2 - Vietnam 101: Origins to 1946

The debate over the American effort in Vietnam has a feature rarely, if ever, found when discussing modern wars: while inevitably focused on the period from 1954 to 1975, this debate also involves looking back two millennia in the history of the Vietnamese people. One reason for this journey into the distant past, which may seem an irrelevant digression to those new to the subject, is the widely accepted portrayal of the Vietnamese as a people who for centuries resisted Chinese aggression and/or attempts at assimilation and in the process forged a national identity with a powerful tradition of fiercely opposing any and all foreign efforts to compromise their independence.¹ With regard to the Vietnam War, this heroic David versus Goliath narrative implicitly supports the orthodox argument that the United States, as part of its worldwide effort to contain Communism, erred by intervening in what essentially was an internal fight in a country whose people were intensely averse to interference by foreigners. This error presumably was compounded by the fact that in siding with the non-Communist South Vietnamese, the United States was supporting the weaker side in that struggle. Orthodox commentators then often link this presumed US error to how they assess the relationship between Communism and nationalism in Vietnam and therefore to what they see as another mistake: the failure to recognize the true nature of Vietnamese Communism as led by Ho Chi Minh. They stress that immediately after World War II and subsequently during the Cold War, it was local Communists who led the struggle against the foreign presence in Vietnam. Between 1946 and 1954 Vietnamese Communists fought against France, which was trying to retain de facto colonial control of Vietnam, and between 1954 and 1975 against the United States, which in effect was preventing the unification of Vietnam by supporting a weak and illegitimate non-Communist regime in the southern half of the country. Impressed by this effort and by the strength of the Communists as opposed to the weakness of their opponents, orthodox commentators tend to conclude that Vietnamese Communism was the only legitimate expression of Vietnamese nationalism during those years.² They therefore argue that the United States erred, to its detriment and to the great misfortune of Vietnam, by not recognizing that fundamental reality.

Revisionists challenge the validity of this narrative. To be sure, the saga of steadfast Vietnamese resistance to constant pressure from mighty China and their resultant national identity that proved impervious to accepting any foreign rule does draw on actual events scattered throughout a historical record of two millennia. And between 1946 and 1975 Vietnamese Communists did lead the struggle in their country against, first, French colonialism and, next, American anti-Communism. But these facts constitute only threads and patches of the complete historical tapestry, and revisionists justifiably argue that by themselves, and in the absence of other pertinent information, they constitute an inaccurate picture of the historical record.

With regard to Vietnam and China, a thorough examination of that long relationship reveals its complexity and, most notably, that it involved significant benefits to the Vietnamese as well as hardships. Indeed, Chinese influence was central to the development of the culture and identity of the Vietnamese people. Furthermore, the Vietnamese, far from always battling outside interference, at times not only allowed but invited China, and at times other foreign powers, to intervene in their domestic affairs, most notably during disputes between rival claimants to their country’s throne. Turning to Vietnamese identity, there has not consistently been what can be called one Vietnam or one vision of how Vietnamese life should be organized; indeed, after 1500 for about two centuries there were, at least de facto, two Vietnamese kingdoms with decidedly different ways of life. Not coincidentally, the border between those kingdoms ran very close to the 17th parallel, the line that divided North and South Vietnam between 1954 and 1975. Finally, the claim that Vietnamese Communism as formulated by Ho Chi Minh and his comrades represented the only legitimate or viable form of Vietnamese nationalism from the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s is contradicted by the actual history of Vietnamese nationalism as it evolved during the twentieth century. Vietnamese nationalism came in a variety of forms; while the Communists excelled when it came to organization, propaganda skills, and military prowess, those qualities are hardly a reasonable basis on which to crown one political movement with legitimacy at the expense of rival movements whose agendas may have more closely corresponded to the overall interests and desires of the people of Vietnam.

The Vietnamese and China

The Vietnamese under Chinese Rule

The Vietnamese people have spent their entire history living under the shadow of China. Their original homeland placed them cheek by jowl with the Chinese. It centered on the Red River plain along the Gulf of Tonkin, which amounts to approximately the northern quarter of the area that currently makes up Vietnam. When Vietnam later expanded southward, that region was referred to as Tonkin, with the central part of the country known as Annam and the far south as Cochinchina. The arrival in the Tonkin region of the Chinese from the north about three millennia ago meant that the people of the Red River delta – who are most accurately described as proto-Vietnamese – found themselves living next to a giant that was by far the most powerful and advanced society in East Asia. From the first quarter of the second century BC to AD 939, the Vietnamese lived under the control of Chinese states, which were either centralized dynastic empires or regional kingdoms during times of Chinese disunity. The first Chinese state to rule over the Vietnamese, known as Nam Viet (Chinese: Nam Yu), was in fact a regional state that emerged under the leadership of a Chinese general in the wake of the collapse of the China’s Qin dynasty (221–206 BC).³ Nam Viet controlled territory on both sides of the current Chinese/Vietnamese border and had a composite Chinese/Vietnamese population. Its capital was near today’s Chinese city of Guangzhou. Chinese imperial rule came to the Vietnamese when Nam Viet was incorporated into the Chinese empire by the Han dynasty in 111 BC, that is, when the Chinese Empire conquered a Chinese regional state.

