The Making of an Authoritarian Regime
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1. The Making f an Authoritarian Regime
Although all ethnic Vietnamese share a cultural heritage of language, customs, and national identity—a heritage defined more sharply by the centuries of Vietnamese national resistance to Chinese domination—differences in topography, soil, and the duration of Vietnamese settlement have given rise to three distinct regions: North, central, and south Vietnam—or Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, as they were called during the French colonial period—have all emerged with their own peculiar socioeconomic patterns. Tonkin, the area of the Red River delta, has been inhabited by Vietnamese for more than two thousand years. Annam, the coastal region linking north and south, has been under firm Vietnamese control for less than seven hundred years whereas the Vietnamization of Cochinchina was completed only two centuries ago.
The original heartland of Vietnamese civilization was in the plains of the Red River delta, a triangle of flat, low-lying, rice-growing land surrounded on the north and west by a larger fan of hills and mountains. For the peasantry of the northern lowlands, the problem of water—far too much of it during the six-month rainy season and far too little in the dry season—has been a constant preoccupation since the beginning of settled agriculture there. The Red River is one of the world’s most turbulent during the rainy season with a peak discharge of as much as 850,000 cubic feet of water per second. Without any restraints on its flow, it would inundate nearly two-thirds of the Red River delta land every summer. For centuries villagers have maintained a system of enormous dikes, rising high above the surrounding plains, to protect both the villages and their rice crops from flooding. The construction of flood-control works was associated with the establishment of a centralized bureaucracy governing under the Ly (1009–1224) and Tran (1225–1400) dynasties.
The threat of ruptured dikes has remained constant throughout Vietnamese history. The frequent flooding has repeatedly enriched some parts of the delta with fresh alluvial sediments, so that those areas can support one of the most dense populations of any agricultural region in the world. In the southern part of the delta, however, much of the land is so low-lying that fields are waterlogged during the rainy season. The soil in these provinces has been slowly turning to clay for centuries.
The villages of Tonkin have historically been communities closed to outside cultural influences. They were organized according to a strict sociopolitical hierarchy, although most of the land was held communally, and village cults and rituals created tight solidarity within the village. Because each village was responsible for maintaining the dikes within its territory, village notables had the authority to mobilize peasant labor. This combination of solidarity and authoritarianism did not prevent popular uprisings in times of trouble; however, chronic food shortages caused by floods, drought, and insects contributed to antinydastic revolts during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
South of the Red River delta along the narrow spine of the central Vietnamese coastal lowlands, where there was less threat of massive flooding, villages located along riverbanks wherever possible instead of away from floodpaths. The soil was less fertile than that of the Red River delta, however, and could not support the density of population seen farther north. Annamese peasants, particularly those in the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh, were always the poorest in the country because of the combination of poor soil and unreliable rainfall. As the Vietnamese carried out their “march to the south” (nam tiến) through central Vietnam from the fifteen to
Between 1806 and 1900, the dikes ruptured twenty-six times and in the first quarter of the twentieth century, ten times. But only one major break has occurred since—one that caused the terrible flood of 1945. See A. Terry Rambo, “A Comparison of Peasant Social Systems of Northern and Southern Viet-Nam: A Study of Ecological Adaptation, Social Succession and Cultural Evolution” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1972), p. 77.
Ibid., pp. 60–61.
Vo Nhan Tri, Croissance économique de la République Démocratique du Viet Nam (Hanoi: Éditions en Langues Étrangères, 1967), p. 14.
Rambo, “Comparison of Peasant Social Systems,” pp. 25–35, 75–76.
Vu Quoc Thuc, L’économie communautaires du Vietnam (Hanoi: Presses Universitaires du Vietnam, 1951), p. 123; Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), p. 34 n. 3.
Michael G. Cotter, “Towards a Social History of the Vietnamese Southward Movement,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 9 (March 1968): 16.
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 128.
the nineteenth century, implantating tightly organized civilian settlements proteted by a shield of military villages and penal colonies. they replicated the closed and relatively isolated commnities the north.
As Vietnamese communities began to penetrate the thinly populated Mekong River delta—then part of the kingdom of Cambodia—in the seventeenth century, they found a very different physical environment. The Mekong River's predictably mild annual overflow provided the water needed for cultivation of a rainy season crop, then receded during the dry season. Because there was no need for river dikes or for village reservoirs and irrigation canals, village elites never developed the power to organize peasant labor as they did in the northern and central regions.
Villages in the south were usually organized along waterways, so they were less compactly settled than those in Tonkin and Annam and more open to outside social and cultural influences. Because the individual was not enmeshed in a web of village ceremonies and kinship organizations, the hold of traditional religion (the officially approved blend of Confucianism and village-based cults) as well as the Confucian family structure was weakened. The Theravada Buddhism of the Khmer population provided a cultural context in which popular and potentially politically volatile religious movements, including messianic Buddhist cults, could flourish.
The agrarian structure of the frontier region further undermined the cohesion of Mekong delta villages. Whereas in Tonkin and Annam concentration of land ownership remained relatively modest before the French arrived, in the south the Nguyen court relaxed its controls over land ownership, allowing village notables to acquire large tracts as rewards for political loyalty and to consolidate Vietnamese control over the area. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a high percentage of the peasants in the southern delta were already landless, and communal land was almost unknown.
Thus,
Cotter, “Towards a Social History,” p. 16.
Rambo, “Comparison of Peasant Social Systems,” p. 65; Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 172–73.
Cotter, “Towards a Social History,” p. 20.
See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Nguyen Thanh Nha, Tableau économique du Vietnam au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions Cujas, 1970), p. 68; Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 120–21.
in cochinchina the control by village elites was relatively weak compared with that in Tonkin and Annam.
Precolonial and Colonial Authoritarianism
Precolonial institutions and culture and, starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial political and socioeconomic structures, left their imprints on the authoritarianism of the Vietnamese revolution. Traditional Vietnamese society and its political system provided little basis for the later emergence of a democratic or even pluralist political culture. By the late fifteenth century, the Vietnamese imperial court, bureaucrats, and notables had adopted the Confucian political philosophy and institutions of the former Chinese overlords to bolster their own power. Confucianism was a rigidly hierarchical political ideology that posed the patriarchal family as the model for the political system and treated ordinary subjects as incapable of making decisions. Vietnamese citizens had no political or civil rights in imperial Vietnam. The first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, Gia Long (1802–1829), heavily influenced by neo-Conservative orthodoxy, forbade men between the ages of fifteen and forty to attend Buddhist ceremonies. His successor, Minh Mang (1820–1841), severely restricted printing, rejecting the idea that anyone outside the scholar class needed to know how to read or write.
The imperial court had the power to levy taxes, public labor, or corvée, and military troops on the villages. But its power to collect taxes was constrained by traditions of village autonomy and resistance to arbitrary Mandarins. Only the village authorities had accurate figures on village population and production. Moreover, the village population, unmoved by the Confucian ideology of the court, could and did respond to an assessment it considered unreasonably high by simply abandoning its land and moving elsewhere for a year.
13. On the Vietnamese elite's acceptance of Confucianism, see R. B. Smith, “The Cycle of Confucianization in Vietnam,” in Walter F. Vella, ed., Aspects of Vietnamese History (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1975), pp. 1–30; John K. Whitmore, “Foreign Influences and the Vietnamese Cultural Core: A Discussion of the Premodern Period,” in Truong Buu Lam, ed., Borrowings and Adaptations in Vietnamese Culture, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, Southeast Asia Paper, no. 25 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1987), pp. 7–13.
14. Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 26–28, 190.
15. Nguyen Dong Chi, “Quan He giua Nha Nuoc va Lang Xa o Viet Nam Truoc Cach Mang” [Relations between state and village before the revolution], in Nong Thon Viet Nam trong Lich Su [The Vietnamese countryside in history] (Hanoi: Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi, 1978), p. 59.
Village politics were also hierarchical and authoritarian. Political power was monopolized by the council of notables, who allocated tax and corvée burdens as well as communal land and water resources. Although Confucian theory called for this council to be chosen by age, by the eighteenth century wealth was the real basis of local political power. Members of the council of notables were selected by cooptation, and decisions were made by consensus to ensure secrecy and bolster the authoritarian character of the council's power.
Liberal ideology did not become a major political force during Vietnam's struggle for independence against the French in the 1920s and 1930s. As in other societies undergoing the transition to commercialized agriculture, the absence of an independent commercial or industrial bourgeoisie and the survival of a land tenure system that allowed a landowning class to maintain power over the peasantry discouraged a political evolution toward liberalism. Meanwhile, the abuses of a bourgeois democratic colonial power made it easy for an anticapitalist revolutionary movement to discount the possibility of genuine liberalism for the masses under capitalism.
