Category Archives: China

by | 21 May 2025 · 12:06 pm

DC Debate on Dien Bien Phu

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 593-596:

“The Eisenhower administration has decided that Indo-China will not be allowed to fall into Red hands—whatever the cost,” declared The Wall Street Journal the next day. Echoed U.S. News & World Report: “Blunt notice is given to Communists that [the] U.S. does not intend to let Indochina be gobbled up, even if it means big war.” The New Republic, commenting on Eisenhower’s approval of the text, likewise said the address could have only one possible meaning: “The administration has decided to do whatever is necessary to win in Southeast Asia—if necessary it will commit US ground forces.” And in The New York Times, the lede of James Reston’s front-page news analysis read, “The Eisenhower Administration has taken a fundamental policy decision to block the communist conquest of Southeast Asia—even if it has to take ‘united action’ with France and other countries to do so.” How did Reston know this? Because “the highest authority” told him so.

Of course, Southeast Asia was not the same as Indochina, so the Times and The New Republic may have been hedging their bets slightly on what the immediate implications were for the fighting in Vietnam. But that distinction was lost on many observers, as was the distinction between intervening with airpower at Dien Bien Phu (which Dulles in particular doubted would do much good) and elsewhere in Indochina. On Capitol Hill, the predominant reaction to the speech—especially among Democrats—was surprise and uncertainty. Was the administration trying to lead the nation into war? And what was “United Action” precisely? “I followed Secretary Dulles’s speech very carefully,” remarked Democratic senator John Stennis of Mississippi, “and I have not been able to decide exactly what he means by ‘united action.’ ” Senator Arthur Watkins, a Republican from Utah, warned the White House not to follow Truman’s example “and take action without consulting the Congress.”

Misgivings came also from a more unexpected quarter in the aftermath of the speech: the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On March 31, Admiral Radford convened a meeting of the group to ascertain his colleagues’ views about recommending the commitment of U.S. naval air and air force units for the defense of Dien Bien Phu—and, by extension, their views of the Indochina struggle more broadly. If he expected full support for such a recommendation, he was soon disappointed. None of the other service chiefs was keen on the idea. General Matthew Ridgway, chief of staff of the army, said any benefits to be accrued from intervention to support the garrison would be outweighed by the costs. The use of airpower at Dien Bien Phu would not decisively affect the military picture in Vietnam, Ridgway said, but would greatly increase the risk of general war. Nor did the army chief like the way Radford had introduced the matter. “Unless the question emanated from proper authority,” he continued, “any such recommendation—for or against—was clearly outside the proper scope of the authority of the JCS.” To advocate a specific policy would be to “involve the JCS inevitably in politics.”

Underlying Ridgway’s opposition, and that of his subordinates in army intelligence, was a deeply skeptical view of what the use of airpower could accomplish in Vietnam. Dismissed as a parochial argument by some, as reflecting a desire to rationalize an institutional army viewpoint, it was in fact a reasoned position. To Ridgway, recent history showed clearly that airpower alone could not effectively interdict lines of communication if the adversary had the resources and the motivation to keep supplies moving, as the Viet Minh clearly had. The Italian campaign in World War II had demonstrated this, as had Korea. In Indochina, moreover, the obstacles were greater, for unlike in Italy and Korea the approaches to the front were not constricted by a peninsula. The Viet Minh had shown time and again the relative ease with which they could overcome French aerial interdiction efforts, and there was little reason to believe aircraft operating from American carriers would have markedly more success. The imminent start of the rainy season, with its heavy cloud cover and low ceiling, would further reduce effectiveness.

The White House took note of the alarms raised in Congress and among the service chiefs. During a press conference on March 31, Eisenhower, after affirming his “complete agreement” with Dulles on Indochina policy, said he “could conceive of no greater disadvantage to America” than to send U.S. forces “in great numbers around the world, meeting each little situation as it arises.” That phraseology, of course, signified little about what he might do or not do in Indochina, but some interpreted it as an attempt to soothe congressional concerns. The next morning the president told the NSC he was troubled by the division of opinion within the JCS regarding Radford’s air strike plan but then said the intervention question was not for the Joint Chiefs but for “statesmen” to answer. And the decision would have to be made soon. But not by the full NSC—Eisenhower announced he would not delegate the decision to the NSC but would pursue it after the meeting with a smaller group in the Oval Office.

No records of this second meeting have been found, but it must have been a dramatic session. Two days earlier, on March 30, General Vo Nguyen Giap had launched the second phase of his attack plan on Dien Bien Phu, and the reports coming into the White House were ominous: The garrison had suffered withering blows in two nights of savage fighting, much of it at strongpoints Eliane and Dominique. Radford’s prediction of an imminent Viet Minh conquest seemed to be coming true. The transcribed summaries of Dulles’s telephone conversations from later in the day indicate that a sense of urgency pervaded the second gathering, and that those in attendance agreed on the need for a meeting with the bipartisan congressional leadership. The tenor of these telephone conversations, following on the heels of the NSC and Oval Office meetings, implied the very real possibility of implementing the Vulture plan or some variant. Eisenhower, shortly after the second session, told two newspaper chieftains over lunch that he might have to send squadrons from two aircraft carriers to bomb the Reds at Dien Bien Phu—then added, “Of course, if we did, we’d have to deny it forever.”

