my village had some others who worked for both sides. Owing to these spies, my village was not terrorized in the second half of 1949.22
Like French mayors faced with heavily armed German soldiers patrolling their villages a few years earlier on, in the Second World War, more than one Vietnamese village headman repelled collaboration with the ‘resistance’ since it could draw reprisals of the worst kind from the occupiers. Indeed, as colonial ‘pacification’ rapidly turned into a drawn-out affair, angry French Union troops unable to let loose their firepower on their invisible adversaries adopted increasingly violent measures toward nearby civilian populations suspected of harboring, feeding, or protecting enemy combatants. The discovery of enemy propaganda or Democratic Republic of Vietnam-stamped papers in a village, but above all the loss of one soldier to a guerilla sniper or booby trap, could spark a frenzy of violence against nearby civilians. This included the bombing and burning of entire villages as well as the indiscriminate killing of men and women, young and old. The use of torture spread throughout the French army quickly—at what rate, no one knows, but both French and non-communist Vietnamese memoirs leave no doubt that it was all too real. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam authorities also tried to bring the use of torture under control, especially against other Vietnamese. Rape became a disturbing weapon used by the Expeditionary Corps, as did summary executions. Young Vietnamese women who could not escape approaching enemy patrols smeared themselves with any stinking thing they could find, including human excrement. Decapitated heads were raised on sticks, bodies were gruesomely disemboweled, and body parts were taken as ‘souvenirs’, and Vietnamese soldiers of all political colors also committed such acts. The non-communist nationalist singer, Pham Duy, wrote a bone-chilling ballad about the mothers of Gio Linh village in central Vietnam, each of whom had lost a son to a French army massacre in 1948. Troops decapitated their bodies and displayed their heads along a public road to strike fear into those tempted to accept the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s sovereignty. Massacres did not start with the Americans in My Lai, or the Vietnamese communists in Hue in 1968. And yet, the French Union’s massacre of over two hundred Vietnamese women and children in My Trach in 1948 remains virtually unknown in France to this day.23
In such bloodstained asymmetrical encounters, choice and loyalty were rarely written in black-and-white or heroic terms. Vietnamese villagers did what millions of civilians had just done across Eurasia during the Second World War: they hid, dug tunnels, turned camouflage into an art form, lied through their teeth, wet their pants, or said whatever their interrogators told them to say to escape severe bodily harm. Most grabbed their children and ran. Many local administrators left their jobs, carefully crossing from ‘free’ to ‘occupied’ zones, and vice versa. Property owners abandoned their land. Peasants fled the countryside in ever larger numbers, leading to ever-greater levels of urbanization, a trend that would reach astonishing levels as violence intensified further under the Americans. The population of Saigon-Cholon tripled from 500,000 in 1939 to 1.7 million in 1954. War, not industrialization, explains this phenomenon. Those who could, mainly the urban rich and well-connected, started to leave Vietnam or sent their children abroad. One thing is certain: between 1945 and 1954, civilians in the countryside died in far greater numbers than any other social group, including regular troops. The DRV could never unleash such violence against civilians in France, who remained completely safe from and largely uninterested in France’s colonial war in Indochina. No Vietnamese government has ever revealed how many deaths their populations suffered; but the number of 500,000 offered by one of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s officers at the end of the First Indochina War seems reasonable, indeed a minimum, since we have no estimates for civilian deaths in the other states opposed to the DRV. One highly respected French scholar put the number of war dead at one million.24
