Category Archives: democracy

by Joel | 26 May 2025 · 4:09 pm

Wide Support for Dividing 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. 662-666:

Keeping the United States out of Vietnam meant cultivating support for the DRV internationally, and that too argued for being open to diplomacy. Alienating world opinion by forswearing the chance for peace would be unwise. “We have always followed the situation in the world” and “coordinated with the wishes for peace of the people of the world,” one official said. A negotiated agreement would therefore be a “victory” as it met “the pressing needs of the world’s peace lovers.” In the view of deputy prime minister and foreign minister Pham Van Dong, the DRV needed “the sympathy and the support of all peoples” to contain its enemies and protect its sovereignty.”

Party officials were less keen to talk about yet another possible consequence of a prolongation of the fighting, namely that the struggle would become increasingly fratricidal over time. Already now, Vietnamese were killing other Vietnamese in larger numbers. Viet Minh strategists remained confident they had the vast majority of people on their side, and they were as contemptuous as always of what party documents habitually referred to as the “puppet army” created by the French, but in quiet moments they expressed concern about the changing nature of the war. The revolutionary cause they championed was based on the principles of national unity and derived its legitimacy from its status as the only real representative of the populace. In the spring of 1954, the revolution was not yet seriously threatened, but how would things look in six months or a year, or in two years?

Above all, Ho Chi Minh knew, negotiations for an end to the war would have to be attempted in Geneva because his patrons in Moscow and Beijing said so. Repeatedly since the end of the Berlin conference in February, the Communist giants had made clear their desire for a political solution in Indochina and had even made their continued material and rhetorical backing of the war effort contingent on the DRV declaring a willingness to seek peace. The Soviet Union still sought improved relations with the West and also hoped to induce France to agree to a tacit quid pro quo—Moscow’s help in facilitating a settlement in Indochina in exchange for Paris saying non merci to the proposed European Defense Community. China, for her part, viewed the Geneva meeting as an opportunity to solidify her membership in the great-power club and to forestall an American military intervention near her southern borders. Both Communist powers perceived as well a chance to drive a wedge between the Western powers. Said premier and foreign minister Zhou Enlai on February 27, during a meeting with his associates in the Foreign Ministry: “While France seems interested in reaching a peaceful solution to the Indochina issue, the United States is not. Therefore, it seems that France is reluctant to let the United States put its nose into Vietnam.”

But how to reach such a “peaceful solution”? The Kremlin came down early on the side of partition, a Korea-type solution that would temporarily divide Vietnam in half. Such a solution would respect France’s continuing strength in Cochin China while also acknowledging the Viet Minh’s effective control of large areas of Tonkin and Annam. It would serve China’s security needs as well, by forestalling an American intervention and by giving her a friendly “buffer” state on her southern frontier. And it would stop the war, if not forever, at least for a time. Already in late January 1954, Moscow instructed its ambassador in Paris to float the partition idea with French leaders. “There would be a provisional armistice line drawn at the 16th parallel,” a U.S intelligence assessment said of this Soviet overture, and “the French would evacuate Hanoi and the Tonkin Delta.” The French reacted with caution but did not rule out the idea, and the Soviets were further encouraged when the British government in subsequent weeks began making supportive noises about partition.

The Chinese too were attracted to the idea. Beijing’s ambassador in Moscow, Zhang Wentien, told Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on March 6 that a division along the sixteenth parallel would be “very advantageous” for Ho Chi Minh and as such “should be accepted if it is put forward officially.” A few days later Zhou Enlai told Ho via telegram that conditions were ripe for a greater emphasis on the diplomatic struggle, and that, no matter what the likely outcome of the Geneva Conference, “we should actively participate in it.” Partition should be seriously considered, Zhou went on, because “if a ceasefire is to be achieved, it is better that a relatively fixed demarcation line be established so that [the Viet Minh] can control an area that is linked together.” As for where the line ought to be, the Chinese statesman singled out the sixteenth parallel as “one of our options.”

