Fire in the Lake (11 page)

The prewar French hostility to the sects — the Cao Dai as well as the Hoa Hao — arose out of the suspicion that they were subversive organizations intent upon raising a peasant rebellion against colonial rule. This suspicion was largely unfounded. The main achievement of the sects was to fill in the traditional social and religious gaps the French had left open in substituting their colonial administration and economic system for that of the old empire. The sects built up secular administration and military forces during the Second World War, but they did not intend to take on the French directly by military force. They were merely waiting for the will of Heaven to change, at which point (so they were convinced) the French would disappear and all the Vietnamese would become Cao Dai or Hoa Hao. Their true rival was not so much the French state as the Catholic Church in Vietnam that under the very eyes of the French clergy had developed much the same kind of political control over its adherents as the native sects possessed. But even with the Catholic Church, rivalry did not imply conflict: heaven was either with them or it was not. Traditionalist, mystical, the sects were the real voices of the Mekong Delta, of the Vietnamese who had left behind them in Tonkin and Annam the philosophic strain of Mahayana Buddhism and rationalist Chinese social thought. The Delta would not on its own give rise to a revolution.

Having neither agricultural nor industrial potential, the second
pays
, Annam, did not interest the French. Hue, the seat of the emperor, remained alone with its past, walled in by its court rituals, its illusions of empire. In a country of poor farmers and poor aristocrat-scholars, it became a haven for the old Confucian values, for a fierce traditionalism, and a concomitant xenophobia. While the emperor and the mandarins of the court gave their submission to the French, many of the central Vietnamese scholars withdrew from the capital and continued their resistance in the provinces. In the 1880’s and 1890’s Phan Dinh Phung and others led armed revolts against the French in the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh. A participant in one of these early revolts, a scholar called Phan Boi Chau, left Vietnam in the early years of the twentieth century to look for foreign support for an anticolonial movement. Chau was a monarchist who saw the necessity for modern education and reform. Looking for foreign assistance and education for Vietnamese students, he went to Japan, the only country in Asia to become a modern nation on its own terms. Along with the Prince Cuong De, his chosen contender for the throne, Chau remained in exile for most of his life. He was unable to obtain substantial help from either the Chinese or the Japanese, and he was restricted from playing an active role in Vietnam by his own Confucian elitist notions of politics. His followers founded the Dai Viet or “Greater Vietnam” Party, a small secret society that was eventually to attract a number of the highly placed Vietnamese civil servants. But the early central Vietnamese resistance movements bore other kinds of fruit. They created a tradition of anti-French activity, particularly in the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh. Ho Chi Minh was born in Nghe An in 1890, the son of a provincial mandarin. During the 1920’s a group of civil servants in the Nghe-Tinh region created the Tan Viet, the New Vietnam Revolutionary Party. But as time went on and the French established themselves throughout the rest of the country, Annam gave place to Tonkin as the center of the anti-colonial struggle, the new territories to the Red River Delta, which had been the old base of empire.

The north, too, had suffered from the colonial regime. Because the northern delta possessed no new land available for development, the French had simply expropriated the village land to build their own farms. With the addition of a heavy tax burden the economic squeeze on the peasantry became acute. Few Vietnamese in Tonkin profited from French enterprises, as they did in Cochin China. The new wealth of Tonkin lay in her minerals and her cheap labor, and the mines belonged exclusively to the French. In the 1930’s Tonkin possessed the only industrial base in Vietnam — a collection of mines and several factories for the production of textiles and cement. It also possessed the beginnings of an industrial proletariat. The wages paid to the mine and factory workers ought in some measure to have compensated for the agricultural dislocations, but they did not, for while the wages were calculated on the basis of the barter economy of the village, the taxes and the prices of goods were calculated on the moneyed city economy. The French pocketed the difference.
²⁷
For the sake of survival many of the industrial workers divided their time between the factories, where they could earn money for taxes, and the villages, where they could raise food. This continual coming and going created a link between the modern city and the traditional countryside that did not exist in the south.

In Annam the French had left the mandarins to themselves, but in Tonkin they created the beginnings of a new class — not a group of wealthy landowners, as in the south, but a middle class composed of administrators and professional men.
²⁸
Under the pressure of the First World War they had found it necessary to break into the traditional educational system and train Vietnamese to fill the secondary levels of the colonial and commercial administrations. After that war they abolished the Confucian schools throughout Vietnam and replaced them with a small primary education system, two lycées, and the faculties of law and medicine at the University of Hanoi. In Tonkin, where the loyalties of the mandarins to the old regime remained as strong as they did in the center, the new students grew up on a dangerous blend of modern Western education and Vietnamese tradition. As one historian has contended, the French in this respect made a most impolitic calculation: the Western-educated students were few in number, but by the 1930’s there were still too many of them to fill the available jobs.
²⁹
In particular there were too many schoolteachers, for, believing in the unconditional value of French education, the French trained schoolteachers without regard for their own economic priorities. They trained such men as Vo Nguyen Giap to educate his own compatriots to become Frenchmen. The chief difficulty was that while the schoolbooks spoke of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French in Vietnam did not apply those principles to the Vietnamese. Because the French left no opportunities open for the educated class, the effect of modernization in Tonkin was to split the society on different lines than in Cochin China — not city/country, or modern/traditional, but French/Vietnamese.