Through its legal, fiscal, and credit policies, the colonial regime facilitated the concentration of landownership in all three regions. It created a new commercial market for rice and rice land, instigated a taste for consumer goods to stimulate landowners to maximize the acquisition of wealth, and instituted a heavily regressive tax system that caused hundreds of thousands of smallholders to lose their lands. In Cochinchina, more than 80 percent of the cultivated area was farmed by tenants and agricultural laborers by the 1930s. Many of the tenants and laborers, moreover, had opened up several lands of virgin land only to have it stolen by influential families associated with the new colonial legal system.
By the 1920s, the Vietnamese upper class was based on lare land
Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam, pp. 114–15.
Samuel L. Popkin, “Corporatism and Colonialism: Political Economy of Rural Change in Vietnam,” Comparative Politics 8 (April 1976): 106–11.
See Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).
Vu Quoc Thuc, L’économie communautaire du Vietnam, pp. 201–2; Charles Robequain, The Economic Development of French Indochina (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 170–71; Popkin, “Corporatism and Colonialism,” pp. 444–45.
Rents ranged from 40 to 70 percent of the crop. See Pierre Gourou, Land Utilization in French Indochina, trans. S. Haden Guest and Elizabeth Atherton Clark (New York: Institute for Pacific Relations, 1945), p. 353; Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution, pp. 84–97.
Woodside, Community and Revolution, p. 122; Guy Gran, “Vietnam and the Capitalist Route to Modernity: Village Cochinchina, 1880–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973), pp. 284–331.
holdings because industry and exporting were dominated by French companies and domestic trade was controlled by the Chinese elite. In Cochinchina, where the elite had limited political rights, sought greater economic and political rights from the French through the vehicle of the Constitutional Party. But the large landowners also wanted to keep the landless from acquiring any political voice, and once a revolutionary movement involving peasant activism appeared at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the elite viewed French repression of anticolonial revolutions as necessary insurance against the overthrow of the existing system of land ownership.
The living standards of most peasants substantially worsened during the colonial period. Typical Vietnamese peasants in Tonkin and Annam were constantly in debt to landlords or usurers and often forced to be enough rice to feed their families from one day to the next. Even in normal years, most of them went hungry part of the year; in times of flood or drought, the poorest peasants faced starvation.
Such was the socioeconomic situation confronted by the new generation of Vietnamese patriots—mostly high school students—raged by French racism and arrogance—that was mobilized into anticolonial activism in the 1920s and 1930s. After the failures of the scholar-gentry resistance at the end of the nineteenth century and various nationalist plots in the early years of the twentieth, the new generation was groping for a radically new strategy to drive out the French. Ho Chi Minh, an exile in France who later went to the Soviet Union and became a cadre in the Communist International.
22. See Nguyen Cong Binh, “Thu Ban ve Giai Cap Tu Ban Mai Ban Viet Nam” [Discussion of the comprador bourgeoisie class in Vietnam] Nghien Cuu Lich Su 24 (March 1961): 34; Tran Huy Lieu, Van Tao, Nguyen Luong Bich, Nguyen Cong Binh, Huong Tan, and Nguyen Khac Dam, Xa Hoi Viet Nam trong Thoi Phap Nhat [Vietnamese society during the French-Japanese period], vol. 9 of Tai Lieu Than Khao Lich Su Cach Mang Can Dai Viet Nam [Research materials on the history of Vietnam's modern revolution] (Hanoi: Van Su Dia, 1957), p. 118.
23. constitutional Party founder Bui Quang Chieu stated that the “silence” of the rural proletariat, “stemming from ignorance or fatalism, is the only guarantee of social order” (La Tribune Indochinoise, August 3, 1931). On the Constitutionalists during the high tide of revolution, see Megan Cook, The Constitutionalists Party of Cochinchina, 1930–1942: The Years of Decline (Melbourne: Monash Center of Southeast Asian Studies, 1977).
24.Pham Cao Duong, Thuc Trang cua Gioi Nong Dan Viet Nam duoi Thoi Phap Thuoc [The situation of the Vietnamese peasantry under French colonialism] (Saigon: Nha Sach Khai Tri, 1965), p. 116; Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution, pp. 122–29.
25. On this “changing of the guard” in the Vietnamese anticolonial movement, see David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 249–77.
was the first to provide such a strategy. He taught the youthful revolutionaries that the workers and peasants were the “principal forces of the revolution,” not only because they represented the vast majority of the population but because they were “oppressed more heavily than anyone else.”
The petty bourgeois youth who became the core of the Revolutionary Youth League in the latter half of the 1920s and of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) in 1930 found in Marxism-Leninism a new source of empowerment. It connected them with a worldwide revolutionary movement and gave them a potentially powerful new lever for revolutionary change. The futility of trying to defeat the French with methods that bypassed the organization of workers and peasants was dramatically illustrated, meanwhile, by the destruction by the colonial authorities of the elitist Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang) after it launched a foredoomed military putsch in 1930.
At one level the Marxism-Leninism of the Vietnamese Communist movement represented a rejection of the traditional authoritarian ideology of Confucianism. But although Ho Chi Minh and most of the young nationalists who were the earliest recruits to the party in the 1930s rejected the social hierarchy central to Confucianism, they were from Confucianist scholar-gentry families. So they were deeply imbued with the Confucian notions of political legitimacy based on personal character and correct sociopolitical views and with the idea of organic society. These traditional Vietnamese values combined with the class-based theory of Marxism-Leninism to form a powerful antibureaucratic ideology.
Like Confucianism, Marxism-Leninism gave legitimacy to the claims of the collective and the society over those of individual desires. As the Marxist scholar Nguyen Khac Vien has noted, the first gener-
26. See the excerpt from Ho Chi Minh's collected lectures at the Canton training course for Vietnamese youth in 1926 called Duong Kach Menh [Revolutionary road], in Editorial Office, Central Propaganda and Training Committee, Lich Su Dang Cong San Viet Nam: Trich Van Kien Dang [History of the Vietnamese Communist Party: Excerpts from party documents], vol. 1 (1930–1945) (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Sach Giao Khoa Mac–Le Nin, 1978), pp. 14–15.
27. Nearly all the leaders of the Communist Party from central to local levels in 1930 were between eighteen and twenty-one years old, according to one of that first generation. See Le Duan, Thanh Nien voi Cach Mang Xa Hoi Chu Nghia [Youth and the Socialist revolution] (Hanoi: Thanh Nien, 1966), p. 23.
28. See Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 91–99.
29. For the parallel between Ho Chi Minh's description of the ideal Communist cadre and the definition by Mencius of a “great man,” see King Chen, Vietnam and China: 1938–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 241.
Union of Vietnamese Marxists were more Confucian than the bourgeois intellectuals because they were not "hostile to the principle of collective discipline (as is the bourgeois intellectual)" since “the Marxist always sees social discipline as an indispensable part of his development of his own personality.” For the fund of ancient wisdom and practice on which the legitimacy of the traditional Confucian elite was based, the Vietnamese Communist movement substituted a “scientific” system of thought that gave party leaders the ability to discern the truth and Marxism, moreover, regarded their practices to Confucianism as the only legitimate basis for the Vietnamese respective doctrines as the only legitimate basis for the Vietnamese state and left no space for competing systems of thought.
Despite the French introduction of the concept of bourgeois individualism into Vietnamese society in the 1930s, liberalism did not flourish in Vietnamese intellectual circles when the struggle between colonialism and revolutionaries overshadowed other issues. The intellectuals who embraced individual freedoms as their central ideal, led by the popular novelist Nhat Linh and the Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tu Luc Van Doan), were more concerned with escaping the stifling influence of the Confucian family than with social or anticolonial revolution. Anticolonial activists reacted to the concept of liberal individualism as though it were merely part of a French strategy to divert Vietnamese youth from nationalism.
From the beginning the ICP dismissed parliamentary democracy and bourgeois freedoms as means of deceiving working people and intellectuals. At the ICP's first national congress in March 1935, a political resolution denounced the removal of censorship by colonial authorities as a sham because only "capitalists and feudalists faithful to imperialism" asked for permission to publish newspapers anyway. With the means of production in the hands of the capitalist class, it said, "freedom of opinion" existed only for the "exploiters," regardless of the constitution. “Bourgeois democracy” was considered to...