The VWP Politburo met three times in March to discuss negotiating strategy for Geneva, more specifically the notion of partition. Details from the meetings are sketchy, but we can guess that the sessions were stormy. Earlier in the month, the DRV ambassador in Beijing, Hoan Van Hoang, had shown little enthusiasm for partition when his Soviet counterpart brought up the matter. How can you find a demarcation line, Hoang asked, when there are no front lines? Over time, though, as the early assault on Dien Bien Phu failed to yield a decisive victory, the thinking in the Politburo swung in favor of partition, or at least against outright opposition. Members agreed to consider the possibility, so long as the division was temporary. The demarcation line would reflect the balance of military forces and would be as far south as possible. A party statement avoided mention of partition but extolled Geneva as “a victory for the forces of democracy” that, “together with big victories in the military field,” would make “our people in the occupied areas happy, and the puppets confused and concerned.” VWP instructions concerning the May Day celebrations stressed the need to encourage the people to write petitions to the government to express their “support of the Geneva Conference with a view toward finding ways for peacefully solving the Korean problem and putting an end to the war in Indochina.”

Still, it must have been with mixed feelings that Ho Chi Minh in late March arrived in Beijing, accompanied by Pham Van Dong, the DRV’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, for a pre-Geneva strategy session. His powerful allies were telling him to take half a loaf rather than the whole thing, even though his forces were winning on the battlefield. This was hardly what he wanted to hear, even if he had his own reasons for exploring a compromise diplomatic settlement. He and his comrades had not fought for seven-plus years to gain only partial control of the country. Now he had to listen as Mao and Zhou urged him to score a victory at Dien Bien Phu and thereby achieve results at Geneva, but they also cautioned him to have “realistic expectations” regarding how much could be achieved in the negotiations—shorthand, in all probability, for the estimation that the DRV would not come away from the conference with control over all of Vietnam. The Vietnamese, according to Chinese sources, agreed on both points.

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 15 May 2025 · 5:54 am

Nixon in 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. 485-487:

For the French commander Nixon offered mostly praise, but he lamented Navarre’s failure to utilize the VNA effectively and his reluctance to accept American advice regarding how the native army should be trained. Even here, though, the vice president was sympathetic to the French dilemma. He told a group of State Department officers:

Deep down I sense that Navarre, and Cogny, the Field Commander, and the other field commanders I talked to on the scene at the present time have very little faith in the ability of the Vietnamese to fight separately in independent units which don’t have French noncoms. That may be a cover for the fact that the French naturally have a reluctance to build up a strong independent Vietnamese army because they know that once that is done and once the Vietnamese are able to handle the problem themselves, that despite all the fine talk about the independence within the French Union—when that time comes, the Vietnamese will kick out the French.

My own opinion, of course, as I have expressed it publicly, and I believe it very strongly, is as far as the Vietnamese and the Cambodian and Laotians are concerned, and weak as they are and weak as they will be, even with their national armies, that their only hope to remain independent is to have their independence within the French Union, which the French are now willing to give, but which, unfortunately, they have not been able to sell to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians.

On negotiations, the vice president again spoke frankly, while again ignoring the contradictions. Diplomacy should be firmly resisted, he asserted, for it would inevitably lead to Communist domination of Indochina. The French “cannot get out,” and “we cannot have them get out because if we do the Communists—the Viet Minh are the only ones capable of governing, the only ones capable of controlling the country”—would take over. “So what we end up with here is a hard choice. It is a real risk and a real gamble, but what we end up with here, with all that is at stake, it seems to me we have to continue our military aid and, in that connection, I think the military are going to be as flexible as they can be, and, if there is any doubt, they will put in the additional material equipment that is necessary.”