In any event, as noted earlier, living under Chinese rule for a millennium does not mean that the Vietnamese were always in conflict with their Chinese overlords or that they developed a particularly powerful tendency to resist foreign interference in their affairs because of that presumed conflict. Indeed, one does not have to be a revisionist commentator on the Vietnam War to make that point. For example, David G. Marr, an expert on Vietnamese resistance to French colonial rule, while noting the “major strains” in the relationship between Vietnam and China, also points out: “A more general account of Sino-Vietnamese contacts would certainly give attention to many decades – even full centuries – when all was peaceful and the benefits to the Vietnamese were quite considerable in such areas as commerce, tributary exchange, and educational, administrative, and technological acculturation.”⁴ Marr adds that Chinese influence was much stronger among the Vietnamese elite than among the peasant masses and that the Vietnamese elite made use of Chinese traditions and institutions to control the masses over whom they ruled. This included Confucianism, and as in China, the Vietnamese governing elite, or scholar-gentry, was chosen almost exclusively from members of the landlord class who had passed rigorous examinations based on Confucian texts. Marr thus finds it “no surprise” that during times of political turmoil and fragmentation some of those struggling for power would turn to the Chinese for help.⁵

Keith Weller Taylor is the revisionist scholar who has done the most to provide a corrective to the conventional account of a heroic and united Vietnamese people forging and preserving their identity and ultimately establishing their independence in the face of centuries of Chinese pressure and aggression. A Vietnam veteran, Taylor has served as chair of the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University and is one of the world’s preeminent scholars of early Vietnamese history. His monograph The Birth of Vietnam (1983), which covers that history from the third century BC to the tenth century AD, is widely regarded as the standard work on the formative period in the history of the Vietnamese people, and his more recent A History of the Vietnamese (2013) likewise has been highly praised, with one reviewer calling it “by a wide margin, the finest general survey of Vietnamese history ever produced in any language.”⁶

In Taylor’s view, a fundamental point about Vietnamese history is that the modern Vietnamese people exist not in spite of centuries of pressure from China but in part because of their lengthy interaction with China. Far from the Vietnamese forming their national identity in the process of resisting the Chinese, “Vietnamese history as we know it today could not exist without Chinese history.” The Vietnamese traditionally trace their roots to people who lived in and around the Red River plain before the arrival of the Chinese from the north. While that may be true to some extent in a strictly genetic sense, what Taylor calls “the distinctive features of Vietnamese culture,” and therefore what may be considered the modern Vietnamese people, do not date from that early period. Taylor stresses that the people who lived on the Red River plain before the arrival of the Chinese and the people who lived there 1,000 years later “would surely have been unrecognizable and unintelligible to each other.” During that millennium the local culture was transformed by the influence and presence of the Chinese. Art, literature, philosophy, music, technology, political thought, techniques of government, and even things such as cuisine “were derived from, inspired by, or modeled upon the ideas and practices” of Chinese civilization, among them Confucianism and Daoism. Even Buddhism, which originated in India and was destined to become the most widespread religion in Vietnam, reached the Vietnamese in the second century AD via China when Chinese monks arrived seeking refuge from troubles in their native land. The Vietnamese language, which belongs to the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family as opposed to the Chinese language family, absorbed many Chinese words to emerge as what is recognizable today as Vietnamese by about the tenth century; about three-quarters of modern Vietnamese vocabulary comes from Chinese. Meanwhile, waves of immigration produced a new elite ruling class of mixed Chinese-Vietnamese ancestry.⁷ This, in fact, was true for the local population as a whole. As Taylor puts it: “In the tenth century, the people of what is now northern Vietnam were an amalgam of settlers from the north and indigenous peoples; for centuries they had lived together, intermarried, developed bilingual habits of speech, and formed a regional perspective on imperial civilization.”⁸

Overall, life within the southernmost borders of various Chinese states brought the Tonkin people peace and relative prosperity. They absorbed aspects of Chinese culture and developed a new identity. In short, the people living in the Red River delta region between one and two thousand years ago quite literally needed the Chinese to become the people who today are known as the Vietnamese.

During that formative millennium, there were, to be sure, periodic rebellions by inhabitants of the Red River plain against the rulers from the north. But, Taylor maintains, that does not support the popular narrative of constant and heroic Vietnamese resistance to Chinese rule. Even the iconic first-century rebellion by the Trung sisters against the Han dynasty, so often touted as an example of Vietnamese national resistance to Chinese rule, was rather less than meets the eye, at least when looking through a nationalist prism. While records are sparse, those that exist suggest that high taxation was the primary cause of that rebellion. Other rebellions generally occurred during times of weakened dynastic rule from the north that left the frontier regions in the south unprotected or during times of political turmoil. Some of them did involve indigenous peoples, such as an obscure rebellion by Lao tribesmen at the end of the seventh century or an uprising by a mysterious figure known as the Black Emperor in the early eighth century. Generally, however, those who led the rebellions – such as Ly Bi, a descendent of Chinese immigrants who briefly set himself up as king of a county he called Can Xuan in the mid-sixth century – were disappointed office seekers and/or ambitious local commanders rather than leaders of the indigenous people of the region. They were not Vietnamese nationalists in the modern sense of that term.⁹

Independent Vietnam and China

Vietnam’s independence officially dates from a military victory over Chinese forces, the Battle of the Bach Dang River, in the year 939. While the battle itself featured considerable drama and brilliant strategy on the Vietnamese side, in a larger context the people of the Red River valley were not doing anything unusual given the situation at the time. In 907 the once-mighty Tang dynasty, after decades of decline, had finally collapsed, to be succeeded by a number of smaller kingdoms that had emerged to fill a huge power vacuum. In the general reordering of political power in the region, the Vietnamese won their independence from one of those successor states, which controlled two provinces in southern China. As for the area the Vietnamese controlled, it was only about the northern third of today’s Vietnam along the Gulf of Tonkin. While gradual southward expansion followed, it took until the fifteenth century for the Vietnamese to reach the 17th parallel.