30. Nguyen Khac Vien, “Confucianism and Marxism in Vietnam,” in David Marr and Jayne Werner, eds., Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam, trans. Linda Yarr and Tran Truong Nhu (Berkeley: Indochina Resource Center, 1974), p. 47.
31. The fate of Western individualism during the late colonial period is discussed in Pham The Ngu, Viet Nam Van Hoc Su Gian Uoc Tan Bien, 1862–1945 [A concise modern history of Vietnamese literature 1862–1945], vol. 3 (Saigon: Quoc Hoc Truc Thu, n.d.), especially pp. 425–72, 620–29; Vu Tai Luc, Thanh Phan Tri Thuc duoc Viet Chien, 1969, pp. 215–21.
32. “Political Resolution of the First Congress,” March 27–31, 1935, in Central Propaganda and Training Committee, History of the Vietnamese Communist Party, pp. 122–23.
be ‘the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.’ This cynicism about individual freedoms in capitalist countries allowed the ICP's leaders to justify the absence of such freedoms once the party came to power.
The ICP's first decade was, in many ways, disastrous. Its Comintern-trained leaders dismissed as "opportunist" Ho Chi Minh's pragmatic strategy of completing the national revolution first before carrying out class revolution and pursued narrow class lines that proved politically costly during the first five years. Premature uprisings in Annam and Cochinchina in 1930–1931 resulted in French destruction of some of the ICP’s strongest bases. A wave of arrests in 1939 nearly wiped out its entirely urban network and most of its top leadership; then another premature uprising in Cochinchina in 1940, which the French ruthlessly suppressed, shattered the party apparatus there and left the countryside terrorized.
The Japanese occupation of Indochina in 1940, which the Vichy regime in Nazi-occupied France agreed to accommodate, ultimately created a revolutionary situation in which the ICP could seize power without significant opposition. In April 1941 Ho Chi Minh returned from southern China and established the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh), or Viet Minh, the following month. Under Ho’s direction, the party adopted a much broader class line to include the majority of the bourgeoisie within the orbit of the united front against Japanese and French imperialism. The strategy was to prepare for a general uprising to coincide with a landing of Allied troops.
A historical event that shaped the future of Vietnamese politics for decades was the famine of 1944–1945—the worst in modern Vietnamese history—which killed up to two million people in Ton...
33. “Chung Quanh Van De Chinh Sach Moi” [About the problem of the policy], ICP Central Committee document, October 1936, in Central Propaganda and Training Committee, History of the Vietnamese Communist Party, p. 146. When the ICP changed its strategy in 1936 and supported “bourgeois democratic revolution” in Indochina in alliance with the bourgeoisie, the party leadership had to explain that it was only because of the danger of fascism and “not because the Communist International admires bourgeois democracy” (p. 147).
34. Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945, pp. 178–79, 184–85; William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1981), pp. 48–49.
35. Duiker, Communist Road to Power, p. 85. Many of the peasants who had supported the 1930–1931 Cochinchina revolt joined the conservative Cao Dai, which promised protection from government harassment, with the memory of French terror still fresh in their minds. See Lalaurette and Vilmont, “Le Caodaisme,” unpublished report by the Inspector of Political and Administrative Affairs in Cochinchina and Province Chief of Tay Ninh (Tay Ninh, 1933; typescript available at Cornell University Libraries), p. 35.
kin and northern Annam. The Japanese caused much of the suffering by forcing peasants to divert their rice land to industrial crops to serve military needs and then forcing them to sell most of what remained of the paddy crop for a fraction of the market price to feed Japanese troops. The government of Premier Tran Trong Kim, put into power by the Japanese after their March 1945 seizure of power from the French, was powerless to alleviate the suffering. But Viet Minh cadres throughout Tonkin led hungry peasant crowds, often unarmed, in raids on the rice depots belonging to wealthy landowners and distributed rice to the neediest families. More than two decades later, Vietnamese who witnessed those events recalled how that decisive response to a massive social crisis confirmed the legitimacy of the Viet Minh and helped sweep the ICP, with only about three thousand active party members, into power.
By the time the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh already controlled large areas of the countryside. The Viet Minh takeover of Hanoi was only the culmination of a wave of popular uprisings in provincial capitals in the north and in towns and villages surrounding Hanoi. It was the strength of peasant support for the Viet Minh that provided the demonstrators for its show of strength in Hanoi and led to its seizure of power without opposition on August 19. On September 2, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam’s independence and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
In Cochinchina, where there was no famine and the ICP was still recovering from the bloody suppression of the 1940 Cochinchina revolt, the Viet Minh front was much weaker and did not enjoy...
36. Ngo Vinh Long, Before the Revolution, pp. 130–33.
37. The Japanese-sponsored government created after the Japanese coup d'état against the French regime on March 9, 1945, was powerless to do anything but carry out Japanese orders for the continued pillage of the Vietnamese economy. Although the Dai Viet Party did not participate directly in the government, prominent figures in the party published pro-Japanese propaganda. See Le Huu Muc, Than The va Su Nghiep Nhat Linh [The life and work of Nhat Linh] (Hue: Nhan Thue, 1958), p. 125; Vu Bang, Bon Mui Nam “Noi Lao” [Forty years of “lying”] (Saigon: Pham Quang Khai), p. 155.
38. David W. P. Elliott, “Revolutionary Reintegration: Comparison of the Foundation of Post-Liberation Political Systems in North Vietnam and China” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1976), pp. 96–98.
39. Gerard Chaliand, The Peasants of North Vietnam (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 73–74. The figure of three thousand ICP members involved in the August revolution is given in Elliott, “Revolutionary Reintegration,” p. 99.
40. See Ho Hai, “Mot Vai Kien ve Moi Quan He giua Nong Thon va Thanh Thi Nuoc Ta trong Thoi Ky 1939–1945” [A few ideas on the relationship between countryside and city in our country during 1939–1945], Nghien Cau Lich Su, no. 52, July 1963, p. 16.
"clear-cut legitimacy that it did in the north. Its main rivals for power, the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai sects, had depended on the Japanese occupation forces to build up their armed forces during the war, but when the anti-Japanese Viet Minh government was formed in the north, the sects and their allies were forced to accept temporarily the authority of the Viet Minh Committee in the south when the Japanese surrendered."
DRV Institutions and the Anti-French Resistance
The overwhelming popularity of the DRV, the absence of any other political force with a mass base, and the weakness of liberal democratic values and institutions in Vietnamese society were all conditions conducive to the development of a one-party dictatorship. But the DRV’s preparation for and waging of a resistance war against the returning French provided both opportunity and justification for tight control of political, economic, and social life. The nine years of resistance war against the French were to make a long-lasting imprint on DRV political institutions.
The period of coalition government between the ICP and conservative anti-Communist parties in 1946, following the public dissolution (but actual withdrawal into secrecy) of the ICP in November 1945, was not a step toward pluralism. It was a response to the pressure of foreign occupation forces, which strengthened the ICP leadership's belief that the revolutionary regime must be dictatorial toward any opposition to the party.
"Entering behind the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) occupation army that flooded into Vietnam to disarm Japanese troops north of the sixteenth parallel, two anti-Communist parties—the Vietnam Revolutionary League (Viet-Nam Cach Mang Dong Minh Hoi) and the Vietnam Nationalist Party (Viet-Nam Quoc Dan Dang [VNQDĐ])—demanded the replacement of the DRV regime by a gov[ernment]."
41. Le Manh Trinh, "Bai hoc dau tranh de cung co va tang cuong su doan ket thong nhat noi bo Dang trong thoi ky 1939–1945" [Lesson of the struggle to consolidate and strengthen internal party unity during the period 1939–1945], Hoc Tup, no. 8, 1963, p. 14.
42. See the report of a discussion between the ICP representative, Tran Van Giau, and the representative of the sects and their allies, Phan Van Hum, on August 25, 1945, in U.S. Department of Defense, U.S.-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967, 12 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 1:B-31.
43. On the "tactical" dissolution of the ICP, see Propaganda and Training Committee, Lich Su Dang Cong San Viet Nam [History of the Vietnamese Communist Party] (Hanoi: Tuyen Huan, 1988) 1:144–45.
"They continued to kidnap and assassinate Viet Minh cadres despite Ho Chi Minh's attempt to placate them by including their representatives in a coalition government. The VNQDD, the larger of the two, withdrew to China when their Kuomintang sponsors negotiated an accord with France for the withdrawal of Chinese troops from Vietnam, but it ordered members to assassinate both DRV and French officials in the hope of provoking war between France and the DRV.