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by | 17 May 2025 · 8:16 am

Viet Minh Logistics, 1954

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 530-534:

THERE FOLLOWED TEN DAYS OF RELENTLESS PREPARATION, AS ferocious as any in the history of warfare. The general mobilization of labor initiated a month earlier now took on a breathtaking pace. For on this day, January 14, nothing was yet ready. The artillery was not in place on the crests above Dien Bien Phu, and the trails to get it there had not been made ready nor even fully marked out. Farther away, huge tasks remained to get materials to the highlands, from the Chinese border at Mu Nam Quam over Provincial Route 13 to the Red River and thence via Provincial Route 41 to the area of Dien Bien Phu—a total distance of almost five hundred miles. All along this route, engineering crews and soldiers, assisted by porters, worked day and night to clear and widen and repair the roads and to keep convoys moving. The route was divided into eight sections, their endpoints marked by major obstacles such as ravines or waterways where checkpoints were set up. The Russian-made Molotova two-and-a-half-ton trucks, now numbering about six hundred, as well as a smaller number of American Dodge trucks captured by the Chinese in Korea or the Viet Minh in Vietnam, traveled only one section each; at the checkpoints, their contents were taken off by porters and reloaded on the vehicles assigned to the next stretch.

French aircraft were a constant menace, and the casualties among the porters, though never published or perhaps tallied, were undoubtedly high. (A particular menace: the new American antipersonnel bombs that spread lethal showers of small steel splinters.) But the work continued, as thousands of porters stood ready to fill in the craters or build bypasses; French crews reported with dismay that the cuts they succeeded in making in roads were often repaired within hours. To complicate the pilots’ task, elaborate efforts were made to camouflage the route wherever possible. Log bridges were constructed just under the surface of a stream to hide them, and treetops were pulled together with ropes and cables to screen the roads. Vehicles were covered with leafy branches, and tire tracks were rubbed out as soon as the trucks had passed. A primitive but effective air-warning system was fashioned, whereby spotters in treetops clanged alarm triangles or blew whistles to warn of approaching planes (none of which were jets and thus could be heard well in advance of arrival). Pilots would report seeing long lines of truck headlights suddenly go dark, long before they reached the target.

When bomb damage or natural obstacles proved too great to overcome quickly, porters were called in to carry loads themselves, often over considerable distances. They would don makeshift shoulder pads and bamboo carrying rigs, and frequently they would team up. Photographs exist of four-man teams using shoulder poles to carry the barrels and the breechblocks of 75mm Japanese mountain guns up steep wooded hillsides.

Bicycles, for years a favored mode of transport for the Viet Minh, were again called into service. Most were French-made, manufactured at Saint-Étienne or in the Peugeot factories. A specially equipped bicycle—with wooden struts to strengthen the frame and bamboo poles to extend the handlebars and the brake levers—could take more than an elephant could carry. “We mobilized all available supply bicycles,” Vo Nguyen Giap would recall, “reaching a total of 20,000.”

Every supply bicycle was initially capable of transporting 100 kilograms, and this was later increased to 200 or even 300 kilograms. One civilian coolie laborer from Phu Tho named Ma Van Thang was able to transport a total of 352 kilograms on his bicycle. The carrying capacity of transport bicycles was more than ten times greater than that of porters carrying loads on “ganh” [bamboo or wooden] poles, and the amount of rice consumed by the people transporting the supplies was reduced by a similar amount. The superiority of the transport bicycles also lay in the fact that they could operate along roads and trails that trucks could not use. This method of transportation greatly surprised the enemy’s army and completely upset his original calculations.

But the most dramatic feats were accomplished at the end, after the trucks had snaked their way to the endpoint, at Na Nham on Route 41. From here, in order to avoid detection by the French, the artillery pieces had somehow to be dragged to their emplacements, on a trail that ten days before the attack date had still to be blazed. Unloaded from the trucks, the cannons were to be transported through a chain of mountains without going through a valley, in order to cut through the foothills of the 1,100-meter-high Pu Pha Song mountain; then they were to descend again in the direction of the Pavie Piste, which linked Dien Bien Phu to Lai Chau, which they would cross near Ban To; then they were to scale another new height in order to position the battery at Ban Nghiu, from where they would fire on the French garrison at point-blank range.

…

It took seven days and nights of nonstop labor to get the heavy guns in place, with the use of block and tackle, drag ropes, and braking chocks to keep them from careening back down the slopes. The half-ton 75mm mountain guns were not the problem; they could be broken down into eleven loads that, while heavy and cumbersome, were manageable. The 105mm howitzers, however, represented an almost absurd challenge on inclines that reached as steep as sixty degrees. Commander Tran Do of the 312th Division was among the infantry pressed into this “silent battle” of “cannon-pulling” of the 105s. “Every evening when the white fog … began to descend over the plains, columns of human beings set out on the road,” he later wrote. “The [six-mile] track was so narrow that if a slight deviation of the wheels took place the artillery piece would have fallen into the deep ravine. The newly-opened track was soon an ankle-deep bog. With our own sweat and muscles, we replaced the trucks to haul artillery pieces into position.”

Fatigue and lack of supplies were a constant concern, Tran continued. Meals consisted only of rice, often undercooked, as the kitchens had to be smokeless by day and sparkless by night. And yet the work went on: “To climb a slope, hundreds of men crept before the gun, tugging on long ropes, pulling the piece up inch by inch. On the crest, the winch was creaking, helping to prevent the piece from slipping.” Then it got worse: “It was much harder descending a slope. The sight was just the reverse: Hundreds of men held onto long ropes behind the piece, their bodies leaning backwards, and the windlass released the ropes inch by inch.” In this way, whole nights were spent toiling by torchlight to gain five hundred or a thousand meters.