What followed the Battle of Bach Dang River was not, as one often reads, a millennium in which the now-independent Vietnamese were forced to repel continued Chinese attempts to reincorporate them into their empire. The Song dynasty (960–1279), having reunited much of China under its banner by 960, did invade Vietnam in 980, only to be repelled and confronted with the realization that it lacked the strength to restore the more extensive frontiers that had existed under both the Tang and, previously, the Han. For their part, the Vietnamese hastened to follow the example of other East Asian states by assuming tributary status to the Middle Kingdom. The popular narrative of constant Chinese efforts to reassert their rule over the next thousand years simply did not occur. A second Song invasion of Vietnam in the eleventh century occurred in response to a Vietnamese incursion across a disputed border. During the thirteenth century there were three wars with the Mongol rulers of China. Those wars, however, do not mean the Vietnamese were at war with the Chinese. The Mongols were nomads from northern Asia beyond China’s Great Wall who had conquered China and destroyed the Song dynasty before turning their sights on Vietnam. To the Chinese they were detested “barbarians,” alien conquerors they finally overthrew and drove out of their country in the mid-fourteenth century. The Chinese were hardly alone in being victims of the Mongols, whose conquests, destruction, and terror extended westward deep into Europe, southward into the Middle East, and eastward to the shores of Japan, where it took a huge typhoon – what the Japanese called their “divine wind” or kamikaze – to save that island nation. Since Chinese refugees fleeing that conquest actually joined the Vietnamese in their successful struggle to repel the Mongols, it does not make sense to view this particular episode in the history of Vietnam’s struggle to maintain its independence as one in which the antagonist was China. Instead, in this case one finds a short-term alliance of sorts between the Vietnamese and refugee Song Chinese against a mutual enemy, the Mongols. Early in the fifteenth century the Chinese were back, this time in the form of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) that had driven the Mongols from China. In this case Chinese imperial dreams were encouraged by Vietnamese who were seeking outside help after their dynasty, known as the Tran, was overthrown. However, like the Song, the Ming who invaded Vietnam were reaching beyond the limits of their strength, and determined resistance by those Vietnamese who had overthrown the Tran dynasty drove them from Vietnam after about two decades. Their leader then founded the Le dynasty, the longest lasting in Vietnamese history. Vietnam once again became a tributary to China, and more than three centuries of peace between the two countries followed.¹⁰

Prior to the French conquest of Vietnam in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Empire would return to Vietnam only one more time, in the late eighteenth century under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Once more it was by invitation, again from supporters of a Vietnamese dynasty – this time the Le – that had just been overthrown by peasant rebels known as the Tay Son. It bears mentioning that the Qing dynasty that sent Chinese troops to Vietnam was itself foreign to China. It had been founded in the mid-seventeenth century by the Manchus, who like the Mongols were nomads from beyond the Great Wall who had conquered China. Taylor argues that the Qing had limited aims – restore their client, the Le dynasty, to the Vietnamese throne and then depart – although some scholars believe that the Qing intended to stay in Vietnam. In any event, the Tay Son did not wait to find out whether or not the Qing intended to leave. In January 1789 they launched a surprise attack against the occupying Chinese troops and routed them. The attack was completely unexpected because it came during the Tet lunar new year, the most important holiday of the Vietnamese calendar. The victorious Vietnamese, this time acting as expected, quickly made peace with the Qing, and Vietnam resumed its traditional tributary status vis-à-vis the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese would not intervene again in Vietnam for more than a century, and when they did in the 1880s it was because the Vietnamese again asked them for help, this time against the French, who were completing the process of turning Vietnam into their colony. As Taylor points out, “Altogether, these episodes do not account for much in the context of a millennium.”¹¹

Vietnam’s tributary relationship with China obviously was onerous in many ways. At the same time, it often had its benefits. Historian D. R. SarDesai has pointed out that Vietnam’s vassalage to China could at times serve as a deterrent to smaller but nonetheless dangerous enemies in Southeast Asia. Not the least of them, directly to the south, was the kingdom of Champa, for several centuries “the perpetual thorn in the Vietnamese side.” In addition, Chinese intervention on two occasions ended long periods of civil war, once in 1540 and again in 1673. An interesting fact is that the first intervention was less significant for establishing a lasting peace than it was for bringing about an agreement establishing the division of Vietnam and thereby foreshadowing China’s role in the Geneva Conference of 1954 that produced North and South Vietnam. The second intervention likewise ended with a divided Vietnam, although this time it also produced a peace that lasted for almost one hundred years.¹²

A New Way of Being Vietnamese and Different Visions of Vietnam

If the Vietnamese generally got along better with the Chinese than is commonly believed, how did they get along with each other? Beyond that, how over time did people living in different parts of the country come to view what it meant to be Vietnamese?¹³ We already know that the Vietnamese were not, as is often claimed, fiercely united in fending off the Chinese. In fact, as previously noted, two Chinese interventions, by the Ming in the fourteenth century and by the Qing in the eighteenth century, were by invitation from one of the factions fighting for the Vietnamese throne at the time. In the 1370s one family competing for the throne went so far as to seek help, and thereby invite military intervention, from the king of Champa, Vietnam’s bitter enemy to the south that controlled territory that today constitutes central Vietnam.¹⁴ Ironically, given their ultimate role as colonizers, during the early nineteenth century even the French would be invited to interfere in a struggle for the throne by a Vietnamese faction. Nor were the Vietnamese any more unified than most other peoples in governing themselves. There certainly were strong dynasties and able rulers. But internal conflicts during the first seventy years of independence caused three dynasties to rise and fall, and other eras of Vietnamese history are pockmarked by internal rebellions. The Vietnamese have also committed their share of aggression against minorities within their borders and neighbors to the south. In Taylor’s view, “There is abundant evidence that, in quantitative terms, Vietnamese suffered much more from the misgovernment and oppression of their own rulers than they ever suffered from ‘foreign aggression.’”¹⁵