In South Vietnam, where the Viet Minh regime was waging a resistance war against the French by September 1945, anti-Communist parties and groups that had been pro-Japanese during the occupation quickly turned to the French authorities to help suppress the Communist-dominated government. First, the Cao Dai sect in May-June 1946 and, then, the Hoa Hao sect during the first half of 1947 negotiated agreements with the French to collaborate against the Viet Minh.
In September 1945 the DRV published a decree 'dissolving reactionary parties,' defined by their 'collaboration with foreigners to plot actions harmful to national independence and our country's economy.' The immediate targets of the ban were the pro-Japanese parties, primarily the Dai Viet Party, which had supported and..."
44. The Dong Minh Hoi was led by Nguyen Hai Than, an officer in the Chinese Kuomintang Army for more than thirty years, and was sponsored by the KMT. The VNQDD had also depended on the KMT government for financial support for fifteen years. See King Chen, *Vietnam and China, 1938–1954* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 123; Pierre Dabezies, "Forces politiques au Viet Nam" (PhD diss., University of Bordeaux, 1955), p. 93.
45. See Hoang Van Dao, *Viet-Nam Quoc Dan Dang* [The Vietnam Nationalist Party] (Saigon: Thuy Phuong, 1964), pp. 278–79, p. 295; Pierre Celerier, *Menaces sur Viet-Nam* (Saigon: Imprimerie d'Extrême Orient, 1950), pp. 47–48; Le Huu Muoc, *Life and work of Nhat Linh*, pp. 129–32; Nguyen Manh Con, *Dem Tam Tinh Viet Lich Su* [Writing history from the heart] (Saigon: Nguyen Dinh Vuong, 1958), pp. 74–75.
46. On Cao Dai moves to collaborate with the French, see Tran Quang Vinh, *Lịch sử Cao Đài trong Thời Kỳ Phục Quốc 1941–1946* [History of the Cao Dai in the national restoration period 1941–1946] (Tay Ninh: Dai Dao Tam Ky Pho Do, n.d.), pp. 77–78, 84–90. A. M. Savani, *Visages et images du Sud Viet Nam* (Saigon: Imprimerie Française, Editions du Seuil, 1955), p. 2. On the Hoa Hao collaboration, see Paul Mus, *Vietnam: Sociologie d'une guerre* (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), p. 70; H. Lanoue, *Vietnam: Bases économiques et sociales des sectes*, *Cahiers Internationaux* 65 (April 1953), p. 83; A. M. Savani, "Notes sur le Phat Giao Hoa Hao" (n.° 1, 1951: mimeographed), p. 29; Tran Tong Kim, *Mot Con Gio Bui* [a dust storm] (Saigon: Viet Hanh, 1947), pp. 162–68.
47. Nguyen Van Huong, *Su Nghiep Bao Ve Doc Lap, To Do, Bao Ve Thanh Qua cua Cach Mang va Hinh Luat cua Nuoc Viet Nam Chua Cong Hoa* [The defense of independence, freedom, and the gains of the revolution and the criminal code of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam], in Vietnam Social Sciences Committee, Lao Institute, *Mot So Van De Ve Nguoc va Phap Luat Viet Nam* [Some problems of the Vietnamese state and law] (Hanoi: Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi, 1972), p. 119.
"participated in the puppet government installed by the Japanese after the March 1945 cup. But its terms obviously applied equally to the parties relying on the support of Chinese occupation. In November 1945 the Communist Party leadership considered one of its four main tasks to be to 'eliminate internal foes.'
When the bulk of the KMT troops had left in mid-1946, therefore, the DRV cleared out the remaining pockets of VNQDD troops, closed down its offices and newspapers, and began mass arrests. Once the resistance began in the north, the government set up a 'section for the repression of traitors' in each village. In the south after the Viet Minh evacuated Saigon in September 1945, they captured a leading Cao Dai figure, Tran Quang Vinh, who was in contact with French authorities and other anti-Communist political figures. After a pact of military cooperation had been signed between Hoa Hao military commanders and the French, the Viet Minh captured Hoa Hao leader Huynh Phu So in April 1947, charged him with treason, and carried out a death sentence one month later.
Despite the repression of these parties and sects for their opposition to the regime and collaboration with foreign powers, many of the leaders and cadres of such organizations, including some who had been invited to participate in the government in the north and in the Executive Committee of the Viet Minh in the south, eventually became top officials in the puppet Bao Dai regime after 1948. The lesson learned by the ICP leadership was that the DRV had been too lax toward 'counterrevolutionaries.' Party secretary and theoretician Truong Chinh later expressed regret that 'energetic and necessary measures to counteract all possible dangers were not taken immediately upon the seizure of power' because 'for a newborn revolutionary power to be lenient with counterrevolutionaries is tantamount to committing suicide.'
The party's fear of internal enemies quickly gave impetus to the..."
48. Vo Nguyen Giap, *Unforgettable Days*, 2d ed. (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1978), p. 71.
49. Vo Nguyen Giap, *Unforgettable Days*, pp. 286–91.
50. Bernard Fall, *The Viet Minh Regime: Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam* (Institute of Pacific Relations with the Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1956), p. 35.
51. See Tran Quang Vinh, *History of the Cao Dai 1941–1946*, p. 63; Jayne Werner, "The Cao Dai: The Politics of a Vietnamese Syncretic Religious Movement" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1926), pp. 275–76.
52. On Viet Minh charges against and execution of Huynh Phu So see telegram from council in Saigon to the secretary of state, June 24, 1947; Department of State Papers, 1947, 851C.006/2447, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
53. Truong Chinh, *The August Revolution* (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), p. 4.
"development of an extensive security apparatus. The Vietnamese People's Police (Cong An Nhan Dan Vietnam) was actually created on August 19, 1945, the day the Viet Minh took over Hanoi and nearly two weeks before the DRV itself was founded. It began as a 'state secretariat' under the Ministry of Interior. Despite shortages of money, armaments, and professional skills, from its first days, it actively monitored the activities of the VNQDD, mobilized propaganda against them, and eventually carried out mass arrests. The government was struggling against foreign occupation forces justified an extremely broad definition of national security crimes, apart from outright collaboration with the enemy. In March 1946, soon after the beginning of the resistance in the south, it gave the Administrative Committees of the three regions the authority to send to detention camps 'those judged to have spoken or acted in a way which could harm the struggle for independence, the democratic regime, the safety of the public or the unity of the nation.' Only in 1953 did the DRV distinguish twelve types of action that constituted national security violations.
The court system was, from the beginning, an arm of the executive power of the resistance government primarily for the maintenance of security. At first the only judicial institutions were courts martial, dominated by the party and the army, set up to judge those accused of violating national security. When a system of 'people's courts' replaced the courts-martial in 'repressing counterrevolutionaries,' the judges at interzonal, provincial, and district levels were appointed jointly by the officials of the Ministry of Justice and the Resistance and Administrative Committees at each level.
Many of the cadres of the Ministry of Justice were graduates of law schools of the colonial regime and were imbued with bourgeois democratic concepts of legality. These cadres frequently conflicted with the Resistance and Administrative Committees, who felt little concern about such notions of legality. From 1948 to 1950 the ministry was engaged in writing a new, simplified penal code that
54. The Công An celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on August 19, 1970. See Tran Quoc Hoan, "Kỷ Niệm Lần Thứ 25 Ngày Thành Lập Công An Nhân Dân Việt Nam" (Celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Vietnam People's Police), Học Tập, no. 9, 1970, p. 51.
55. Ibid., p. 52.
56. Nguyen Van Huong, Defense of Independence, pp. 119–21; Fall, Viet Minh Regime, p. 31.
57. Resolution of the Expanded Central Committee Plenum, January 15–17, 1948, in Central Propaganda and Training Commission, History of the Vietnamese Communist Party, vol. 2 (1979), pp. 159, 161.
"departed dramatically from traditional legal practice, especially in DRV legal cadres were retrained to view law as a 'weapon of the ruling class, with which to punish a class which opposes it.' The denigration of bourgeois legal concepts and procedures during the earlier years of the resistance set the stage for the establishment of special people's courts to try landlords in the context of the mass mobilization for rent reduction and land reform in 1953. The land reform courts could sentence landlords accused of more serious crimes, including those committed before the revolution, to long prison sentences or even death. Very often, however, they merely formalized sentences that had already been decided by poor and landless peasants at denunciation sessions organized by peasant organizations under the guidance of the land reform cadres.
