Indochina

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INDOCHINA.

THE PROCESS OF COLONIZATION
INSTRUMENTS OF COLONIAL DOMINATION AND CONTROL
ECONOMICS
RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION
COLONIAL LIFE AND CULTURE
THE TWO WORLD WARS
A THIRTY-YEAR WAR
CAMBODIA AND LAOS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

French colonial Indochina was a federation of protectorates, kingdoms, and colonies comprising Laos, Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina—the last three since subsumed into the borders of modern-day Vietnam. Named Indochina by the French because they situated it at the crossroads of Chinese and Indian influences, it was created by gradual accretion. It should not be confused with the more general term Indochina, designating a vast swath of Southeast Asia, often taken to include Thailand.

THE PROCESS OF COLONIZATION

Although the kingdom of Nam-Viet was established in 207 b.c.e., and Vietnamese independence from China was again achieved in the tenth century of the common era, neither the contours of Vietnam nor certainly the space known as Indochina came into focus until the French colonial era. Colonial conquest had been preceded by the influence of French missionaries, most notably members of the Société des Missions Étrangères, present in the region for centuries. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the French Second Empire undertook military conquest of the region. French forces radiated from Saigon into Cambodia (Kampuchea) between 1859 and 1867. A second wave of expansion in 1884 sealed the French conquest, in spite of military reverses at the hands of the Chinese at Lang Son. Treaties in 1884 granted France a protectorate over Tonkin in the north and French tutelage over the Vietnamese court in Hue (capital of Annam). That same year, the kingdom of Cambodia was officially transformed into a French protectorate. In 1893, under pressure from French gunboat diplomacy, neighboring Siam (later Thailand) recognized French rule over Laos, which France had claimed since 1887. The resulting federation of Indochinese regions known as the "Indochinese Union" constituted an ill-defined patchwork of languages and alphabets (Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong, Khmer, among others), ethnic identities (highland minorities, ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Khmer, ethnic Lao, ethnic Thai, etc.), religions (Confucianism, cult of ancestors, Theravada Buddhism, Catholicism), and government models (kingdoms, protectorates, and states).

INSTRUMENTS OF COLONIAL DOMINATION AND CONTROL

The French navy played a dominant role in both the conquest and administration of Indochina. While the French army was granted considerable control over Algeria, the navy was given carte blanche over Indochina for much of the colony's existence (1859–1954). Vietnam's last emperor, Bao Dai, quipped that in Indochina "the sovereign may rule, but the French Admiral governs."

The French practiced a policy of dividing and conquering in Indochina by playing upon old antagonisms (for example, northern and southern Vietnam had once been at war in the seventeenth century and much of southern Vietnam had been under Kampuchean, or Cambodian, control until the nineteenth century). In so doing, the French became not only the arbiters of Indochina but also the cement that held this heterogeneous federation together. The French administration dispatched many ethnic Vietnamese to manage Laos and Cambodia but not vice versa. They also placed ethnic Vietnamese in prisons located in highland minority areas and attempted to forge alliances with some ethnic minorities in view of checking a perceived Vietnamese dominance. In some cases, these triangular tensions shaped the actual contours of Indochina, as in Laos and Cambodia, where the French became extremely sensitive to Thai designs and intrigues with ethnic Thais living in French Indochina. Border skirmishes with Siam (later Thailand) occurred during much of the French colonial era. Siam itself served as a buffer zone between French and British agents of influence.

ECONOMICS

Indochina attracted considerable investment and speculation in France, from its rubber plantations and Michelin's stakes in them to the powerful Banque d'Indochine. By 1940 Indochina emerged as the third largest global exporter of rubber. Conditions were notoriously cruel on these rubber plantations, where some 133,000 laborers toiled by 1942. French Indochina also produced considerable quantities of minerals and rice. Liquor and opium monopolies played prominent roles in the colonial economy. France also introduced large-scale planning and public works to Indochina. The trans-Indochinese railroad, undertaken between 1905 and 1936, provided not only a motor and showcase of development and modernization but also, more ironically, a catalyst of Vietnamese national unity.

RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION

The very first French forays in Indochina met considerable resistance, although the shapes and degrees of resistance certainly shifted over time. They included an initial wave of monarchist, conservative resistance, a subsequent pro-Japanese streak, and the emergence of multiple Marxist opposition movements, out of which the Indochinese Communist Party eventually triumphed. Uprisings at Yen Bay and by the Nghe Tinh soviets in 1930 were met with brutal repression by a colonial administration increasingly reduced to a policing role. By 1936, when police repression was actually slightly relaxed under the Popular Front government in France, Indochina's detention ratios were 2.3 times higher than those in France, and roughly 1.5 times higher than those in the neighboring Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia). At the zenith of incarceration in 1942, some thirty thousand prisoners, many of them political, languished in the retrograde and brutal French penal system, emblematized by the penitentiary island of Poulo Condore.

Already in 1917 the Thai Nguyen prison revolt had featured some of the nationalist claims of future struggles. However, most historians identify the Nghe Tinh soviets of 1930 as initiating a significant escalation and militarization in the French response to Indochinese communism. The heavy-handed tactics used by the French army to quell these uprisings anticipated the large-scale violence that would break out again a decade later.

COLONIAL LIFE AND CULTURE

Indochina evoked more than a simple geographical area: it came to embody a set of fantasies in the colonial imagination. This mythical Indochina occupied a central place in French literature, from Roland Dorgelès to Marguerite Duras, but also in architecture, art, and film. Beyond the romantic vision of Indochina disseminated in these media, Indochina was in reality a colony marked by hierarchies: the French administration itself was more stratified than at home, and the chasm between colonizer and colonized was considerable in terms of access to employment or education. The settler's universe was far removed from life in the metropole. A metropolitan French visitor described the average settler's situation unkindly: "[they obtain] land from free concessions, employees through forced labor, and remuneration through bonuses" (Meyer, p. 234). Throughout the colonial period, with a handful of exceptions like the French novelist Marguerite Duras, the small European community in Indochina (some thirty-nine thousand in 1940) enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle in the opulent French quarters of cities like Hanoi and Saigon, at seaside resorts like the Cap Saint-Jacques, or at the hill stations at Tam-Dao, Dalat, and Bokor. In France, Indochina earned the reputation as a land in which the most humble European man—not to speak of high-ranking officials—could afford a coterie of servants and several congaï, or mistresses. Many French colonial women, for their part, considered themselves more emancipated in Indochina than back home in France, although some, like a character in George Groslier's 1929 novel Le retour à l'argile (The return to clay), complained of ennui.

THE TWO WORLD WARS

In the First World War, some 48,922 Indochinese served in the French military. Of them 1,548 "died for France," according to inscriptions at the Temple du Souvenir Indochinois—a monument to Indochinese soldiers of the Great War located outside Paris. In the wake of the war, many Indochinese elites attempted, in vain, to translate this sacrifice into colonial reform.

The Second World War heralded far greater changes in Indochina. In September 1940, following France's defeat to Nazi Germany, Japanese forces launched assaults on French positions in Tonkin. That month, Japan and Vichy France reached agreements, one allowing Japanese troops to station in Indochina, another placing Indochina within the Japanese zone of economic influence. Although Japanese troops were present in Indochina between 1940 and 1945, the Vichy French government of Admiral Jean Decoux remained in place until March 1945. Vichy reforms and ideology were introduced, and Vichy police forces forcefully suppressed rebel uprisings in both the north and south of Indochina. In fact, French Indochina was the only former Asian colony east of Bangladesh to remain in colonial hands in 1945, because in Hong Kong, Burma, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Malaysia, and Singapore, the Japanese had simply toppled the colonial administration. However, while they did not actually remove the French administration until 1945, the Japanese nevertheless actively supported pan-Asian and anticolonial movements in Indochina. Among them was the religious sect Cao Daï, whose supporters were rounded up by the French in a move that typified the complexity of Vietnamese-French-Japanese relations in this era. Japan finally put an end to this uneasy working arrangement when on 9 March 1945 it orchestrated a coup that toppled French rule. In August–September 1945, after Japan's surrender to the Allies, Ho Chi Minh, who had slipped back into Indochina from exile in 1941 to found the Vietminh, declared Vietnam's independence. The removal of both the French and the Japanese in 1945 signaled a profound shift. The noncommunist nationalist resistance was largely compromised by its close ties with Japan. Only the Indochinese Communist Party emerged strengthened in August 1945, untarnished because of its reasoning that the French and Japanese had constituted a "double yoke of oppression."