In making his case about Vietnamese self-inflicted wounds, Taylor refers to more than 170 years of war since the fifteenth century between competing Vietnamese political entities. This reality in turn raises a fundamental point about Vietnamese history often overlooked or mentioned only in passing in textbooks that introduce students to the Vietnam War: that Vietnam was divided de facto between two states for about two centuries beginning in the sixteenth century.¹⁶ Nor is it irrelevant that the dividing line was approximately at the 17th parallel, the same line that divided North and South Vietnam between 1954 and 1975. Perhaps more important, during those two centuries Vietnam was not just divided politically; it increasingly became divided in terms of lifestyle and outlook. Ultimately this produced what Taylor calls “a new version of being Vietnamese,” and that in turn, the passage of several centuries notwithstanding, bears on how one should evaluate the bitter division and war that rent Vietnam in the second half of the twentieth century.¹⁷

Southward Expansion and Vietnamese Identity

The “new way of being Vietnamese” was the product of Vietnamese southward expansion from their base in Tonkin. This process began as early as the eleventh century, albeit very slowly; it took until the early fifteenth century for the Vietnamese to get approximately to the 17th parallel. At that point the way south was blocked by the kingdom of Champa, a state more than a thousand years old. The Chams had arrived in Southeast Asia from the islands of Indonesia, and their civilization was based on Hinduism imported from India. As late as the end of the fourteenth century, Champa had been strong enough to invade Vietnam on several occasions. But weakened by incessant warfare with its neighbors, it was virtually destroyed by the Vietnamese in 1471. Thereafter Champa was a defenseless remnant unable to stop Vietnamese southward migration and occupation. Most of the indigenous population of the south was either killed, absorbed, or driven eastward into Cambodia. By 1500 the Vietnamese were about three-quarters of the way down the coast, and by the 1757 they controlled the Mekong River Delta, giving Vietnam its current geographic configuration.

Vietnam’s first era of political division dates from the mid-sixteenth century. At that time instability and civil war in Tonkin contributed to the first big wave of Vietnamese migration south of the 17th parallel.¹⁸ At the same time, an aristocratic family usually referred to as the Nguyen lords was consolidating its control in what then was the southern part of Vietnam, with the city of Hue, just south of the 17th parallel, serving as its capital. Civil war between two other families – the Trinh and the Mac – continued in Tonkin until almost the end of the century until the Trinh, who ruled in the name of the puppet Le dynasty, emerged victorious. It was not long before the Trinh attempted to conquer the south, an effort that led to a half century of war beginning in 1620. As part of their defense the Nguyen lords built a system of walls from the highlands in the west to the sea in the east – sometimes called the “Small Wall of Vietnam” – on which they placed artillery and garrisoned thousands of soldiers, a formidable defense the Trinh were never able to penetrate. Not until 1673 did the fighting stop, a peace mediated by the Chinese. This de facto division of Vietnam continued for another century.¹⁹ While in theory Vietnam remained united under the Le dynasty, in practice the Le had no power: Vietnam north of the 17th parallel was ruled by the Trinh family while south of that line the Nguyen family ruled.

Vietnamese southward expansion does get mentioned in orthodox textbook accounts of the war the United States fought in Vietnam, which sometimes add that one result was Vietnam’s division into separate rival states, divided at the 17th parallel, for about two centuries. A small population and many natural resources in the south, including fertile soil that provided abundant crops, helped the Vietnamese who moved there live more prosperously than those they left behind in the north. A consequence of this, likewise sometimes noted by orthodox commentators, is that over time the lifestyle in the south diverged from that in the north, with the southerners tending to be more easygoing, individualistic, materialistic, and less rigid or disciplined.²⁰ However, when any implications about this phenomenon with regard to America’s effort in Vietnam are mentioned, and they rarely are, it is to point out, as Frances Fitzgerald does in Fire in the Lake, that by backing South Vietnam “the United States was taking on what had historically been the weakest part of Vietnam.”²¹ In other words, Vietnam’s history of being divided and the resultant differences between North and South provide yet another reason the United States should not have supported South Vietnam’s military struggle to remain independent of North Vietnam, this time because of South Vietnam’s weakness.

From Taylor’s perspective, the implications of Vietnamese southward expansion and its consequent division into two political entities are entirely different and suggest a correspondingly different conclusion regarding South Vietnam versus North Vietnam. For him, the key point is that during Vietnam’s two centuries of division, a “new version of being Vietnamese” emerged from the evolving lifestyle in the south. Taylor therefore has more to say about how people lived in the south than do orthodox commentators. He begins with the established observation that southern Vietnamese enjoyed the benefit of abundant natural resources, which helped them build a significantly more prosperous society than that in the north. But then he goes further. Taking advantage of their natural resources, the southerners engaged in much more foreign trade than did the northerners, an activity encouraged by their Nguyen rulers, and therefore were exposed to foreign influences.²² Southern society, with its vibrant economy and extensive trade contacts with foreigners, provided more opportunity to exercise personal freedom than did northern society. There was more social mobility in the south than in the north. Over time, Taylor notes, southern Vietnamese became “less disciplined by poverty and oppression than were northerners, less awed by authority, less constrained by notions of fate and cyclic passivity, more self-reliant, and more susceptible to opportunity.” Even peasant villages were different. Taylor notes that while northern peasant villages typically were closed and encircled by bamboo hedges, southern villages generally were built without such barriers along the shores of rivers and canals. Taylor’s point about villages in southern Vietnam is important not because he is stating something new – Frances Fitzgerald notes the same phenomenon, citing studies from the 1960s – but because of the implications he draws. To Fitzgerald, once again, what happened is a sign of weakness: along with losing the “fortress aspect” of northern villages, southern villages lost the “disciplined social organization that gave the northern villages their political strength.” To Taylor, what matters is that, unlike enclosed and fortified villages in the north, those in the south were “open to the outside world.”²³