The exigencies of war further reinforced the tendencies in Leninist ideology and organization toward the centralization of power and limited the role of representative and political institutions that might have at least moderated those tendencies. Although ICP leaders did not consider an elected parliament to be the measure of a regime's democratic character, the concept of democratic centralism held that popularly elected bodies at each level were supposed to 'accept responsibility' before the people and elect the administrative organs at that level while obeying the orders of the central government.
One of the first actions of the DRV was to issue a decree establishing elections for People's Councils (Hoi Dong Nhan Dan) at village and provincial levels every two years. These elected councils would, in turn, elect the village and provincial Administrative Committees (Uy Ban Hanh Chanh), which were, in theory, equal in power. The Administrative Committees could be dismissed by People's Councils at the same or higher level, but they were also subordinate to the central government administrative apparatus. This system thus
58. Le Kim Que. "The People's Courts," in An Outline of Institutions of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1974), p. 92; Fall, Viet Minh Regime, pp. 31–32.
59.Do Van Cang, "Nhung Loi Ho Chu Tich Day Bao Can Bo Nganh To Phap Trong Hoi Nghi Hoi Tap Nam 1950" [Chairman Ho's teachings to legal cadres in the 1950 study conference], in Vietnam Lawyers Association, Nha Nuoc va Phap Luat [State and law] (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Lao Dong, 1971), 3:139.
60. Thoi Moi, January 22, 1957.
61. Pham Van Dong, "Tang Cuong Cung Co Chinh Quyen Dan Ghi Nhan Dan Viet Nam" [Step up the consolidation of the Vietnamese people's democratic government], Report to the Second Party Congress, February 1951, Mot So Van De Ve Nha Nuoc [Some problems of government] (Hanoi: Su That, 1980), pp. 27–28.
"combined formal mechanisms for popular control with strong central government control over administration at every level.
Immediately after the resistance war began, however, the government suspended local elections, and the system of People’s Councils also stopped functioning. Small groups composed of representatives of the army, the party, mass organizations, and civil administration were given authority above the local Administrative Committees. Originally called 'defense committees,' they were renamed 'resistance committees' a few months later. They absorbed the Administrative Committees' functions, and by October 1947 they had become 'Resistance and Administrative Committees.' These groups, which had five members at the village level and twelve at provincial levels, were appointed by the central government.
Elected village People’s Councils were reinstated in 1948 in those areas under firm Viet Minh control, but these bodies could no longer dismiss members of the Resistance and Administrative Committees whereas the latter could dissolve the People’s Councils’ decisions contrary to higher level directives. The councils existed on paper but were given no real power. As Premier Pham Van Dong observed at the party’s second congress in 1951, the DRV had begun to pay attention to People’s Councils and had 'not yet developed their works.' During the campaign for mobilization and reorganization of village government in 1953, the People’s Councils were again 'temporarily dissolved' on the grounds they were controlled by landlords and landowners, but no elections were planned. Meanwhile, the central government further strengthened control over local organs by creating in 1948 territorial military administrative committees (reduced later to six) with wide-ranging administrative powers, including requisitioning..." of
62. George Ginsburgs, "Local Government and Administration under the Viet Minh, 1945–54," in P. J. Honey, ed., North Vietnam Today (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 137–49.
63. Vu Van Hoan, "Local Organs of State Power," in Outline of Institutions, pp. 65–66; Fall, Viet Minh Regime, p. 28.
64. Ginsburgs, "Local Government and Administration," p. 151; Fall, Viet Minh Regime, p. 29.
65. Pham Van Dong, Step up the consolidation, p. 28. See also Vu Van Hoan, "Qua Trinh Xay Dung Hoi Dong Nhan Dan" [The process of building the People's Councils], in Social Sciences Commission of Vietnam, Legal Institute, Mot So Van De Ve Nha Nuoc va Phap Luat Viet Nam [Some problems of Vietnamese government and law] (Hanoi: Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi, 1972), p. 180.
66. Vu Van Hoan, Building the People's Councils, p. 180.
"property, censorship of publications, and arrest, detention, trial, and sentencing of national security offenders.
At the national level as well, the elected legislature disappeared in January 1946. In which Ho Chi Minh's government received an overwhelming popular mandate, produced a National Assembly of resistance cadres broadly representative of the Viet Minh leadership stratum. But after approving a new constitution in November 1946, the government informed its members that it would not be able to begin nor would there be new elections for a legislative assembly. The Assembly was persuaded to vest full authority for making law in the government and to give the Standing Committee of the Assembly the power to maintain “liaison” with the government and to contribute “ideas” to it.
During the self-criticism that followed the admission of errors in the 1955–1956 land reform program, the party leadership noted that during the war “democratic activities” had been “restrained.” The explanation for this departure from the democratic centralism model was that the state’s authority had to be “precise and disciplined” rather than diffuse and divided to respond to the requirements of the resistance.
These institutional features of the DRV during the long years of anti-French resistance inevitably shaped the attitudes and practices of DRV officials at all levels. The concentration of power in the hands of central government and its subordinate administrative entities and the absence of democratic processes or effective legal restrictions on official power increased the likelihood of authoritarian and bureaucratic patterns.
The primary nexus between the DRV and the population during the resistance was the mobilization of foodstuffs and labor to support..."
67. Ginsburgs, "Local Government and Administration," pp. 152–56.
68. See Huynh Van Tieng, "Suc Manh Than Ky cua La Phieu trong Tay Nhan Dan" [The marvelous strength of the ballot in the people's hands], Cuu Quốc (April 11, 1971).
69. Nhan Dan, December 31, 1956, cited in Elliott, "Revolutionary Reintegration," p. 246 n. 11. The one meeting of the National Assembly during the resistance—to pass the agrarian reform law in December 1953—was clearly more a symbolic than a real exercise of the legislative function. It was not carried out under the 1946 constitution, which was never ratified by plebiscite.
70. Nguyen Duy Trinh, "Quan He giua Nhan Dan, Dang va Nha Nuoc trong nen Chuyen Chinh Dan Chu cua Ta" [Relations between the people, the party and the State in our people's democratic dictatorship], Hoc Tap, no. 8, 1957, p. 7.
"port its constantly growing army. After relying solely on voluntary contributions from the population during the first three years of the war, the DRV was forced in 1949 to impose two new taxes. One tax cost each adult sixty dong; the other cost ten kilograms of paddy rice—enough to feed one soldier for ten days. The following year, the resistance government levied a steeply progressive agricultural tax, which exempted the poorest 10 percent of the population but extracted from 5 to 45 percent of the paddy income of the rest of the population.
The party leadership's view was that the mobilization of foodstuffs and labor had to involve coercion, but that if the people understood it clearly and consciously implemented it, the process would "lose its coercive character." In "very many places," however, the DRV admitted that cadres had not "explained and propagandized." The problem of "compelled by bureaucratism (quan lieu), defined as using commands rather than persuasion to obtain compliance, was described as "rather serious within our government, from top to bottom."
Although the DRV began to mobilize the poor and landless peasants in the north when carrying out agrarian reform in 1953–1954, the result was not the creation of a more independent peasant political stratum relative to the party and government. The mass mobilization campaign temporarily replaced discredited local party and administrative organs with a new authority structure extending from the central land reform committees to cadre work teams in the villages. The cadre teams used authoritarian methods to coerce peasant to reflect the political views ordained by higher party organs. Indeed, the newly mobilized peasants, instigated by the work teams, considered the previously poor peasants who had previously become politically active in the party or state as "lackeys" of class enemies. Even agricultural leaders were viewed in this light, often residing in the villages, and they lacked the respect of most of the..."
71. Nguyen Xuan Lai, "The First Resistance (1945–1964)," Economic Policy and National Liberation War, Vietnamese Studies, no. 44 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1976), pp. 131–32.
72.Christine Pelzer White, "Agrarian Reform and National Liberation in the Vietnamese Revolution: 1920–1957" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1981), pp. 145–50.
73.Pham Van Dong, "Step up the Consolidation," pp. 29–33.
74. Edwin E. Moise, "Class-ism in North Vietnam, 1953–1956," in William S. Turley, ed., Vietnamese Communism in Comparative Perspective (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 93–98.
"The land reform experience did not reduce, but only reinforced, the traditional authoritarianism of Vietnamese village politics.