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by | 13 May 2025 · 5:12 am

Korean War and French Vietnam, 1953

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 462-463:

THE KOREAN ARMISTICE, SIGNED ON JULY 27, HAD A DEVASTATING effect on French thinking, causing a further slackening of the will to continue the fight. Marc Jacquet, the minister for the Associated States, told British officials a few days later that his compatriots were nonplussed: They saw the United States securing a truce in Korea and Britain trading with China and could not understand why their allies should expect them to continue a war in Indochina in which there was no longer a direct French interest. France, he said, wanted the future Korea peace conference extended to cover also Indochina and sought Britain’s help in that regard. He added that American aid for the French war effort was insufficient and speculated that Laniel’s government was the last that would continue the struggle.

Bernard B. Fall, a French-raised World War II veteran who would in time become one of the most astute analysts of both the French and American wars, and who would be killed while accompanying U.S. Marines on a mission near Hue in early 1967, saw firsthand the effect of the Korean truce as he toured Vietnam in 1953 in order to conduct field research for his Syracuse University doctoral dissertation. Born into a Jewish merchant family in Vienna in 1926, Fall lost both parents at the hands of the Nazis and joined the French underground in November 1942, at age sixteen. As a maquisard he soon got a taste of what it meant to fight a guerrilla war against an occupying force. Later, he saw action in the First French Army under de Lattre before being shifted—thanks to his fluency in German—to the French Army’s intelligence service. A stint as a researcher for the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal followed, whereupon Fall resumed his studies, first at the University of Paris and then in Munich. In 1951 he arrived in the United States, the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to pursue graduate work at Syracuse. During a summer seminar in Washington in 1952, Fall’s instructor encouraged him to pursue research on the Indochina struggle, about which little scholarship had as yet been produced.

Fall took up the challenge with zest. He recalled in an interview in 1966: “By pure accident, one sunny day in Washington, D.C., of all places, in 1952, I got interested in Viet-Nam and it’s been sort of a bad love affair ever since.”

On May 16, 1953, Fall arrived in Hanoi, carrying a military-style duffel bag and with his precious Leica camera and a new shortwave radio slung over his shoulder. Granted special access as a former French army officer, Fall accompanied units on combat operations, attended lunches and dinners with officers, and kept his eyes and ears open. The signing of the Korean armistice, he later wrote, “brought a wave of exasperation and hopelessness to the senior commanders that—though hidden to outsiders—was nevertheless obvious.” For no longer could it be said that France was fighting one front of a two-front war, necessary for the defense of the West. Washington had broken the deal: It had agreed to a separate peace in Asia. And now the Chinese, being no longer preoccupied in Korea, could turn their focus southward. About Navarre, meanwhile, Fall heard mostly complaints—he was timid and uncommunicative, many in the officer corps said, disliked even by his own staff—and few commanders had much good to say about the fighting abilities of Bao Dai’s Vietnamese Nationalist Army.

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by | 12 May 2025 · 3:42 pm

French Empire Overstretched, 1952

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 405-408:

The possibility of a French withdrawal seemingly grew more real that January, as Paris lawmakers prepared to begin a full-dress debate on Indochina in the National Assembly. De Lattre’s death on January 11, just a few days before the start of the debate, set a somber mood for the proceedings, and it was soon clear that a broad cross section of delegates questioned France’s continued commitment to the war. Views that a year earlier would have been labeled “defeatist,” or “unpatriotic,” were openly expressed, and not merely by the left. How could France afford, many delegates asked, to continue a struggle that in 1952 would consume between one-seventh and one-sixth of the entire budget? Answer: She could not, certainly not if she was also to build up a large army in Europe, which alone would enable her to pull her own weight in the organization of Western defense. “I am asking for a change of policy in Indo-China,” declared Pierre Mendès France of the Radical Party.

…

Influential voices in the French press said in essence the same thing; Le Monde and Le Figaro both noted that, absent dramatically increased U.S. aid, France would soon have to choose between fulfilling her European responsibilities and seeking a rapid diplomatic solution in Vietnam. At the U.S. embassy in Paris, a despondent David Bruce saw French hopes for victory dashed and the public eager for peace. “A snowball has started to form,” the ambassador warned Washington. Absent greater American assistance for the war effort or some kind of “internationalization”—meaning U.S. and British guarantees to defend Indochina militarily—public sentiment for withdrawal would continue to build. The CIA, for its part, said that a full-fledged French reappraisal of Vietnam policy was at hand, with potentially major implications for the United States.

Ultimately, the Pleven government prevailed in the debate, and the Assembly approved by a wide margin the appropriation of 326 billion francs for land forces in Indochina during 1952. This sum, however, did not cover the air force or navy, and as in previous years a supplemental allocation would be required before long. Pleven declared that the government had secured a fresh mandate for the vigorous prosecution of the war, and he lauded French forces for their “magnificent” performance in the field; a year or eighteen months hence, he predicted, France could secure a negotiated settlement “from positions of strength.” His words rang hollow. The dominant mood in the Assembly after the vote, observed one journalist, was that “it couldn’t go on like this.” If the appropriation passed, “it was only because the French army in Indo-China could not be left high and dry without money or equipment.”

Two other factors no doubt shaped the outcome of the vote. One was the growing nationalist restiveness in North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Tunisia. In Rabat, the French faced growing pressure from the sultan, Mohammad Ben Youssef, to grant independence, while in Tunis negotiations had broken down just a few weeks earlier over nationalist demands for home rule. For some Paris officials, the North African tensions were an added reason for withdrawal from Indochina—in the words of Radical leader Édouard Daladier, so long as 7,000 French officers, 32,000 NCOs, and 134,000 soldiers were “marooned” in Vietnam, France would be hopelessly outnumbered in her North African possessions. The alternative view, and the one that won out in the end, was that early disengagement from Vietnam would only intensify nationalist fervor in the Maghreb. (If the Vietnamese can win independence, why can’t we?) For the sake of the empire, then, France had to stay the course in Vietnam. Second, Premier Pleven won political points for his announcement, timed perfectly in advance of the Assembly vote, that he had secured agreement for a three-power conference on Indochina, involving Britain, the United States, and France, to take place in Washington later in the month. Pleven assured delegates that France would press for a joint Western policy toward the Far East and direct Anglo-American support in the event of a Chinese Communist move into Indochina.