Taylor’s assessment of southern Vietnamese society and culture is solidly grounded in his own extensive research and that of other scholars. Perhaps the most comprehensive overview in English of what was in effect an independent southern Vietnam is Li Tana’s Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Li Tana stresses how Vietnamese immigrants to the south adopted important aspects of other cultures they encountered, most notably, but not only, that of the Chams. Foreign trade further exposed the southern Vietnamese to influences from outsiders such as Japanese Christians, European Christian missionaries, and Chinese Buddhist monks. Not incidentally, it also provided the Nguyen rulers with the financial resources they needed to acquire modern weaponry, a crucial asset in their long conflict with the Trinh, who had a far larger population to draw on in building their military. Meanwhile, exposure to other cultures combined with Nguyen political interests to lessen Chinese influence in the south. Because the Nguyen lords needed to establish their own legitimacy in opposition to the Trinh in the north, they deemphasized Confucianism so that over time it “played a political and social role that was relatively minor compared to its role in the north.”²⁴

As an alternative the Nguyen lords turned to Mahayana Buddhism, which had the advantage of reaffirming Vietnamese ethnic identity in the south. At the same time, the Nguyen lords, with their Buddhist-based authority, distinguished themselves from the Trinh, whose authority was Confucian based. All of these factors combined to the point where, as Li Tana puts it, “from the early seventeenth century we find developing a sense of separateness, and with it the beginnings of local identity.”²⁵ What Li Tana calls “this successful experiment” did not stop there. As the southern Vietnamese interacted with new neighbors, they created a “Southeast Asian” pattern and in turn a “new social space” that led them to develop in ways different from their Vietnamese contemporaries to the north. This enabled the southern Vietnamese society to develop outside the Sino-Vietnamese framework that for centuries had determined northern politics and culture.²⁶ For two centuries there were “two separate Vietnamese states and two distinctive Vietnamese economic systems.” That said, the southern Vietnamese did not lose their original identity and become “non-Vietnamese.” Instead, as they adjusted to their new environment, demonstrated their willingness to experiment, and took advantage of new opportunities, they “developed another way of being Vietnamese.”²⁷

To orthodox commentators like Fitzgerald, the characteristics that differentiated southern Vietnamese from their northern brethren were the result of a “cultural washout,” a loss of “disciplined social organization,” and this cultural loss allegedly led to weakness. Li Tana, in contrast, sees the two centuries of de facto independence as having given southerners traits such as “their curiosity and tolerance towards new things and new ideas, their more open and spontaneous nature, [and] their unwillingness to be fettered by history and tradition.”²⁸ Thus Taylor, pointing to the southern effort to preserve its freedoms against the north’s efforts at conquest that began the early seventeenth century, argues that in the twentieth century South Vietnam’s cause had a “genealogy” going back to that time. Far from seeing what existed in South Vietnam as a “cultural washout,” he stresses:

The war of 1955–1975 was a war between two different Vietnamese visions of the future of the country. These visions primarily came from contrasting northern and southern perspectives on ideology, economics, society, and politics. They have existed for over four centuries, ever since southern Vietnamese began to form their own structure of authority.²⁹

This long-standing bifurcation that has characterized Vietnam makes it fair to say that there was nothing “predestined,” to use Mark Moyar’s term, about the country’s unification under a Communist dictatorship that took place in 1975. As Moyar observes, geographic contiguity and a shared language did not produce the unification of the United States and Canada or Germany and Austria.³⁰ Other examples could be cited, from Central and South America to North Africa and the Middle East and, perhaps most interesting, to East Asia itself, where today there are two dramatically contrasting visions of what it respectively means to be Chinese and Korean. Nor should it be overlooked that in the end, military force was decisive in both the unification of Vietnam and the imposition of the vision under which it was unified. Since that vision led, as many observers from Taylor to Stanley Karnow³¹ have pointed out, to decades of misgovernment and oppression, one can reasonably say that how Vietnam was unified says nothing about the merits of the victor’s vision as opposed to that of the vanquished. It thus should not be difficult to understand how differing interpretations of the contrasts between northern and southern Vietnam might influence how one views the manner in which the United States should have responded to the North Vietnamese effort to take over South Vietnam.

Vietnamese Nationalism

Vietnamese nationalism in the modern sense of that term arose out of the French colonial occupation of Vietnam, a process that began in the far south (Chochinchina) in the late 1850s but was not completed until 1884. Ironically, that conquest began barely a half century after Vietnam was first united in its current configuration from north to south by the emperor Gia Long, who had completed that task, with French aid, in 1802. The French had to confirm their conquest with a short war against China when the Vietnamese emperor, following a well-established tradition, appealed to Beijing for help against the new intruders. The Chinese, who themselves were unsuccessfully battling Western encroachment, did intervene militarily in 1884 on behalf of their tributary, but they were decisively defeated by 1885. The French then divided Vietnam into three entities – Chochinchina in the south, Annam in the center, and Tonkin in the north – which they ruled as part of what they called the Indochinese Union, an entity that included Cambodia and, from 1893, Laos. In Vietnam itself, only Chochinchina was technically governed directly as a colony; the rest of the country was officially a French protectorate under a puppet emperor, with its capital in the old Nguyen capital of Hue. Vietnam’s de facto political capital was Hanoi, where the French governor-general was based. The country’s economic center, however, was far to the south in Saigon, a city whose history officially goes back to 1698 when the Vietnamese were first settling in the Mekong River Delta. By the middle of the eighteenth century Saigon was a major town and base for Nguyen rule in the south and also a thriving commercial center, a development due in part to the presence of Chinese refugees fleeing the Manchu conquest of their country. Under the French, Saigon was designated the capital of Chochinchina; because of the economic potential of the south, it attracted French capital and became the economic and commercial center of Vietnam.