Even if the DRV had not had to fight a war of resistance against the French and Vietnamese collaborators and if opposition groups had commanded strong domestic support and remained independent of foreign forces, there is every reason to believe that Vietnam would have been an authoritarian state in which representative institutions and the rule of law would have been weak. But the conditions of resistance war gave further impetus to the concentration of power in the hands of the central government and its subordinate administrative echelons in the absence of democratic processes or of effective legal checks on official power. These institutions and practices, in turn, established bureaucratic authoritarian patterns of behavior that continued after peace was restored."
Revolution in the South and Reunification by Force
Revolutionary politics in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975 took a form rather different from those in areas of DRV control during the anti-French resistance war, both because of the region's socio-economic structure and because a conservative anti-Communist regime held power with the backing and, ultimately, military intervention of the United States. Instead of being the government, therefore, the Communist Party played the role of insurgent, with far-reaching implications for its political style and structure.
The Geneva Agreements of 1954 created two temporary zones of administration pending elections for a government of a united Vietnam in 1956: the Northern zone under the DRV administration and the Southern zone under the much weaker French-sponsored State of Vietnam. The State of Vietnam (renamed the Republic of Vietnam in 1955) frustrated the provisions for all-Vietnamese elections, leaving tens of thousands of civilians affiliated with the Communist Party and their supporters in the South as a potential threat to the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. The Republic of Vietnam (RVN) responded by trying to destroy the party apparatus physically in the South through arrest, detention, or execution.
Despite pleas from Southern Communists to resume armed struggle, Hanoi was constrained by the opposition of its socialist allies and its heavy dependence on them to develop the economy of the North.
"The party leadership sought instead a compromise, a 'democratic alliance policy,' that would avoid either war or the destruction of the party in the South. Through that policy it tried to attract liberal non-Communist opponents of Diem to a united front by making concessions to them on the future regime in the South. The educated elite in the South included many who had been active and sympathized with the Viet Minh resistance and who opposed Diem for his political repression, his subservience to the United States, and his refusal to permit any moves toward reunification of the country. Some of them were in touch with party members by late 1958 and were open to an alliance with Hanoi against Diem, although most still preferred a liberal democratic regime in the South.
As the violence against the party and resistance veterans in the South mounted, Southern party leaders complained bitterly to Hanoi about its passive stance. Many of these victims and, in one case, an interzone committee, took up arms against the Diem regime in 1957–1978 on their own initiatives. In early 1959 the party leadership agreed to a limited armed struggle in the South. It did not, however, intend to win that armed struggle by main force warfare, as in the anti-French resistance war, but by a 'general offensive and insurrection' in which political, rather than military, forces would play the main role. Hanoi was hoping that an alliance between the party and non-Communist opponents of Diem at the national level would hasten the collapse of the regime and permit a left-of-center coalition government to take power.
Hanoi's political struggle strategy in the South was reflected in the formation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) by Communist party cadres in December 1960. The NLF was based on agreement between the party and the anti-Diem non-Communist intellectuals and political figures on a pluralist and nonaligned South Vietnamese..."
76. "Duong Loi Cach Mang Mien Nam" [The path of revolution in the south], Party directive, 1956, document no. 1002, Jeffrey Race Collection, in the Echols Collection, Cornell University Libraries, p. 2. At about the same time the document was written, Hanoi was contacting non-Communist political figures from the Southern elite, many of whom had been connected with the French-sponsored regime before 1954, and assuring them that the socialist North would coexist with a nonsocialist South for many years, provided that U.S. military influence was removed from the South. Bangkok Post, January 18, 1956.
77. See Truong Nhu Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), pp. 65–69.
78. See George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 101–10.
79. For a clear delineation of differences between the Chinese protracted war strategy and the Vietnamese "general insurrection" strategy in the South, see Le Duan, "To Muoi Cuc and Other Comrades in Nam Bo," February 7, 1961, Letters to the South (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1986), pp. 9–10.
regime and reunification through peaceful negotiations between the two zones. Independent Southern figures made up the bulk of the NLF Central Committee as well as local committees while the southern party organization provided the finances and logistical support for its leaders and most of the cadres who organized the NLF structure from top to bottom. The party guided the operations of village level–NLF committees through its party fraction (đảng đoàn), which was ordered not to “dictate” policies to the committees and persuasion. Most of the members of the committees out to be led were not party members but were respected leaders of the community who had been associated with the Viet Minh resistance to the French.
Village party officials, unlike their RVN counterparts, had wide autonomy regarding taxes, land policy, military recruitment, and education. This decentralization of political power to the village level not only gave the revolutionary organization greater flexibility to adapt to local issues but gave the village population meaningful participation in decisions affecting their lives.
The relationship between the NLF/party structure and the rural population in the South in the early 1960s was also different from that between the DRV and the population in the North during the anti-French resistance. DRV cadres, concerned with obtaining resources and labor from the population, had relied heavily on their status as representatives of the legitimate state authority. Party cadres in the South, on the other hand, avoided any implication that they represented the power of the state in relations with ordinary peasants and, at least at first, even helped people demand services from the village from the RVN administration.
80.See Truong Nhu Tang, Viet Cong Memoir, pp. 65–80.
81.Instructions from Thu-Bien Province party committee to party committees, March 28, 1961, Department of State, no. 7308, Far Eastern Series no. 110, A Threat to Peace: North Viet-Nam's Effort to Conquer South Vietnam, National Archives, Washington, D.C., pt. 2, item 5, p. 95; interview no. 123, RAND Vietnam Interviews (Z-ZH
Interview series), quoted in Carlyle A. Thayer, “Southern Vietnamese Revolutionary Organizations and the Viet-Nam Workers’ Party: Continuity and Change, 1951–1961,” paper for ad hoc seminar on Communist Movements and Regimes in Indochina, New York, September 30–October 2, 1974, p. x in 121; unfiled party document quoted in Douglas Pike, Viet Cong (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p. 228.
82.For an example, see James Walker Trullinger, Jr., Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam (New York: Longman, 1980), p. 79.
83. For an insightful discussion of this point, see Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 159–65.
84.As Race points out, the party’s own training documents warned against the party apparatus becoming “an administrative organization” (ibid., p. 160). In the early party apparatus…
Party cadres were not merely creating organizations responsive to the party's strategy but educating peasants to assert themselves politically. Whether it was a conscious aim or not, the effect was to create critical political participants—activists who no longer simply feared obeyed party cadres but who thought for themselves. Criticism of cadres and suggestions for correcting their errors were encouraged as signs of political maturity. The stronger the NLF village organization, the more difficult it was to collect taxes, simply because people in the villages were not afraid to complain about decisions by cadres or demand lower taxes. Even outright refusal to cooperate, when openly expressed, usually brought further efforts to persuade rather than punishment.
The party could not have succeeded, of course, in building such a sophisticated village-level political organization without using violence to eliminate the government apparatus in the villages, either by killing key officials or by frightening them away beginning in 1960. As Jeffrey Race observes, however, the violence by the party only "eliminated the asymmetry between government and Party agents in the rural areas" that had existed over the previous years. Although the initial effect of the appearance of armed revolutionaries in the villages was to create fear among those who were not familiar with them, the political education process eventually eliminated that fear and replaced it with positive support.
The single most important issue that attracted poor peasants to participate actively in the revolutionary movement was the land tenure system. Instead of pushing the tenant farmers to denounce large landlords, as in the North, party cadres channeled their grievances into a struggle against RVN security personnel, who were often used by landlords to collect back rent or to reclaim land redistributed by the Viet Minh. The cadres had little difficulty...
1960s, the cadres did not discourage people from seeking the RVN district government's assistance in building schools and supplying teachers but, instead, taught them how to lobby for such benefits. "Experiences in Turning XB Village in Kien Phong Province into a Combatant Village," document E-6, in Michael C. Conley, The Communist Insurgent Infrastructure in South Vietnam: A Study of Organization and Strategy (Washington, D.C.: Center for Research in Social Systems, American University, 1966) p. 351.
85. David Hunt, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam," Radical America 8 (January–April 1974), pp. 25–32, 81; W. P. Davidson, "Some Observations on Viet Cong Operations in the Villages," RAND Corporation RM-5267/21SA/ARPA, July 1967, pp. 149–53; "Experiences in Turning XB Village," pp. 350, 352–53.
86 Race, War Comes to Long An, pp. 115–16.
87.Hunt, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam," p. 32–37.
88."Experiences in Turning XB Village," pp. 348–51.
persuading the tenant farmers that their interests lay in ensuring that the old village notables and security agents could not reestablish their power. Building a mass movement on the immediate interests of the poor peasants in land helped secure the village from assaults by the landlord. Moreover, despite the fact that the party distributed land to peasants only provisionally, some cadres noted that the beneficiaries would be generally more inclined to defend their rights to the land than their Northern counterparts had been.