In the 1920’s a group of political organizations very different from their predecessors began to emerge in Vietnam, and mainly out of the north. Their memberships remained small, but they were composed largely of French-educated civil servants, schoolteachers, and professional men who saw the need for a social program and for the participation of the mass of the people. Their aim was not merely to rid the country of the French but to bring about revolutionary change in the life of the society. Among these parties numbered the Tan Viet and the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, the Vietnam Nationalist Party, or VNQDD, and the Communist Party of Indochina. Of the three the VNQDD was by far the most prominent in the 1920’s. Modeled on the Chinese Kuomintang, it attracted some thousand adherents in the area of Hanoi to undertake a program of anti-French agitation and terrorism. But like the Tan Viet, it suffered from parochialism and from the lack of a well-thought-out political and social strategy.
³⁰
The French police arrested most of its leading members in 1930–1932, and the rest went into exile in China to survive through the Second World War only by the grace of the Chinese Kuomintang. In 1925 Ho Chi Minh founded the Revolutionary Youth League which was to be the nucleus of the Indochinese Communist Party. Initially the League undertook a much less adventurous policy of building up committees in the three
pays
and converting many of the other radicals. In 1930, just as the worldwide depression hit Vietnam, forcing down the price of rice and plunging the small farmers throughout Vietnam into bankruptcy, the Party undertook its first large-scale action with the organization of workers and peasants in the Nghe-Tinh region. The results were spectacular. For a year the people of the region demonstrated against the colonial regime, assassinated local officials, created a government of village soviets, and carried out a land reform. The revolt did not spread to other areas of the country, and from a historical perspective it might be said to have been premature, for the French still possessed the force to put it down in a most brutal manner.
³¹
But the Communist Party survived, gained experience, and waited for a new opportunity to emerge.

The opportunity came as a result of the Second World War. The war marked a caesura in Vietnamese history as it did in that of most countries. After the fall of France in 1940 Japan took over French Indochina by diplomatic fiat. The Vichyite governor sent by Paris to Saigon agreed to continue to administer the territory while the Japanese used its ports for military bases and its raw materials for trade within the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In the spring of 1941 Ho Chi Minh and his comrades founded the Vietnam Independence League or the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, known as the Viet Minh, and with the cooperation of the Tho, one of the montagnard tribes of the north, built up bases in the mountains and assembled a small guerrilla force to combat the Japanese. While Ho’s policy was in line with that of the Chinese Communists, his support came from one of the warlords under the nominal suzerainty of Chiang Kai-shek, who dominated the provinces just across the Vietnamese border.

The Viet Minh’s opportunity arrived with a sudden change in the status of the country in 1945. A few months before the Allied landings in the south, the Japanese overthrew the French administration in a sudden
coup de force,
and set up an “independent” Vietnamese government over Tonkin and Annam, composed of the local Vietnamese functionaries and under the aegis of the current Nguyen emperor, Bao Dai. In mid-August, 1945, Ho Chi Minh moved into Hanoi with a thousand men and, given no resistance, proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The French moved quickly into Cochin China with their British allies. But it was the Chinese Nationalists that under the Potsdam Agreements occupied northern Vietnam for seven months following the allied landings. When the period was up and the French made ready to move back into the north, Ho Chi Minh had already been ensconced in Hanoi and Hue for nine months claiming to represent the sovereign nation of Vietnam.

Since the autumn of 1940 our country has ceased to be a colony and had become a Japanese outpost… we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated, our people have broken the fetters which for over a century have tied us down; our people have at the same time overthrown the monarchic constitution that had reigned supreme for so many centuries and instead have established the present Republican government.
³²

Ho Chi Minh’s claim for Vietnamese independence was not just the legalistic rationale it seemed to many Frenchmen at the time. Despite its haphazard character, the Japanese coup had made a profound impression on the Vietnamese. In escaping out of Hanoi at that moment in history, Paul Mus, a Free French agent and scholar of Asian religions, had seen its effect on the villages: the day before the coup the French were the respected masters of the country, the day after it they were uninvited guests with the worst of reputations. Later, Mus realized that he had witnessed one of those strange shifts in Vietnamese life where the resentment, so long repressed, turns suddenly to revolt. To the Vietnamese the sight of French surrendering to Asians meant that the French had, as it were, lost their winning streak; in the old language, the will of Heaven had changed and the French were no longer the rulers of the country.
³³
This shift was felt by the ministers of the Bao Dai government, the former faithful servants of the French, as much as by the most traditional of the villagers.
³⁴
For the Vietnamese it was now merely a question of time before the French disappeared altogether. Incomprehensible as it was to the French, this conviction was to remain with most Vietnamese throughout the war for independence. The issue was merely who now possessed the Mandate of Heaven.

Ho Chi Minh’s revolution in Hanoi succeeded mainly because there was nothing to oppose it. Apart from the Viet Minh, the country had no national leaders ready to assert independence and take control of the government. The Japanese-sponsored government in Hanoi was no more than a group of functionaries with no political experience and no ideas for the future. Presented with a
fait accompli
by the Viet Minh, many of the officials joined the new movement; the Emperor Bao Dai himself proposed to serve it for a time, and three northern Catholic bishops added their approval. The test of Ho Chi Minh’s government lay not in domestic political confrontation but in a military trial with the French armies — in the war that Ho Chi Minh hoped to avoid. Not long after the French reoccupation of the south the North Vietnamese leader began negotiations with the French authorities in Saigon and Paris.
³⁵
For a time there seemed a possibility that the French would grant the Vietnamese their independence: the Free French commanders in the south had little sympathy with the local Vichyites, and the coalition government in Paris included the supposedly anti-imperialist left-wing parties. But gradually the negotiations broke down. The French Communists and socialists defected to the imperialist cause, now a matter of national pride for the newly liberated France, and the French colonial authorities deliberately sabotaged the diplomatic bargaining process. In February 1947 the French army took control of Hanoi, and the Viet Minh, now numbering some one hundred thousand throughout the country,
³⁶
retreated to their bases in the countryside and prepared for a war of resistance.