French colonial rule contributed to the modernization of Vietnam via the building of roads, bridges, irrigation works, and other infrastructure. The French also fostered the spread of an alphabetical system, first developed by Portuguese Catholic missionaries, of writing Vietnamese, which previously had been written with Chinese characters. That said, French rule was at once economically exploitative and politically repressive, as was European colonial rule elsewhere in Asia and Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The introduction of rubber plantations, which were French owned and produced for export, exacerbated the problem of peasant landlessness in the south. So too did the commercial production of rice, also for export, which increasingly was grown on large estates. A few Vietnamese managed to become large land owners and share in the spoils, but many more were dragged into the French capitalist economy as laborers on the countryside or in mines and factories and suffered greatly.

Two points merit mentioning in this regard, neither of which is intended to minimize the negative impact of French colonial rule on Vietnam. First, the problem of peasant landlessness in the south did not begin with the French; the pattern of large landownership and a majority of landless peasants, often working as virtual slaves, dated from the early eighteenth century and the Vietnamese development of the Mekong River region.³² What French policies did was make the land situation much worse. Second, French colonialism in some ways increased the differences between northern and southern Vietnam. More economic development took place in the south, with the result, as Taylor puts it, that Chochinchina region became “more integrated into the modern world than other parts of Vietnam.”³³ But if Saigon, which earned the sobriquet “Paris of the Orient,” provided a desirable modern lifestyle for its French residents and the small minority of Vietnamese who were able to position themselves to benefit from colonial rule, the great majority of Vietnamese endured poverty and repression. Out of this situation, among certain elements of the local elite, emerged Vietnamese anti-colonialism and nationalism.

Map 1 Vietnam’s Southward Expansion and the Trinh and Nguyen States

Protonationalists, Scholar-Patriots, and Modern Nationalists

Vietnamese nationalism developed in several stages. Initial resistance to French rule originated among the country’s traditional elite and was based on traditional values. Active opposition, led by low-level officials, military officers, and sometimes by peasants, began in the towns and villages of Chochinchina during the early 1860s but was poorly organized and had little success. What William J. Duiker calls “a relatively organized campaign of violence against French rule” began in 1885. It was inspired by an edict issued on behalf of the emperor – the so-called loyalty to the king edict – but was crushed by the French after about a decade. Duiker notes that the traditional elites who led this early resistance actually are best understood as “protonationalists.” They knew little of the Western concept of the nation-state and in their efforts against the French did not distinguish between Vietnam as a nation and its monarchy.³⁴

With the new century and the maturing of a new generation, the crafting of Vietnamese nationalism passed from people with a strictly traditional perspective to those with a broader outlook. As Duiker observes, “This new generation represented the transition between traditional and modern Vietnam.”³⁵ While generally members of scholar-gentry families – Duiker calls them “scholar-patriots” – Vietnam’s new generation of nationalists had been exposed to Western thinking and institutions, and they based key aspects of their political outlook on what they had learned about the world outside their country. They were influenced by Chinese reformers and nationalists and deeply impressed by the success of Japan, which after 1868 had not only undertaken a successful modernization campaign but had demonstrated its resultant strength by decisively defeating a European great power, the Russian Empire, in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905.

The most important member of this generation was Phan Boi Chau (1867–1940), who was active from just after the turn of the century until he was arrested by French security forces in 1925, after which he spent the last fifteen years of his life under house arrest. A prolific writer, Phan Boi Chau advocated Vietnamese independence to a growing audience in the cities and was involved in an unsuccessful uprising in 1908. He did not, however, believe that Vietnam was ready for democracy, which is why he argued that an independent Vietnam should be ruled by a monarchy. On this point he disagreed with his country’s other leading contemporary nationalist, Phan Chu Trinh (1871–1926), a proponent of democracy and constitutional government. The two men also disagreed about the use of violence, which Phan Boi Chau supported and Phan Chu Trinh opposed. Foreshadowing what would happen to future Vietnamese nationalists – that is, the activists on behalf of independence who were not Communists – the disagreements between the two men prevented them from working together.

In any event, by the late 1920s the era of the scholar-patriots was over: Phan Boi Chau was no longer active politically and Phan Chu Trinh had died. A new era in the history of Vietnamese nationalism was beginning. Dominated by the first generation of Vietnamese with a French rather than a traditional Vietnamese education, it would see the emergence of modern nationalist groups. It would also see the arrival on the scene of the first Vietnamese Communists. The Communists were very different from their countrymen whose first and foremost concern was Vietnamese independence from French colonial rule. To be sure, the Vietnamese Communists would become participants in their country’s nationalist movement and, in the end, come to dominate it, but as revisionist historians stress, their primary loyalty was to international Marxism-Leninism, an ideology that viewed the nationalism in colonial regions as a means to be used to promote world revolution rather than an end it itself. And that would change the history of Vietnam.