Tenants and other poor peasant farmers in the South were in a better position than those in the North to become politically active on the basis of their own interests rather than simply to follow the orders of the party because of South Vietnam's looser socioeconomic structure. Southern tenant farmers and agricultural workers historically had been less dependent on landlords and more willing to struggle against them than the poor peasantry in the North. So outside cadre work teams did not need to pressure them to mobilize against landlords.
The military arm of the revolutionary movement in the South, the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), was created in 1961 with troops recruited exclusively in the South although key officers and cadres were Southerners who had regrouped to the North after the Geneva Agreement and infiltrated back to the South after 1960. The PLAF was so successful in recruiting and in attacks on the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in 1962–1963 that it began preparing in 1964 to shift from guerrilla warfare to main force warfare. By early 1965 the PLAF was rapidly chewing up the main forces of the ARVN, prompting the United States to begin the continuous bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965 and to send its own combat units to the South in March 1965.
The intervention of U.S. combat forces in the conflict fundamentally altered the politics and society of rural South Vietnam. The NLF zone became the target of massive U.S. firepower, airstrikes as well as “harassment and interdiction” artillery fire.
89.Ibid., p. 357.
See the account by a defector from the party in Race, War Comes to Long An, p. 129.
91 For a discussion of "free fire zones" and "harassment and interdiction fire," see Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 95–114. For a journalistic account of how the NLF zone was devastated in two of the northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, see Jonathan Schell, The Military Half.
on the NLF zone had profound psychological, economic, demographic, and political consequences. “In the entire VC-controlled areas along the canals,” one of the Mekong Delta observed a U.S. official in 1968, “there are very few, if any houses. Long stretches in these areas have been blasted by bombs, artillery, rockets and napalm gun fire.” Large areas of the countryside were taken out of production as a result of chemicals sprayed under the U.S. crop destruction program. Orchards were wiped out by bombs and shells, thus depriving the population of its main source of income.
Although most families clung to their land as long as possible, they were finally forced to leave the villages to find safety in RVN-controlled towns or refugee camps. The constant fear of bombs and shells drove people from their homes in the villages into the fields in the hope of escaping injury and death. But when the peasants would “get the nervous shakes even during the daytime,” they would come as refugees. In many NLF villages from 80 to 85 percent of the population fled to areas controlled by the government.
The massive population movement to the government-controlled zone reduced the NLF recruiting and financial base while the bombing and shelling reduced individual families’ ability to support the Front’s military forces. In 1966–1967, NLF cadres were forced by the resistance of the remaining village population to reduce their exactions on the peasants and even to eliminate conscription, which had been introduced in late 1964. Meanwhile, the political life of NLF villages was also disrupted by U.S. air and artillery attacks. Large political meetings, vital to the maintenance of a system of participatory politics, had to be discontinued; schools shut down and mass associations atrophied for lack of leadership.
The Tet Offensive was another major blow to the NLF/party organization. Not only in the cities but in the areas surrounding them and in highly populated areas of the Delta party chapters and armed
Account of the Destruction of Quang Ngai and Quang Tin (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). For another province study, see A. Terry Rambo, Jerry M. Tinker, and John D. LeNoir, The Refugee Situation in Phu Yen Province (Mclean, Va.: Human Science Research, Inc., 1967), especially pp. 111–12.
92 Debrief of a USAID agriculturalist in Vietnam, 1967–1968, no. 24681, Asia Training Center, p. 58; Hunt, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam," pp. 37–43.
Hunt, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam," pp. 42–44.
Debrief of a USAID agriculturalist, p. 58.
Hunt, "Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam," pp. 42–54.
96 Ibid., pp. 70–107; David W. P. Elliott and W. A. Stewart, Pacification and the Viet Cong System in Dinh Tuong: 1966–67, RAND Corporation Memorandum RM-5788 ISA/APRA, January 1969, pp. 72–75.
units suffered extremely heavy losses.⁹⁷ The NLF/party organization in strategic Long An Province south of Saigon was so shattered that a main force regiment long accustomed to major battles in the mountains had to be brought in to help with political organizing in 1969.⁹⁸
In 1968–1969, moreover, U.S. bombing of NLF areas became even more intense in the Mekong delta.⁹⁹ From late 1968 to 1972 the ARVN gained physical control over the vast majority of former NLF villages because the PLAF main force units did not maintain the offensive to block U.S.-RVN pacification efforts.¹⁰⁰ During the 1968–1971 period tens of thousands of political cadres were lost either in combat or through arrest or assassinations under the U.S.-sponsored Phoenix program to destroy the nonmilitary organization of the insurgency.¹⁰¹ The NLF zone shrank dramatically, and cadres had to retreat to fortified enclaves nearby, from which they could maintain contacts with the population only with great difficulty.¹⁰²
At the same time, the NLF/VWP apparatus was rapidly becoming dependent on troops from the North. The shrinking NLF population base and heavy combat losses inflicted by U.S. troops and planes followed by the ARVN occupation of the rural villages resulted in a precipitous decline in Southern troops in the PLAF and their re-
97. In the case of Can Tho city, a party official later admitted that "many party chapters were killed or imprisoned down to the last comrade" and that in many military units "nearly everyone was killed" (Nguyen Ha Phan, "Youth of Can Tho City," Thanh Nien [Hanoi], December 1977, Joint Publications Research Service [JPRS], Translations on Vietnam, no. 2019, March 24, 1978, pp. 18–23).
98. Tran Van Tra, Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B2 Theatre, vol. 5, JPRS-SEA-82-783, Southeast Asia Report, February 2, 1983, p. 39.
99. See "Pacification's Deadly Price," Newsweek, June 19, 1972.
100. By the end of 1971, the U.S. "Hamlet Evaluation System" showed RVN control over all but 3 percent of the population. See Lewy, America in Vietnam, p. 192. On Hanoi's strategic decision in August–September 1968 to shift to the strategic offensive while building up its forces for a later offensive, see Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam and the Paris Agreement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 92–94.
101. Le Duc Tho later referred to "hundreds of thousands" (hang chuc van) of cadres and party members killed or arrested in the South during the war, but this was obviously not a literal statement of the losses (Le Duc Tho, Bao Cao Tong Ket Xay Dung Dang va Suo Doi Dieu Le Dang [Report on party building and amending the party statute] [Hanoi: Su That, 1977], p. 47). For official U.S. statistics, see Lewy, America in Vietnam, p. 281. For critical accounts of the program, see John Prados, "The Fight of the Phoenix," The Veteran (Washington, D.C.), August 1988, pp. 13–16; James William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), pp. 298–303.
102. David W. P. Elliott, NLF-DRV Strategy and the 1972 Spring Offensive, Cornell University International Relations of East Asia Project, Interim Report no. 4, January 1974, p. 15.
placement by Northern troops. By the end of 1969, Northern troops already constituted 70 percent of all main force Communist troops in the South,¹⁰³ and no more predominantly Southern units existed by the end of the war, despite the Communist spring offensive of 1972 that recaptured militarily many of the villages that had been lost from 1968 through 1971, the party's ability to recreate the elaborate village-based revolutionary political system of the early 1960s had been irreparably damaged. Nearly all rural zones in the Mekong delta were without party bases.¹⁰⁵ The weakened party apparatus in the South had been isolated from the population in much of the countryside during the latter half of the war, and cadres were distrustful of the youth in the villages to recruit them as members.
Ironically, the period of most rapid decline of the NLF/VWP structure and Southern military forces began just as the NLF was claiming the status of a second government. During 1968 the party carried out a nationwide campaign to elect "people's revolutionary committees" that claimed governing authority in hundreds of NLF villages.¹⁰⁷ That campaign was linked with the formation after the 1968 Tet Offensive of a new pro-NLF Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces by non-Communist intellectuals and political figures. The Alliance and the NLF then formed the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) of South Vietnam in May 1969.
The Alliance adopted its own manifesto in mid-1968, affirming that South Vietnam would be "an independent and fully sovereign
103. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Vietnam: December 1969, A Staff Report, 91st Cong., 2d sess., February 2, 1979, p. 11.
104. Truong Nhu Tang, then minister of justice of the PRG, recalls asking General Van Tien Dung at a review of revolutionary troops in Saigon immediately after the 1975 victory, "Where are our [NLF] divisions one, three, five, seven and nine?" (Truong Nhu Tang, Viet Cong Memoir, pp. 264–65). In fact, however, the Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth divisions, originally filled exclusively with Southern NLF troops, had been filled with Northern replacement troops since their heavy losses in 1967 and 1968 whereas the First and Third divisions had been Vietnam People's Army divisions formed in the North after the anti-French war. See John Prados, "Year of the Rat: Vietnam 1972," Strategy and Tactics, no. 35, November–December 1972, p. 9.