This militarization and brutalization of Vietnamese society created a sea of hate, surging on waves of raw human emotion. Ideology certainly counted in the decisions people made, as did family ties and intimate friendships; but young men, women, and even children often joined one side or the other because of traumatic experiences, such as the murder, rape, or torture of a loved one. European settlers who lost family members to unspeakable atrocities committed by the Vietnamese in Saigon in September 1945 and in Hanoi in December 1946 learned to hate in ways they never could have imagined a few years earlier. Madeleine O’Connell, the daughter of Irish immigrants who had come to Indochina to make their future, armed her plantation in the Mekong delta and herself so heavily that DRV agents referred to her as ‘Madame Cannon’. Democratic Republic of Vietnam agents killed her in a firefight on Christmas Day in 1947 in order to send a message to settlers to get out. Enraged, her children dug in and hung on until 1975 (as did 15,000 other French settlers). Vietnamese children also witnessed extraordinary violence and were too often subject to it. Of the 175-strong children’s guard (‘Ve ut’) participating in the Battle of Hanoi as guides and messengers, one third died. A veteran of the wars for Vietnam, Nguyen Cong Luan speaks in chilling detail of the horrific things he witnessed as a child and to which he grew all too easily accustomed. ‘Even the animals’, he recalled, knew how to get out the way of French-led patrols:
Whenever the French [Union] soldiers came, all kinds of sounds subsided. Even domestic animals—beasts of burden, pigs, and dogs—seemed to try to make the least noise. All kept quiet and acted frantically as if they could apprehend [the] fear conveyed by the behavior of panic-stricken villagers. Most dogs ran about to find a nook of safety in dense bamboo groves. Some pigs sneaked into concealed holes when their owners yelled, ‘French coming!’ Two of the dozen buffaloes in my village would act accordingly to the shout ‘Lie down!’ when they were under fire while fleeing the village. When the French [Union] soldiers were gone and the villagers returned to their normal activities, all those animals became lively again and made their usual noises and sounds.25
War-generated hate manifested itself in language, too. The dehumanization of the Vietnamese was such that the French army was soon using the term ‘les Viet’ to refer not only to the faceless enemy, but even to the majority population over which troops were instructed to re-establish colonial control. War correspondents like Lucien Bodard and veterans like Marcel Bigeard and Erwan Bergot popularized it in French. One can hear the term used in France to this day (though not necessarily in the same negative or racist way). The DRV combatant learned to infuse the ancient word ‘giac’ (bandit) with extremely powerful emotions to dehumanize the French enemy, while the term ‘Viet gian’ (traitor) criminalized those Vietnamese ‘collaborating’ with the French in ways difficult to convey strongly enough in English. Anticommunist nationalists, working with or against the French, used the word ‘Viet cong’ (Vietnamese communist) to describe pejoratively Ho’s Vietnam long before the American army and press corps globalized it in English. Post-1945 Vietnamese history cannot be reduced simply to ‘war’. However, the savage, sustained violence the Indochinese conflict unleashed directly influenced Vietnamese mentalities, society, and the states emerging from it. The French and the very transnational army that did most of the fighting for them did not emerge unscathed either. Veterans from Senegal and Algeria carried ‘things’ with them long after this war ended. They also left behind some 200,000 children, who struggled tragically to find their place in Vietnamese societies that wanted to forget them much as the French shunned children born of Franco-German unions during the Second World War.26
THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM (1945–50): A COLONIAL GRAFT?
So what was this state that opposed the French, other Vietnamese states, and then the Americans, so fiercely? For all its nationalist rhetoric, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was in many ways a colonial creation at the outset. Upon taking power, nationalists did everything in their power to make the colonial state theirs before the colonizers could return. This was hardly surprising. Nationalists across the Afro-Asian world did much the same. In 1945–6, however, republican Chinese troops of occupation—not communist ones—also contributed to the success of nationalist state-building by preventing the French from returning immediately to areas above the sixteenth parallel and by refusing to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Pragmatism once again trumped ideology in modern Vietnam, this time between Chinese non-communists and Vietnamese communists.27
Many colonially trained Vietnamese bureaucrats stayed on in their jobs in 1945–6, whether they were moved by nationalism, indecision, or simply driven by the need to put food on the table. A veteran later recalled how his father, a French-trained railway attendant, continued working under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as if nothing that revolutionary had occurred: ‘He worked for the revolution, still as a civil servant. He did not work for the sake of ideology but just out of the diligent, conscientious devotion of a civil servant. He just continued to follow his profession and to do his job.’ Many, of course, supported the new national government on patriotic grounds. Literate young people at ease in quoc ngu found a new source of upward mobility and careers as the national government turned to them to fill new and vacant jobs. Many found employment in newly created mass organizations run by the Viet Minh. DRV state-building was always weaker in the south, however, where the French returned immediately, and they and their Vietnamese allies were always stronger there.28