The prospect of a Chinese military intervention dominated the discussion of Indochina at the tripartite meetings, though there was a divergence of views on the seriousness of the threat. At the start of 1952, the PRC had about two hundred and fifty thousand troops in the provinces bordering Indochina, many of them ready to cross the frontier on short notice. Both the CIA and the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the likelihood of an invasion, and so did British intelligence. With the Korean War still ongoing and claiming vast Chinese resources, and with the Viet Minh holding their own against the French, these analysts thought Beijing would almost certainly be content to maintain its current level of support—arms and ammunition, technicians and political officers, and the training of Viet Minh NCOs and officers in military centers in southern China. The French, however, insisted on the very real possibility of direct, large-scale Chinese intervention and requested a U.S. commitment to provide air and naval support in that event. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council agreed it was important to decide on a course of action should the Chinese move. But which course?

Many of the French troops in Indochina came from France’s African colonies, some of the best from Morocco and Senegal. By 1952 “the fighting had killed 3 generals, 8 colonels, 18 lieutenant colonels, 69 majors, 341 captains, 1,140 lieutenants, 3,683 NCOs, and 6,008 soldiers of French nationality; 12,019 legionnaires and Africans; and 14,093 Indochinese troops. These numbers did not include the missing or wounded—about 20,000 and 100,000 respectively.” (p. 458)

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by | 7 May 2025 · 12:30 pm

U.S. Doubts About French Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 370-374:

From Truman on down, senior U.S. officials publicly affirmed support for the war effort and pledged to speed up military deliveries. In private sessions, though, they refused to accept that Korea and Vietnam were one war, and they pressed the general for more proof that France was sincerely committed to full independence for Indochina, and for greater efforts to build up the Vietnamese fighting forces. The Washington Post spoke for much of American officialdom when it editorialized, in the middle of the French general’s visit, that “the great problem in increased military aid is to avoid the appearance of propping up colonialism.”

Still, when de Lattre and his wife left New York by air shortly before midnight on September 25, bound for Paris, he took satisfaction in the results of the trip. As well he might. The Americans had unambiguously affirmed the critical importance of the fight against Ho Chi Minh and had pledged to bolster their military assistance and to deliver it with more dispatch. In Congress and in the press, and among the general public, awareness of the French war and of French military needs was now much greater than before. As a laudatory New York Times editorial put it, the Washington talks made two points plain: “First, we are in basic political agreement with the French. Second, our aid to the Associated States of Indochina [French colonies] will be stepped up. Both are vital.”

EVEN BEFORE DE LATTRE’S VISIT, THE AID HAD BEEN SUBSTANTIAL. He had already received upward of a hundred U.S. fighter planes, fifty bombers and transports, and ground arms for thirty battalions, as well as artillery and naval craft. But other promised deliveries, including trucks and tanks, were months behind schedule. Only 444 of a scheduled 968 jeeps and 393 of 906 six-by-six trucks, for example, had been sent in fiscal year 1951. Lovett blamed the slow pace on production problems and a lack of expertise at some plants, but he and other officials also said the French themselves were partly responsible, chiefly because of their inadequate maintenance practices. Distribution of matériel already delivered was another problem: Armed convoys were forced to move slowly—whether by road or water—and were subject to frequent Viet Minh attacks. Nevertheless, Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins pledged to de Lattre that U.S. deliveries would be stepped up, and they were: In the four months following his visit, the French received more than 130,000 tons of equipment, including 53 million rounds of ammunition, 8,000 general-purpose vehicles, 650 combat vehicles, 200 aircraft, 14,000 automatic weapons, and 3,500 radios.

…

Another American, who held a starkly different view, called on de Lattre in Saigon that autumn, a young Democratic congressman who in time would stand at the very apex of America’s Vietnam decision making. This was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose visit to Indochina in mid-October—accompanied by his brother Robert and sister Patricia, during a tour of Asia and the Middle East—is described at the start of this book. JFK was taken aback by what he saw, it will be recalled—France was engaged in a major colonial war and was plainly losing. The United States, as France’s principal ally in the effort, was guilty by association and risked being forced down the same path as the European colonialists. The French-supported Vietnamese government lacked broad popular support, Kennedy determined, and Ho Chi Minh would win any nationwide election.

It was a remarkable message coming from a man who hitherto had sounded every bit the Cold Warrior, blasting the Truman administration, for example, for allowing China to fall to Communism and bragging to constituents about his ties to the rabidly anti-Communist Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. But it’s clear that the Asian tour changed JFK’s outlook. It convinced him that the United States must align herself with the emerging nations, and that Communism could never be defeated by relying solely or principally on force of arms. His Indochina experience led him to that conclusion, as did a dinner conversation in New Delhi with Jawaharlal Nehru, who called the French war an example of doomed colonialism and said Communism offered the masses “something to die for” whereas the West promised only the status quo. War would not stop Communism, Nehru warned him; it would only enhance it, “for the devastation of war breeds only more poverty and more want.” Kennedy agreed, but he wondered if U.S. officials grasped these essential truths. Many of “our representatives abroad seem to be a breed of their own,” he said a few weeks later, “moving mainly in their own limited circles not knowing too much of the people to whom they are accredited, unconscious of the fact that their role is not tennis and cocktails, but the interpretation to a foreign country of the meaning of American life and the interpretations to us of that country’s aspirations and aims.”