105. Le Duc Tho, speech to a cadre conference, November 26–27, 1981, Xay Dung Dang trong Cach Mang Xa Hoi Chu Nghia Viet Nam [Party building in the socialist revolution in Vietnam] (Hanoi: Su That, 1985), p. 294.
106. William Turley, "Political Participation in the Vietnamese Communist Party," in Vietnamese Communism in Comparative Perspective, pp. 189–90.
107. See Nguyen Hoai, "Tu Mat Tran Dan Toc Giai Phong den Chinh Phu Cach Mang Lam Thoi Cong Hoa Mien Nam" [From National Liberation Front to Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam], Nghien Cuu Lich Su, nos. 11-12, 1973, pp. 1–14.
108. On the background of the alliance, see Truong Nhu Tang, Viet Cong Memoir, pp. 130–44.
state with a foreign policy of nonalignment” and that “national reunification cannot be achieved overnight.”¹¹⁴ The VWP thus renewed its compromise with a section of the Southern elite for a bourgeois democratic regime in the South just as the conditions on which the original compromise had been based were being overtaken by new political-military realities.
That fact alone did not automatically rule out a separate Southern regime, with a political and economic system different from that in the North, for a transitional period. Had the United States agreed to the DRV demand for a coalition government in the South between the U.S.-backed government of President Nguyen Van Thieu, the PRG, and the neutralist “third force” in 1972 and backed it with economic incentives for Hanoi to delay reunification, the chances for the survival of a distinct Southern regime would have been enhanced.¹¹⁵ There is evidence that, even as Communist troops were preparing for the final collapse of the Saigon government, there was a major debate within the party leadership over whether Saigon should be governed by the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) or by non-Communist Southerners known to be sympathetic to the NLF.¹¹⁶ The initial series of meetings of party leaders on the problem in May 1975 was inconclusive about a time limit on the transition to a reunified political structure, and at least some were speaking privately in terms of years.¹¹⁷
There were strong arguments for a relatively long transitional period, quite apart from the Southern elite’s sensitivity to Northern domination. The socioeconomic and cultural differences between North and South Vietnam had widened during the years of U.S. military occupation. Capitalist ideology had sunk relatively deep roots in the cities and towns of the South not only among wealthy merchants and French-trained intellectuals but within a new middle class based on the war economy. That class included those who worked directly for the U.S. government as contractors, those who provided services of various kinds to Americans, and those who sold goods delivered from the U.S. military. As many as 1.5 million people
109. "National Salvation Manifesto of the Viet Nam Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces," July 30–31, 1968, South Vietnam: From the NLF to the Provisional Revolutionary Government, Vietnamese Studies, no. 23, pp. 358–59.
110. This is the argument made by then-non-Communist PRG justice minister Truong Nhu Tang, Viet Cong Memoir, pp. 213–18.
111. Personal communication from Ngo Vinh Long, who interviewed party officials involved in the debate during his visit to Vietnam in 1987.
112. United Press International (UPI) dispatch, Washington Post, May 31, 1975; Reuters dispatch, New York Times, May 18, 1975.
"In the Saigon area alone experienced middle-class consumer taste and upward social mobility for the first time as a result of the flood of money and goods from the United States. A new class of entrepreneurial small farmers had also emerged in the Mekong delta from the land reforms carried out by both the NLF and the RVN and the subsidization of fertilizer and other agricultural inputs by U.S. aid during the war. This sizable middle class embraced liberal ideals of political and economic freedom.
It might be argued that South Vietnam was undergoing a capitalist revolution against a traditional agrarian-bureaucratic elite even as the Communist movement was carrying out its own 'unfettered anti-imperialist' revolution. Moreover, it would take many years to reconstruct a party apparatus in the South capable of mobilizing popular activism rather than simply forcing compliance with party policies. In the meantime, the party would have to rely on a state apparatus heavily reinforced by Northern bureaucrats and troops to carry out a socialist revolution there.
But the physical domination of the South by Northern troops and Hanoi's adherence to the principle of skipping the capitalist stage of development tempted the VCP leadership to try to do just that. Party leaders feared that the bourgeoisie would become even more entrenched if the South were allowed to have a separate nonsocialist regime and thus jeopardize the prospects for socialist revolution there. They also believed the socialist revolution needed to control the economic wealth of the South to succeed in Vietnam's first postwar five-year plan (1976–1980). Explaining the reunification decision in November 1975, Truong Chinh minimized the differences between the two zones and said the country's economy had to be under a single administration in order to carry out centralized planning."
The twenty-fourth Central Committee Plenum, meeting in July and August 1975, decided, without consultation with the PRG leadership, to eliminate the separate South Vietnamese regime. At a joint Political Consultative Conference in Saigon in November many of the NLF and PRG representatives were forced to swallow their bitterness about the decision and join in unanimously approving it.
113. One indication of the size of the new middle class is the estimate that there were three hundred thousand television sets in South Vietnam by 1970. See Dao Quang My, Dien Tra ve Vo Tuyen Truyen Hinh tai Xa Hoi Viet Nam [Investigation on television in Vietnamese society] (Saigon: Anloat Roneo Ly Huong, [1970?]), p. 2.
114. William J. Duiker, Vietnam since the Fall of Saigon, Ohio University monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series, no. 56 (1985), rev. ed., pp. 15–20.
115. Truong Nhu Tang, Viet Cong Memoir, p. 285.
The next step was the organization of an election in April 1976 for a new National Assembly for the whole country, which convened in June to approve the formation of a government for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The PRG was quickly dissolved, and the NLF was left in limbo until it merged in February 1977 with the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF). Several party members who were officials of the NLF or PRG, including PRG Chairman Huynh Tan Phat, became high-ranking officials in the SRV, and one non-Communist PRG official, composer Luu Huu Phuoc, went on to become the chairman of the Culture and Education Committee of the National Assembly. But only two of the non-Communists in those organizations, NLF Chairman Nguyen Huu Tho and PRG Justice Minister Truong Nhu Tang (who soon escaped to France), were offered positions in the government. Tho was named to the purely ceremonial position of acting president, where he was kept powerless and isolated.
As VCP officials sought to speed Vietnam's integration into the global economic division of labor in the late 1980s, at least some recognized that not permitting a separate non-Communist South Vietnamese regime that could cooperate with the North was a major historical error. The non-Communist figures in the NLF and PRG had stressed the importance of national reconciliation and opposed the decision by the party to trick the entire civilian RVN bureaucracy and officer corps and the non-Communist intelligentsia into going to "reeducation" camps far from their homes and then keep them there for years—a policy that engendered bitterness throughout the South. A separate Southern regime would have avoided the policies of forced collectivization of agriculture and elimination of the Chinese-dominated trading system by confiscating the assets of merchants and sending the merchants to the countryside. It would have
116. See the brief history of the Vietnam National United Front in Vietnam News Agency, November 17, 1986.
117. Cf. list of officials of the PRG in Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1975), p. 259, and National Foreign Intelligence Center, Directory of Officials of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, CR 80–15659, December 1980; Truong Nhu Tang, Viet Cong Memoir, pp. 286–87.
118. Some years later Tho told a visitor who had brought him some French magazines how precious it was to be able to read the French press. His daughter had bought him airmail subscriptions to all major French magazines and newspapers, but though the cadres at the door would not let them go through. "You see I am the acting president of the SRV," he lamented, "but the censors will not allow me to read what I want" (interview with a Western diplomatic source in Hanoi, August 1982).
119.See Truong Nhu Tang, Viet Cong Memoir, pp. 271–82.
"established business links with the overseas Chinese communities in East Asia and maintained a freer press that might have prodded the party leadership to begin the process of economic and political reform much sooner than it did.
In short, Vietnam would have been in a far stronger position to carry out the economic development strategy that it finally adopted in the late 1980s had it not insisted on a forced reunification in 1975–1976. But the strength of the VCP's ideological commitment, as well as the legacy of a decade of deep and steadily growing Northern military involvement in the South, ruled out such a solution. The North's costly military victory thus added yet another layer to the mélange of historical and cultural factors that made the SRV—Vietnam's first unified, independent government in more than a century and a half—a highly authoritarian and bureaucratic socialist regime."
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