Nowhere was the interface between the colonial and the national more evident than in the pages of the Journal officiel de l’Indochine as it imperceptibly became the Cong Bao Dan Quoc Viet Nam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s government bulletin. Past issues of the Cong Bao provide a day-by-day, decree-after-decree account of how the young Vietnamese republic assumed operation of the colonial state’s people, services, offices, and materials, as it went about transforming them in national ways. Decrees instructed civil servants to remain in their jobs. Government authorities resumed trade, reopened forms of transport, and continued the telephone, telegraph, and postal services. Rice finally circulated to help alleviate the recent famine. Decrees authorized the requisition of the Pasteur Institutes, the Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient, hospitals, colonial primary and secondary schools, as well as the Indochinese University. High on the list, too, were colonial printing presses, newspapers, radios, paper, and typewriters, essential to the bureaucratic paper flow. Other edicts established the national flag (a yellow star plastered against a red background) and anthem while colonial street names changed to national ones. In a bid to shore up popular support, the government did away with several colonial taxes, including the much-resented head tax, but maintained others essential to the financial well-being of Vietnam. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam even relied on the colonial police infrastructure and lower-level staff to help in building, consolidating, and protecting its own security and intelligence services.29
But all was not a colonial graft. Territorially, nationalists did not announce a Republic of Indochina. They could have. The Javanese, after all, had become ‘Indonesian’. In mid-1945, the national idea of Vietnam prevailed, not least of all because Lao and Khmer elites wanted nothing to do with Indochina—which was, for them, a Vietnamese as much as a French colonial structure. The majority of Vietnamese nationalists wanted ‘Vietnam’ and its unification. Gone were the colonial terms for ‘Tonkin’, ‘Annam’ and ‘Cochinchina’. In their place appeared the officially sanctioned nationalist terms: ‘Bac Bo’, ‘Trung Bo’, and ‘Nam Bo’. A good nationalist said ‘Vietnamese’ in 1945, not ‘Annamese’. New history books celebrating Vietnam’s heroic national past and timeless patriotic resistance poured off the presses, praising the heroic Trung sisters and ancient Vietnamese resistance to foreign domination. School children began singing patriotic songs while young scouts saluted Ho Chi Minh. That said, this seemingly national space was not necessarily the same one that had existed before the French arrived. In establishing colonial frontiers by force in the late nineteenth century, the colonizers accorded large swathes of land and people to ‘Cochinchina’, ‘Annam’, and ‘Tonkin’ at the expense of others. Although Vietnamese nationalists vehemently contested the division of Vietnam into three parts, they rarely disputed the colonially established outside edges of the country, including the maritime ones in the South Seas and the Gulf of Thailand.
A modern nation-state required a homogeneous citizenship for those who belonged to it. Whereas the French had created a hodgepodge of legal categories for their ‘colonial subjects’, the new republic established an inclusive definition of citizenship transforming almost all of those residing within its territory into Vietnamese nationals (‘dan cong Viet Nam’). Significantly, this legislation also transformed national minorities (‘dan toc thieu so’) into citizens. In 1946, the ministry of the interior required all Vietnamese who were eighteen and over to carry citizenship cards. Similar cards existed for mass organizations such as the Viet Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party. In theory, identification papers provided decision-makers with a better knowledge of their populations. They allowed for the more efficient allocation of resources, the recruitment of manpower and soldiers, and the organization of the census needed to prepare a budget and set taxes. And of course the Democratic Republic of Vietnam used such cards to incorporate parts of the population into its political realm. However, this bureaucratic modernity was not a simple colonial carryover from the French. Twentieth-century Vietnamese politicians drew upon pre-existing Sino-Vietnamese models of administration in building the postcolonial state. Village councils continued to operate as they had under the French or even the Nguyen.
Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese communists also relied on a united front to help them control and mobilize people. Ho Chi Minh was the driving force behind the creation of the Viet Minh in 1941. Through it, the communists took power in August 1945 and created the DRV state. They intentionally kept the Viet Minh alive as a political party and simultaneously transformed it into a mass nationalist organization. The communists used it to incorporate, control, and mobilize as many parts of Vietnamese society as possible, with the triple goal of running a state, a war, and eventually a communist revolution. Though small in numbers at the outset, dedicated party militants relied on young patriotic but mainly non-communist volunteers to organize an impressive network of national salvation associations, federations, and unions based on religious affiliation (Catholics, Buddhists, Cao Dai followers), gender and age (women’s and youth federations), ethnicity (the overseas Chinese and Khmer), and professional status (workers, civil servants, artists, and peasants). Anticolonialism and national independence guided them. Friends, schoolmates, sweethearts, and family connections did more to build up these organizations in the late 1940s than the ability to cite the Marxist-Leninist canon, while French brutality increased membership better than any single propaganda drive or pamphlet the communists could concoct.
Unlike the Front de libération nationale (Front for National Liberation) that would fight the French over Algeria, the communists ran the Viet Minh nationalist front, and it mattered. The problem was that many Vietnamese intellectuals and bourgeois nationalists avoided the Viet Minh precisely because of its communist core. This, in turn, undermined the Indochinese Communist Party’s ability to bring people into its fold. Like those repelled by the French colonial hold over Cochinchina in the south, hundreds of highly trained and badly needed non-communist patriots climbed on the fence in the north because of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s communist hue. Of course French colonial and Vietnamese anticommunist propagandists were only too happy to keep them there, by transforming the ‘Viet Minh’ into a synonym for ‘the communists’. The Chinese republic’s occupation allowed the opposition to publish newspapers, organize political parties, and speak in public against the communists, the Viet Minh, and even Ho Chi Minh.30
The need to widen the national front became critical for the Indochinese Communist Party in mid-1946 with the departure of the Chinese army and the subsequent outbreak of civil war above the sixteenth parallel. In May 1946, as the communists mobilized the army and the police to destroy the anticommunist opposition parties, the government, pushed by the Indochinese Communist Party, created a new national front called the Association of United Vietnamese People (the Hoi Lien Hiep Quoc Dan Viet Nam) or the Lien Viet for short. Ho was honorary president of this ‘super’ national front, which regrouped all patriotic individuals who had not yet joined the Viet Minh within it. From this point, the Viet Minh existed in an even more confusing relationship with the Lien Viet until the latter formally absorbed it in 1951.
Despite their ideological differences, Vietnamese nationalists of all political colors agreed on one thing—the importance of running a modern, independent state complete with a presidency, cabinet, ministers, and a parliament. The Japanese-backed government led by Tran Trong Kim had already demonstrated this. Days after delivering the declaration of independence on 2 September, Ho Chi Minh signed universal suffrage into law and called for national elections to form a constituent assembly, an official government, and for the purpose of the elaboration of Vietnam’s first constitution. Lively debates characterized the organization of the first national elections in January 1946. This experiment in postcolonial democracy gave birth to the country’s first national assembly in March. The chairman of the parliament was none other than the man the French had so badly humiliated through their failure to allow for fuller colonial democracy after 1918, Huynh Thuc Khang. The DRV leadership also wanted a parliament in order to demonstrate to liberal-minded Vietnamese and to the colonialists that they were on the side of modern republicanism.