Other Americans also held these twin convictions—that the United States was becoming too enmeshed in the war, and that the prospects were nevertheless bleak. At the CIA and at the State Department, numerous midlevel officials held them, as did some of Kennedy’s colleagues on Capitol Hill. Indeed, a sizable number of informed Republican and Democratic lawmakers in this period saw the war as resulting primarily from France’s determination to preserve her colonial empire; some spoke in language similar to that of JFK.

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by | 3 May 2025 · 10:21 am

1950: Ho, Stalin, and Mao

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 295-301:

BY THE START OF 1950, THEN, THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL NATION seemed poised to throw her full support behind the French war effort. No official action, however, had yet been taken, and there matters might have rested for some time but for dramatic news out of the east: On January 18, the People’s Republic of China extended formal recognition to Ho Chi Minh’s government, and on January 30 the Soviet Union did likewise. In the weeks thereafter, Moscow’s Eastern European satellites followed suit, as did North Korea. Viet Minh diplomacy, so dismally unsuccessful for so long, had scored a colossal victory (if one with a hefty price tag, as we shall see), one that Ho desperately needed even as he also feared its implications. His efforts had centered initially on the Soviet Union. But he had a tricky path to walk, given his determination (strongly held through much of 1949) to avoid spurring the Americans into full and open support of France and her counterrevolutionary Bao Dai–led state. In 1948, the ICP reminded party functionaries to refrain from criticizing Washington in their pronouncements and to adopt a neutral line:

…

Such a posture was unlikely to score points with a Soviet leadership already questioning Ho Chi Minh’s socialist bona fides. Nor was this declaration exceptional for the period—in his interviews in 1945–50, when asked about the broader international situation and the growing rift between East and West, Ho always took care to strike a neutral pose. Even as party leaders took great satisfaction in the successes of Mao’s Communist forces to the north, therefore, they rejoiced quietly; even as they sought to win recognition as well as assistance from Moscow, they also continued to meet with American diplomats in Bangkok, among them Lieutenant William H. Hunter, an assistant naval attaché who had traveled widely in Indochina and knew players on both sides personally. Stalin, at odds with independent-minded Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito since 1948, couldn’t abide Communists who showed anything less than complete fidelity to the Kremlin line.

When French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez tried to convince Stalin that he could trust Ho’s commitment to the cause, Stalin demurred. Ho had collaborated too much with the Americans in World War II, he replied, and failed to solicit advice from the Kremlin before making key decisions. Case in point: Ho’s decision to dissolve the ICP in 1945. Thorez tried to say that the dissolution had been merely tactical, but the Soviet dictator would not hear it. A Soviet Foreign Ministry memo dated January 14, 1950, spoke of “ambiguity” in Ho Chi Minh’s interviews. “Speaking about the Vietnam government’s attitude towards the U.S., Ho Chi Minh evades the issue of U.S. expansionist policy towards Vietnam.… Until now Ho Chi Minh abstained from the assessment of [the] Imperialist nature of the North Atlantic Pact and of the U.S. attempt to establish a Pacific bloc as a branch of this pact.”

And yet before that month was out, the USSR had taken the important step of extending diplomatic recognition to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Why? In large part because Stalin felt compelled to follow Mao’s lead. And for the Chinese, the decision was, by all accounts, a relatively easy one. Contacts between Ho’s government and Mao’s forces, for a long time modest because of geographic separation and because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been too preoccupied fighting its own war to provide direct and substantial support, increased markedly beginning in late 1948. In January 1949, Truong Chinh told the Sixth Plenum of the ICP that Mao’s army might soon conquer all of China and that “we must be ready to welcome it.” In April, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces fled Nanjing and the Red Army crossed the Yangtze, and in midyear the Vietnamese dispatched about a thousand men to southern China to attack Guomindang units in collaboration with local CCP troops. To senior CCP leaders, never as bothered as Stalin had been by Ho’s dissolution of the party in 1945, it was a welcome sign of the Viet Minh’s internationalist commitment.

In mid-1949, as the Chinese Communists publicly proclaimed their determination to “lean to one side” in the Cold War and their rejection of Titoism, Liu Shaoqi, the CCP’s second in command, traveled to Moscow for secret meetings with Kremlin leaders, including Stalin. A key item of discussion was the Vietnamese revolution and how to respond to it. Stalin, showing again his lack of interest in Southeast Asia, expressed his desire to see the CCP take primary responsibility for providing support for the Viet Minh. Liu Shaoqi agreed, and he promised a skeptical Stalin that Ho Chi Minh was a true internationalist at heart. Mao Zedong offered the same assurance when he held talks with Stalin in Moscow on Christmas Eve. That same day Liu Shaoqi, now back in Beijing, chaired a Politburo meeting to discuss Indochina policy. Any decision to assist the Viet Minh would exact a price, he told his colleagues, since the French government had not yet decided whether to grant diplomatic recognition to the new China and would obviously be offended should Beijing opt to recognize the DRV. Nevertheless the Politburo decided to invite a Viet Minh delegation to the Chinese capital for consultations, and to send a senior commander of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Guibo, to Vietnam as the CCP’s general representative.

The following week Ho Chi Minh set out on foot for the Chinese frontier, dressed in his now-familiar khaki suit. He traveled under the name Ding. For seventeen days he walked, arriving at Guangxi on about January 20, 1950. On January 30, he arrived in Beijing. Mao was still in Moscow, but Liu Shaoqi assured Ho that major assistance would be forthcoming, including diplomatic recognition.