Modern Vietnamese nationalism developed along several tracks. The moderate track was most notably represented by the Constitutionalist Party, a group made up of prominent businesspeople, landlords, civil servants, and other Vietnamese who had become beneficiaries of French rule. Based in Saigon, the Constitutionalist Party’s demands were limited to reforms as opposed to independence, and it never acquired a mass base. Far more militant, and the most important non-Marxist organization in Vietnam, was the Vietnam Nationalist Party (VNQDD). Formed in Hanoi in 1927, the VNQDD took a militant stand against French colonialism and was prepared to use violence to achieve its aim of Vietnamese independence. The VNQDD soon had about 1,500 members divided into twenty cells in and around Hanoi, although it quickly was thoroughly infiltrated by French agents. Most of its members were students, small merchants, soldiers, and low-level bureaucrats. Nguyen Thai Hoc, its leader, drew his “three principles” of national unity, democracy, and social welfare from Sun Yatsen, founder of the Chinese Nationalist Party. Then, in 1929, a party member acting against instructions assassinated a Frenchman in charge of recruiting Vietnamese laborers to work on Chochinchina rubber plantations, where conditions were deplorable. This act provoked a wave of arrests of party activists that virtually crippled the VNQDD. The party leadership concluded that survival depended on a nationwide insurrection, and in February 1930 this assessment resulted in what is known as the Yen Bay uprising. The French effectively and brutally suppressed the uprising, actually a sporadic series of violent incidents lasting several days, capturing and executing most of the remaining VNQDD leadership. A second wave of repression during 1931 and 1932, following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the French governor-general, drove the remnants of the VNQDD leadership into exile in China where, joined by the remnants of other groups and rent by factionalism, it ineffectually remained until the end of World War II.³⁶

The virtual destruction of the VNQDD was paralleled by the fate of the non-Communist nationalist movement as a whole. The nationalists suffered from several critical weaknesses. Their movement was primarily urban with a small membership, with leaders who did not understand the need to develop support in the countryside, where most Vietnamese lived. Those leaders lacked the skills to build clandestine organizations able to thwart infiltration by French agents. They were divided into factions that proved unable to cooperate. Unlike the Communists, they did not receive outside help to overcome their weaknesses or to recover from their defeats. As a result, during the 1930s the French colonial authorities were able to cripple Vietnam’s nationalist organizations. Ironically, by repressing these nationalists so effectively, the French cleared the way for the rise of the Communists. The latter, with the main nationalist groups in disarray and with crucial help from outside Vietnam, were able to tap into Vietnamese nationalist sentiments and exploit them to build the movement, albeit with a very different set of goals, that eventually drove France from Vietnam.

World War II, the August Coup, and 1946

World War II drastically weakened the French hold on Vietnam and Indochina. After Nazi Germany defeated France in June 1940, a puppet regime was set up in the town of Vichy to govern the part of France the Germans did not directly occupy. The Vichy regime was in no position to resist Japanese demands regarding Indochina, and in late 1940 the Japanese occupied northern Vietnam. They took over the rest of Vietnam and Indochina the next year. Until March 1945, when Japan finally took direct military control of Vietnam to better protect its home islands against advancing Allied forces, Tokyo left the collaborationist French colonial administration in place. However, it answered to the Japanese army that directly controlled Vietnam’s main cities and strategic assets such as ports, airfields, and railways.

Map 2 French Indochina

France’s defeat by Nazi Germany, followed by the Japanese occupation of Vietnam, should have been a golden opportunity for the Vietnamese nationalists to break free of French control and foreign occupation. But none of the nationalist parties had managed to recover from the decimation they had suffered in the early 1930s. The remnants of the VNQDD, still the most important non-Communist Vietnamese party, were in southern China, but the party did not have a functioning organization inside Vietnam. Meanwhile, some groups in the nationalist camp adopted pro-Japanese attitudes under the assumption that the Japanese represented the most powerful Asian force opposed to European colonialism and therefore a potential source of help to the cause of Vietnamese independence. They included two religious sects with large followings in Vietnam: the Cao Dai, founded in 1926, and the Hoa Hao, founded in 1939. Four other groups organized during the late 1930s that hoped to use the Japanese to end the French hold on Vietnam drew on both the Vietnam’s past triumphs and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century nondemocratic European ideas to formulate their ideologies. These groups all incorporated the term Dai Viet (Great Viet) into their names, and in 1944 they united in the Dai Viet National Alliance. It bears mentioning that in this rejection of Western democracy, these groups were in step with their countrymen in the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), which as a Leninist organization had no use for democracy in any form, and, significantly, for the authoritarian political tradition of Vietnam itself, which had always been ruled by aristocrats and emperors.³⁷ Meanwhile, in 1942 a French Catholic intellectual from a prominent family named Ngo Dinh Diem organized a group he called the Dai Viet Restoration Society.³⁸ During the 1930s Diem had briefly served as interior minister under Emperor Bao Dai, but he resigned when he realized the French were unwilling to make genuine reforms that would allow Bao Dai to function as more than a puppet ruler. The group Diem formed in 1942 was ineffectual, but after 1954, and the partition of Vietnam, he would emerge as the surprisingly effective leader of the anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam.

During World War II the VNQDD’s deficiencies left it unable to make effective use of support it received from the anti-Communist Chinese government led by Chiang Kaishek. That support, to be sure, was minimal and consisted mainly in promoting the VNQDD as the core and leading party in a coalition of several Vietnamese non-Communist nationalist groups, all of which were small and weak.³⁹ The coalition itself was called the Vietnam Revolutionary League, or Dong Minh Hoi. In return for their organizational assistance and a monthly subsidy, the Chinese expected help in gathering intelligence on Japanese activities inside Vietnam, a job the groups that originally made up the Dong Minh Hoi were unable to do. The Chinese therefore turned to Ho Chi Minh – that name was a new alias adopted to hide his Comintern past – whom they had arrested when he entered China in 1942. In 1943 Ho was released from prison; the Vietminh, the Communist-front group he had established in 1941, was brought into the supposedly non-Communist Dong Minh Hoi, and in early 1944 Ho took on a leadership role in that organization. That awkward arrangement lasted only several months, at which point Ho, with a bodyguard provided by the Chinese, returned to Vietnam.⁴⁰ Not incidentally, by then Ho had gotten his hands on something far more valuable: weapons the United States provided in return for help against the Japanese. Those weapons were funneled to the Vietminh by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime precursor to the CIA.