Economic conditions were difficult in this period. Between 1940 and 1943, the price of rice in Tonkin rose eightfold. Poor food distribution, the confiscation of rice stocks by the Japanese army, and other factors, including a power vacuum, conspired to starve roughly one million Vietnamese in 1945.

A THIRTY-YEAR WAR

In August 1945 Indochina was occupied by Chinese troops in the north and British Commonwealth forces in the south. Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh and their sympathizers dominated large sections of Indochina. Within the Indochinese Communist Party, some advocated maintaining the unity of Indochina, although in the end the communist movements of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia ended up taking separate nationalist paths.

Starting in September 1945, the French government strove to retake Indochina, which it considered the keystone of its overseas empire. Vietnam would be at war almost continuously between 1945 and 1975. In late 1945 the French forces, led by Marshal Leclerc's (Philippe de Hauteclocque) armored division that had liberated Paris in 1944, made rapid headway in southern Vietnam but encountered stiff Vietminh resistance in the north. In March 1946 France recognized Vietnam as a "free state" within the French Union but retained control over former Cochinchina. In December 1946 war erupted again in the north. Although the French took and retook cities like Hanoi and Haiphong, they were unable to control rural areas—even near Saigon. From its bastion in the mountains of northern Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was able to direct a coordinated campaign featuring both guerrilla and regular Vietminh units, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap.

With the war's escalation came internationalization. France, still recovering from the ravages of World War II, was unable to bear the brunt of costs alone. The United States, once sympathetic to the cause of Vietnamese independence and even to the person of Ho Chi Minh, began around 1949 to consider Vietnam a theater of the Cold War. A now communist China (since 1949) was increasingly uneasy with this war at its doorstep. In 1950 both the Soviet Union and China recognized Ho Chi Minh's side as the only legal government of Vietnam. Increased American aid did not produce French victories. In 1950 French forces suffered a reverse at Cao Bang. In France, support for the war was waning. French forces, many of them hailing from colonies themselves, were drained by guerrilla warfare. In 1954 French troops were encircled in a valley at Dien Ben Phu near the border with Laos. General Giap laid siege to the French garrison, while at the same time diplomats attempted to reach a solution in Geneva. The diplomats were presented with a fait accompli when on 8 May 1954 Dien Ben Phu fell to the Vietminh. The Union indochinoise, and hence Indochine, technically ceased to exist in 1954. On 20 July 1954 in Geneva, a cease-fire was signed, dividing Vietnam along the same seventeenth parallel that had separated British and Chinese forces in 1945.

This divide remained on the map until 1975. The years from 1955 to 1975 marked greater and greater American involvement in what was now a civil war between North and South Vietnam. In 1963 South Vietnam's Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated in a coup. That same year the Vietcong (communist guerrillas south of the seventeenth parallel) made major inroads. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson escalated the war on two fronts: trying to quell insurgency in the South, and bombing North Vietnam. The United States dropped some eight million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia over the duration of the war. The Vietcong were supplied by the Vietminh through a tortuous network of paths known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran largely through Laos. Near Saigon, in the so-called Iron Triangle (around Cu Chi), the Vietcong expanded by hundreds of miles underground galleries from which they had already fought the French. In 1968 the Vietcong launched the Têt offensive, which failed to hold its objectives but ultimately proved that the rebels could orchestrate large and coordinated attacks in the heart of the South. North Vietnam launched a final offensive against the South in 1975. The South fell in just over one month (10 March–30 April). Just over fifty-eight thousand U.S. troops died in combat, and approximately one million Vietnamese soldiers perished. Estimates of civilian casualties run in the millions. After 1975 a massive exodus of political and religious refugees took place, a diaspora composed of some 1.4 million people between 1975 and 1989.

CAMBODIA AND LAOS

In 1953 King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia declared independence from France. In 1975, five years after Sihanouk was deposed by a military coup, the Khmer Rouge took power. Under the murderous leadership of Pol Pot, they committed genocide against their perceived opponents, until the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in December 1978, in a move supported by Moscow but strongly opposed by Beijing. In retaliation, China invaded Vietnam in 1979, before being stymied by the Vietnamese army. Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia for a decade.

Laos, like Vietnam, had become independent in 1945, only to see the French take over again a year later. Between 1953 and 1975 Laos was torn by civil war. Laos also became a major, though unofficial, theater of military operations during the U.S.-Vietnam war. In 1977, two years after a people's republic was established in Laos, the country signed a friendship treaty with Vietnam.