From Beijing, Ho continued on to Moscow, arriving in the Soviet capital by train on February 10. Mao was still there, having himself gotten his fill of both the bitterly cold Russian winter and Stalin’s vast reservoir of distrust. The Kremlin leader had long thought Mao unreliable, an ersatz Communist whose motives were always to be questioned. As early as 1940, Stalin had complained that the CCP was largely a peasant organization that gave far too little role to the working class. He referred to Mao as that “cave-dweller-like Marxist,” whose ideas were primitive and who—like Ho Chi Minh—was probably, underneath it all, much more nationalist than internationalist. It mattered not that the CCP had supported Moscow in excluding Tito from the Cominform in 1948; Stalin still considered Mao and Ho both to be closet Titos. “He mistrusted us,” Mao later complained, speaking of Stalin’s view of the CCP. “He thought our revolution was a fake.”

Of course, Stalin’s own nationalism had something to do with his stance, as did his security priorities emerging out of World War II. For much of the Chinese civil war he adhered to a neutral position, calculating that a divided China served the USSR’s interests. As late as the beginning of 1949, he had urged Mao not to send his forces across the Yangtze but to be content with holding the northern half of the country. This was prudent, he said, to avoid provoking the United States. But as Communist troops continued to advance and victory became assured, Stalin shifted his rhetoric. He now praised Mao as a “true Marxist leader” and during Mao’s visit agreed—though only after a delay of several weeks, during which the Chinese leader was left to seethe, half prisoner, half pampered guest, in Stalin’s personal dacha—to rescind the Sino-Soviet friendship treaty that Stalin had concluded with Chiang Kai-shek in favor of a new one with the PRC.

At Mao’s urging, Stalin agreed to meet with Ho Chi Minh. Still focused on European concerns and still distrustful of Ho, the Soviet leader affirmed his government’s recognition of the DRV but ruled out direct Soviet involvement in the war against the French. “There must be a division of labor between China and the Soviet Union,” Stalin said. As his government had to meet its commitments in Eastern Europe, it would be up to China to give Vietnam what she needed. “China won’t lose in this deal,” the Soviet leader added, “because even if it provides Vietnam with second-hand articles, it will be given new ones by the Soviet Union.” Ho Chi Minh pressed the issue, urging Stalin to sign the same treaty of alliance with the DRV that he had just signed publicly with Mao. Impossible, came the reply; Ho, after all, was in Moscow on a secret mission. Ho responded—perhaps in jest—that he could be flown around Moscow in a helicopter and then land with suitable publicity, to which Stalin replied: “Oh, you orientals. You have such rich imaginations.”

It was hardly the reception Ho had hoped for, but Mao promised him (both there and in Beijing, to which the two leaders returned on March 3) that the PRC would do her best “to offer all the military assistance Vietnam needed in its struggle against France.” He soon set about making good on his word. For Mao, the Vietnamese struggle represented an opportunity to promote the Chinese model for revolution and also served his country’s national security interests. Like so many Chinese rulers before him, he sought to keep neighboring areas from being in hostile hands, and he worried in particular that the United States might become more involved—whether in Indochina, in the Taiwan strait, or in the increasingly tense Korean peninsula.

Personal ties between Ho and senior Chinese Communists may have made a difference too. Already in the early 1920s, while in Paris, Ho had met CCP leaders such as Zhou Enlai, Wang Ruofi, and Li Fuchun; later, it will be recalled, he spent time in Canton (Guangzhou) assisting Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern representative to the new Chinese revolutionary government led by the Nationalist Party. In Canton he had also engaged in various anticolonial activities, including teaching a political training class for Vietnamese youth. Among the guest speakers he invited in: Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. Fluent in Chinese, Ho later translated Mao’s study “On Protracted War” from Chinese into French.

Now, a quarter of a century later, Ho could board the train for the trip home secure in the knowledge that he had Chinese backing for his cause. But he also must have had feelings of ambivalence as he looked out the window of his train car, contemplating what lay ahead. The Sino-Soviet recognition of his government, however necessary, was certain to alienate a lot of Vietnamese moderates, after all, and limit Vietnam’s room for maneuver with respect to non-Communist Asia. It also would isolate the DRV from the United States, Britain, and Japan and drastically increase the danger of a major American intervention on the side of Bao Dai and the French. A certain degree of independence had been lost. At various points in 1949, Ho had denied publicly that his government was about to identify itself with either the CCP or Stalin’s Russia. In a radio interview with American journalist Harold Isaacs, for example, he ridiculed the notion of the Viet Minh falling under Soviet or Chinese domination and vowed that independence would come through the DRV’s own efforts. For that matter, could the Chinese Communists really be trusted? Notwithstanding the toasts and vows of eternal friendship in Beijing, mutual suspicions remained, including on Ho’s part.

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by | 1 May 2025 · 9:12 am

1949: Vietnam War Goes International

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 290-293:

BROADER INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ALSO SHAPED ACHESON’S thinking on Vietnam in 1949. He began to pay more attention to Southeast Asia’s economic potential, particularly in terms of facilitating Japan’s recovery. Given the instability in China, Washington planners deemed it absolutely essential to secure a stable, prosperous Japan under U.S. control. Southeast Asia, rich in rice, tin, oil, and minerals, and with a population of 170 million (bigger than the United States), could play a principal role in this endeavor. George F. Kennan, head of the Policy Planning Staff, influenced Acheson in this direction, as did the young Dean Rusk, deputy undersecretary of state and a man Acheson asked to take on a larger role in Asian policy. The maintenance of a pro-Western Southeast Asia, they and other government analysts argued, would provide the markets and resources necessary for Japan’s economic revival—and help the recovery of Western Europe (by then well under way, but showing signs of a slowdown) as well. According to Rusk, the importation of rice from Indochina, for example, could be a terrific boon in securing Japan’s revitalization.