While there is no denying the authenticity of the debates surrounding the creation of Vietnam’s first constitution and national assembly, this early experiment in multiparty politics was largely forced on the communists, due to their own weakness, the Chinese nationalist presence, and the need to show the French and the world that they were more nationalist and democratic than communist and dictatorial. Chinese protection allowed the opposition parties to publish newspapers, assemble publicly, and criticize the communists. Under Chinese pressure, Ho postponed the elections until January 1946 in order to give the opposition more time to prepare for it. He also accepted the hardly democratic request of reserving in advance seventy seats in the future assembly for the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance, including the reservation of the vice-presidency for Nguyen Hai Than (who was of the Revolutionary Alliance) and three other important ministerial positions for the nationalists. That these non-communist parties backed by the Chinese pushed for this hardly made them any more democratically inclined than their adversaries.31
This first flawed experiment in multiparty politics only lasted above the sixteenth parallel until late June 1946. When the Chinese army pulled out, the communists attacked those in the Vietnamese opposition parties (the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Vietnamese Revolutionary Alliance and Dai Viet) with the police and the army, supported in part by the French army. By September 1946, what was left of the opposition parties fled to southern China, languished in Democratic Republic of Vietnam prison camps, went into hiding, or crossed over to the French. The communist-run security services closed independent opposition newspapers, confiscated their presses, and ‘reformed’ the remaining Vietnamese non-communist nationalist parties (the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Revolutionary Alliance) and integrated them into the Lien Viet as the communist-commanded DRV now moved one step closer to becoming a single-party state. When the national assembly met for the second time on 28 October 1946, of the total number of 444 deputies, only 291 were present (distances were long; war was on in the south). Of this number, the opposition parties counted only thirty-seven delegates. Continued communist-directed operations and violence against their political competitors were such that on 8 November, the day the General Assembly voted for the constitution, only two members of the opposition were present out of the total number of 240 delegates there. Liberal intellectuals and politicians in the DRV parliament accepted this in order to maintain national unity, all the while hoping in secret that Vietnamese communists would respect the constitution guaranteeing parliamentary democracy. They would be disappointed, like their counterparts who had allied with the French colonialists. Indeed, the French leaders may have ridiculed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s elections in late 1946, but, if they did so, they had conveniently forgotten that in mid-1946 they themselves had named the new leaders of the Cochinchinese ‘republic’, censored the press, and had been careful to avoid any kind of vote on national unification. Democracy would never come easily to Vietnam, neither under the French, nor their communist adversaries.32
Administratively, the DRV government maintained the three regions into which Minh Mang had divided the country in the 1830s. Each region (north, south, and center) was divided into smaller internal zones in early 1948, each of which, in turn, administered its provinces, districts, and villages. The government exercised power through the creation of ‘popular committees’, then via ‘administrative committees’, which ultimately became ‘administrative and resistance committees’ (‘uy ban khang chien hanh chinh’), with the outbreak of full-scale war. This four-tiered hierarchy (zones, provinces, districts and villages) constituted the administrative backbone through which the Democratic Republic of Vietnam operated until 1954. The twelve ministries making up the central government transmitted instructions downward to their corresponding offices present at each level of the administrative chain (offices for the interior, the economy, justice, education, etc.). Working via this structure, bureaucrats collected taxes, dispensed justice, maintained order, and schooled children. The Viet Minh and Lien Viet also operated parallel offices located within the administrative and resistance committees. State administration and mass mobilization were designed to work in tandem.33
While the Viet Minh was the largest political party and nationalist front in late 1945, the communists did not yet rule a single-party state. For one thing, the Indochinese Communist Party was numerically weak, with only 5,000 members in September 1945. Communists maneuvered adroitly in the background, directed the police and the army, and did their best to control the real positions of power in the government and mass organizations. Secondly, in 1945–6, the communists were on the defensive with the arrival of Chinese republican troops and the Vietnamese opposition parties they protected. Fearful of a Chinese-backed coup, the ICP ‘dissolved’ itself in November 1945 and accepted a coalition government. Of course, the Indochinese Communist Party never sacrificed itself and operated secretly; but a party that chooses to dissolve itself, even on paper, is not in a position to be totalitarian.
What worried them most as they scrambled to survive the French onslaught of 1947 and get the Democratic Republic of Vietnam up and running in the countryside was the painful realization of just how dangerously weak the communist hold over the state and the population was at ground level. The ICP’s secret parallel administrative hierarchy rarely reached below the provincial level before 1950. Even though mass membership drives increased the number of communists to 500,000 by this date, the overwhelming majority was poorly trained, unreliable, opportunistic, and often illiterate. Indeed, the transformation of the Indochinese Communist Party into the Vietnamese Workers’ Party in 1951 was designed in part to give the communist leadership an excuse to purge its bad elements, streamline its size, and improve quality control. Vietnamese communists led by Ho Chi Minh and Truong Chinh were dedicated communists; they dreamed of Lenin’s democratic centralism; and they made plans for communizing Vietnam. But communism, like Confucianism before it, did not appear magically everywhere in Vietnam, nor did everyone embrace it. Indeed, the last thing the party wanted to do as it headed for the hills in 1947 was to alienate non-communist social groups whom it direly needed to run ministries, the army, schools, and hospitals. This was even more important as the French and non-communist Vietnamese nationalists started to build alternative Vietnams of an anticommunist kind.