After years of struggle in which there was virtually no movement toward independence, the year 1945 witnessed a sudden surge forward toward the brink of achieving that goal. By the early months of 1945, the Japanese, while still militantly unwilling to surrender, were on the verge of military defeat at the hands of the United States and its allies. Concerned that the French in Vietnam, who heretofore had collaborated with them, might now change sides, the Japanese in March 1945 staged a coup and took direct control over Vietnam. With French rule suddenly terminated and Japanese rule clearly tenuous as the United States closed in on the Japan’s home islands, Ho Chi Minh recognized that an opening had developed for the Vietminh to seize power. To be sure, the VNQDD and other nationalist groups saw the same opening, but they lacked the skills and resources to exploit it. As events would soon demonstrate, they also lacked the ruthlessness, a quality not lacking in Ho and the Vietminh. By the summer of 1945 Japan stood entirely alone, as the war in Europe had ended with Germany’s surrender in May. Still, the expectation was that it would take an invasion of Japan to end the war, which meant the fighting would continue at least into 1946. Then on August 6, 1945, the United States revealed to the world its most closely guarded wartime military secret when it dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, destroying most of the city; on August 9, a second atomic bomb obliterated most of the city of Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 14, with the news reaching Hanoi the next day. Suddenly the war was over, and control of Vietnam, it seemed, was up for grabs.

The Vietminh were prepared to seize the moment; the non-Communist nationalist groups were far less ready, some military preparations by certain groups notwithstanding. For example, the Dai Viet National Alliance began to prepare for military activity in March 1945, and by the summer the VNQDD had some military forces near Hanoi.⁴¹ But all the nationalist groups were badly overmatched by the Vietminh. During the five months since the Japanese coup, the Vietminh had dramatically expanded its influence in the countryside, especially in the mountain areas north of Hanoi. In urban areas, where it was weakest, it had focused on infiltrating nationalist groups, either to take them over or lure away their members.⁴² On August 19, in a bloodless coup but a coup nonetheless, Vietminh forces seized control of Hanoi. In doing so the Vietminh goal was not independence; had it been, the Vietminh would not have immediately turned to neutralizing the nationalist parties with all available means, including murder and other acts of violence. After all, while strengthening the Vietminh relative to non-Communist nationalist groups, the assault against non-Communist nationalists simultaneously weakened the overall strength of those Vietnamese prepared to resist any French attempt to reassert control over Vietnam. Instead, the goal on August 19 was to preempt rival Vietnamese groups to make sure that independence would result in a Vietminh dictatorship or, more accurately, an ICP dictatorship, since the ICP controlled the Vietminh. As historian Arthur J. Dommen has put it, “The seizure of power pitted Vietnamese against Vietnamese, not Vietnamese against any foreigner.”⁴³

During the evening of August 19, as the Vietminh consolidated its control over Hanoi, representatives of the Da Viet National Alliance and the VNQDD met to discuss their options. One VNQDD leader stressed that to accept the Vietminh coup was political suicide and argued for a counter coup, but he received no support. By default, most nationalists adopted a wait-and-see approach.⁴⁴ They did not have long to wait, nor would most of them like what they saw. On August 29 Ho presented the country with a government that included token representatives from several political groups to give the appearance of inclusiveness but which in fact was dominated by the Vietminh; on September 2 Ho declared the independence of the state he called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DVN). Meanwhile, the initial coup in Hanoi was extended to the rest of the country, accompanied by a campaign of assassination of actual and potential opponents of Vietminh rule that claimed thousands of victims. Dommen aptly calls it “The First Liquidation.” It is true that some victims of the Vietminh assassination squads had been collaborators with the French or Japanese, and severe post–World War II vigilante justice was not unique to Vietnam or the Vietminh. But it is also true that many Vietminh targets were genuine nationalists from across the political spectrum. They included Ngo Dinh Khoi, the older brother of Ngo Dinh Diem, who was buried alive. Some of the victims were Marxists, as the Stalinists who controlled the Vietminh turned their guns on Vietnamese Trotskyists in the latest episode of the deadly intra-Marxist feud that had started two decades earlier thousands of miles from Vietnam in the Soviet Union.⁴⁵

All of this was dwarfed by the wave of terror, arrests, and murder the Vietminh waged against nationalist groups during 1946. That campaign, it should be noted, was conducted in de facto collaboration with French forces, as Paris was maneuvering to restore its control of Vietnam and saw the Vietminh campaign as a handy tool to destroy as many nationalist organizations as possible.⁴⁶ It was facilitated by the withdrawal of Chinese troops from northern Vietnam, where they had supported and protected the VNQDD. It was less successful in the south, where French troops, which had entered the country in September 1945 after Japan’s surrender, were largely in control.⁴⁷ Still, the death toll reached into the tens of thousands, and the number arrested was much higher. Systematic Vietminh repression during 1946 severely weakened the VNQDD and other non-Communist organizations and strengthened the Vietminh. As a result, when the war for independence began at the end of 1946, it was a struggle between the Vietnamese Communists on the one hand and French colonialists on the other. The non-Communist Vietnamese organizations had been relegated to the sidelines. They would remain there until the war ended with a total French defeat and a partial Vietminh victory in 1954.