Then, in the second half of the year, came two momentous developments: In August, the Soviet Union for the first time detonated an atomic device; and in September, Mao Zedong’s forces completed their rout of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang. Specialists had known that it was only a matter of time before Stalin got the bomb, but most thought the time would be the early or mid-1950s, not August 1949. The implications were huge (if not quite as enormous as some doomsayers in Washington proclaimed). It meant the end of the U.S. atomic monopoly and immediately raised fears that Stalin might embark on an aggressive course to expand his global reach. That worrisome thought only gained more currency the next month, when Mao Zedong consolidated his victory in China. Here neither the event nor the timing was a surprise to specialists—Nanjing had fallen in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August—but for ordinary Americans it was sobering to hear Mao dramatically declare, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang and the remnants of his army fled to Formosa (now Taiwan).

Though some senior U.S. officials, Acheson among them, believed that the USSR and Mao’s government would ultimately experience a rift, in the short term the dangers seemed all too real. Instantly, the number of major Communist foes had doubled. As a report by the National Security Council (NSC) had put it in June, “the extension of Communist authority in China represents a grievous political defeat for us.… If Southeast Asia is also swept by Communism, we shall have suffered a major political rout the repercussions of which will be felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East and in a then critically exposed Australia.… The colonial-nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive Communist movements, and it is now clear that Southeast Asia is the target for a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”

There was in fact no such coordinated offensive. Stalin’s interest in Southeast Asia remained minimal, it was soon clear, and his feelings about the Chinese developments were decidedly mixed. Still, U.S. leaders could be forgiven for thinking that Communism was on the march in the region. In addition to Mao in China and Ho in Vietnam, there were Communist-led rebellions in Indonesia, in newly independent Burma, in Malaya, and in the Philippines. All four rebellions would fail in due course, but in late 1949 their mere existence fueled American fears. Did the historical momentum now lie with the Communists? Even if it didn’t in objective terms, might the perception gain hold that it did, producing a bandwagon effect that could have a pernicious impact on American national security interests? It seemed all too possible.

The NSC report, with its warnings of the far-reaching consequences—the Middle East! Australia!—of a loss of Southeast Asia, was an early version of what would come to be known as the domino theory. Knock over one game piece, and the rest would inevitably topple. For the next twenty-five years, high U.S. officials, on both the civilian and the military sides, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, linked the outcome in Vietnam to a chain reaction of regional and global effects, arguing that defeat in Vietnam would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Though the nature and cogency of the domino theory shifted over time, the core claim remained the same: If Vietnam was allowed to “fall,” other countries would inevitably follow suit.

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by | 29 April 2025 · 5:06 am

France vs. China vs. Vietnam, 1946

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 183-185:

Ho was in a tough spot, facing pressure from several quarters—from Sainteny and the French, from his Chinese occupiers who counseled moderation, and from Vietnamese nationalist parties (notably the VNQDD and the Dai Viet) who accused him of preparing to sell out to France. The signing of a Sino-French agreement in Chongqing on February 28, in which the Chinese agreed to return home in exchange for significant economic concessions from France, reduced his maneuverability further—the agreement, Ho knew, paved the way for a French invasion of Tonkin.

And indeed, the French were about to launch Operation Bentré, a secret plan for the reoccupation of Indochina north of the sixteenth parallel. Hatched in Leclerc’s headquarters some months earlier (and named for a town and province at the mouth of the Mekong River), the plan had several elements but centered on landing a sizable force at the port city of Haiphong and, in coordination with a smaller force arriving by plane, proceeding to capture Hanoi. Over a period of three days starting on February 27, the French Ninth Division of Colonial Infantry and Second Armored Division—a total force of some twenty-one thousand men, most of them wearing American helmets, packs, fatigues, and boots—boarded warships, and on March 1, a fleet of thirty-five ships sailed from Saigon north along the coast. Because of the movement of the tide, the landing would have to occur on either March 4, 5, or 6, or it could not occur again until the sixteenth. An early objective: to rearm three thousand French soldiers who remained interned at the Hanoi Citadel—and who, Bentré planners surely knew, would be in a vengeance-seeking mood.

The French hoped that the arrival of the troops, following fast on the heels of the Chongqing agreement, would compel Ho to agree to a deal on French terms. But the risks were huge. What if the Vietnamese chose instead to stand and fight? And of more pressing concern, what if the Chinese refused to offer their support to the troop landing? That is what occurred. French general Raoul Salan secured permission from the Chinese to have the vessels “present” themselves in Haiphong’s harbor on March 6 but not to disembark any troops. Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, anxious to secure his southern flank at a time when his struggle against Mao Zedong’s Communists was heating up in northeastern China, had no wish to become embroiled in a Vietnamese war of liberation. When the French ships entered the Haiphong harbor on the morning of March 6, the Chinese batteries in the cities began firing. The ships returned fire, and the fighting continued until eleven A.M., with both sides suffering casualties. Chinese negotiators, meanwhile, leaned hard on both the French and the Vietnamese to come to an accord. Strike a bargain, they in effect ordered, or you may find yourselves fighting us as well as your main adversary.

The blackmail tactic worked. In the afternoon of March 6, the two sides, under intense Chinese pressure, signed a “Preliminary Convention,” wherein the French recognized the “Republic of Vietnam” as a “free state” (état libre) within the Indochinese Federation and French Union; the Vietnamese agreed to welcome twenty-five thousand French troops for five years to relieve departing Chinese forces; and France in turn agreed to accept the results of a future popular referendum on the issue of unifying the three regions. The new National Assembly in Hanoi, which had been elected in January, approved the deal, with the understanding that it was preliminary and that additional negotiations would follow in short order. Some Vietnamese militants condemned the accord as a sellout, but Ho reiterated his conviction that the first order of business was to be rid of the dread Chinese. “As for me,” he told aides, “I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”

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by | 25 April 2025 · 5:01 am

Vichy vs. Japan vs. Vietnam, 1940

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 59-60:

On August 29, Vichy concluded an agreement with Japan that recognized Japan’s “preeminent position” in the Far East and granted Tokyo special economic privileges in Indochina. Japan also received transit facilities in Tonkin, subject to agreement between the military officials on the spot. In exchange, Japan recognized the “permanent French interests in Indochina.” Negotiations continued in Hanoi in September and went slowly, as French negotiator General Maurice Martin held out hope for an American naval intervention that would cause Japan to scale down her demands. Increasingly impatient, the Japanese warned Martin that Japanese troops from the Twenty-second Army, based in Nanning, would enter Indochina at 10 P.M. on September 22, whatever the outcome of the negotiations. At 2:30 P.M. on the twenty-second, the negotiators signed an agreement authorizing the Japanese to station 6,000 troops in Tonkin north of the Red River; to use three Tonkin airfields; and to send up to 25,000 men through Tonkin into Yunnan in southern China.

The agreement stipulated that the first Japanese units would arrive by sea. But the Twenty-second Army was intent on moving its elite Fifth Infantry Division across the Chinese border near Lang Son at precisely 10 P.M. Not long after crossing the frontier, the Japanese units became engaged in a fierce firefight near the French position at Dong Dang. Almost immediately, skirmishing also began at other frontier posts. For two days the battle raged, with the key French position of Lang Son falling on the twenty-fifth. The French forces had suffered a major defeat—two posts were gone, casualties were significant (estimates run to 150 dead on the French side), and hundreds of Indochinese riflemen deserted in the course of the battle. It might have been much worse had not Decoux and Baudouin appealed directly to Tokyo and had not the emperor personally ordered his troops to halt their advance. The Japanese apologized for the incident and termed it a “dreadful mistake,” but they had made their point: Governor-General Decoux and the French might still be the rulers of Indochina, but they operated at the mercy of Japan.

Decoux did his best to pretend otherwise. To anyone who would listen, he claimed that the Japanese were not an occupying force but were merely stationed in the country; that the French administration functioned freely and without impediment; and that the police and security services were solely in French hands. The tricolor, he noted, continued to fly over his headquarters in Hanoi. And indeed, French authority in Indochina remained formidable, as Ho Chi Minh and the Indochinese Communist Party learned firsthand in the fall of 1940. Sensing opportunity with the fall of France in June, the ICP in the autumn launched uprisings in both Tonkin and Cochin China against French authorities, only to be brutally crushed. In Cochin China, the French used their few aircraft as well as armored units and artillery to destroy whole villages, killing hundreds in the process. Up to eight thousand people were detained, and more than one hundred ICP cadres were executed. Not until early 1945 would the party’s southern branch recover from this defeat.

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by | 21 April 2025 · 6:20 am

China’s Current Gold Rush in Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 304-305:

The contours of Chinese small-scale gold mining in twenty-first-century Ghana and other gold-rich areas of West and Central Africa bear some uncanny resemblances to Chinese gold-mining and migration practices in the mid-nineteenth century: small companies with partners pooling resources; network-based migrations and brokers that pave the journey from home to foreign goldfields; and uneasy relations with citizens and governments in destination countries. These economic and cultural patterns are remarkable for their persistence and adaptability.

But the Chinese gold rush to Ghana is quite different from the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Gold is no longer the money-commodity and hence does not generate the same kind of global fever that it did in the past. Nevertheless, gold remains a premier store of value and is highly sought during economic recessions. Thus, Chinese mining entrepreneurs rushed to Ghana between 2008 and 2013 because the world price of gold hit historic highs after the 2008 financial crisis. Gold remains valuable, furthermore, for use in some industrial applications and especially for ornament. China and India are the two largest consumers of gold in the world, nearly all of it for jewelry. China is actually the world’s largest producer of gold (400 tons in 2018), but its declining reserves cannot keep up with domestic demand.

Chinese participation in small-scale gold mining, while not insignificant, is just one aspect of China’s mining interest in Africa. China also engages in industrial gold mining, with investments in South African mines, which are still producing after 150 years on the Witwatersrand but now at nearly two miles below the surface. In addition, copper, cobalt, manganese, bauxite, coltan (used in electronics and mobile phones), and dozens of other minerals and metals are critical elements in Chinese manufacturing, especially in top sectors like electronics, vehicles, and steel production. Africa’s rich mineral reserves and China’s voracious industrial appetite have made China the largest importer of minerals from sub-Saharan Africa.

Still, mining ranks but third in China’s African interests, after infrastructure (roads, railroads, ports) and energy (oil and gas). China’s annual foreign direct investment in Africa is enormous, growing from $75 million in 2003 to $5.4 billion in 2018. Approximately one-half of the capital comes from the central government’s state-owned enterprises and banks. Other Chinese investors and contractors include provincial-level state-owned enterprises and private companies and, at the bottom of the hierarchy, small entrepreneurial ventures like those in artisanal mining.

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Filed under Africa, China, economics, industry, labor, migration