Hence Nixon’s determination, while in Vietnam, to strike only upbeat notes, to urge Navarre on, and to trumpet the robust health of the French Union. The stakes were huge, and victory must come. Now was no time to give up. And indeed, though Nixon’s optimistic pronouncements did little to lift spirits in metropolitan France, where the charcoal autumn sky matched the prevailing mood, they had a noticeable effect on colons and high French officials in Saigon and Hanoi. Navarre and Dejean had more of a bounce in their step after hearing him extol them for the job they were doing and simultaneously admonish the Vietnamese to keep their nationalist ambitions in check. The new U.S. aid package, Nixon had promised them, would soon make itself felt on the ground. How soon was soon? Nobody knew for sure, but Navarre and the high command took satisfaction from the fact that the campaigning season was by now well under way and Giap had yet to launch a major attack anywhere. In past years, he would have moved sooner than this. French intelligence speculated that he felt insufficiently strong to attack in the delta, and that he would concentrate his attention on the highland region of northwestern Tonkin.

Navarre was determined to meet the threat. Rather than concede the highlands and husband his resources for the defense of the deltas and of Annam in the center, he moved to take on the enemy here, in the remote and menacing northwest. As part of that effort, he ordered the reoccupation of a post near the Laotian border. This seemingly innocuous action would trigger a series of moves and countermoves in several world capitals and ultimately bring the war to its climax. The post bore the unlikely name of “Big Frontier Administrative Center,” or, in Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu.

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 30 April 2025 · 6:32 am

Start of Vietnam’s French War

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 222-225:

Whatever date one chooses for the start of the First Vietnam War—September 1945, with the outbreak of fighting in Cochin China, or November–December 1946, with the conflagration in Tonkin—by the start of 1947 there was fighting throughout Vietnam. Both sides had taken the necessary steps toward war, and in hindsight it’s tempting to see the whole thing as inevitable, especially after the failure of the Fontainebleau talks. But wars are never inevitable; they depend on the actions of individual leaders who could have chosen differently, who had, if not a menu of options, then at least an alternative to large-scale violence.

Yet if it takes actions by two sides to make a war, both sides are not always equally culpable. And if it’s true that the Vietnamese fired the first shots on December 19, ultimately France bears primary responsibility for precipitating the conflict. D’Argenlieu, dubbed the “Bloody Monk” by the left-wing press in Paris, had enormous power to formulate policy, often without consulting Paris, and as we have seen, he thwarted the prospects for a negotiated solution at several junctures in 1946; he seemed determined to provoke the Hanoi government into full-scale hostilities. D’Argenlieu, upon returning from a brief visit to France in late December 1946, vowed that France would never relinquish her hold on Indochina. The granting of independence, he declared, “would only be a fiction deeply prejudicial to the interests of the two parties.”

It would be too much, however, to call this “D’Argenlieu’s War.” The high commissioner’s core objective—to keep Indochina French—was broadly shared among officials in Paris as well as colons in Saigon and Hanoi. It is striking, the degree to which all parts of the political spectrum in France in 1945–46 shared the conviction that Indochina ought to remain within the French colonial empire. The left, to be sure, favored bona fide negotiations with Hanoi, but both the SFIO and the PCF were adamant that they did not want to see France reduced to what the Communist newspaper L’Humanité called “her own small metropolitan community.” Both attached importance to reclaiming and maintaining French prestige and saw the preservation of the empire as essential to that task. The Socialists, who dominated French politics in the crucial early postwar years, professed opposition to d’Argenlieu’s efforts to sabotage the March 6 Accords, but in practice they tolerated his actions, just as they tolerated Valluy’s provocations in Haiphong and Hanoi; at the Fontainebleau talks, the Socialist representatives were as intransigent as any on the French side. PCF leaders, meanwhile, despite becoming the largest party in the November 1946 elections (taking 28 percent and 170 deputies), kept a low profile on Indochina in the critical weeks thereafter, anxious as they were to appear a moderate and patriotic force.

Even Léon Blum, a broad-thinking humanist and fundamentally decent man who genuinely despaired at the onset of war, could say at once on December 23, less than a week into the Battle of Hanoi, that the old colonial system was finished and that renewed negotiations were possible only once “order” was restored. Minister of Overseas France Marius Moutet likewise said there could be no talks without an “end to terrorism.”

Most important of all in this constellation of voices on the French political scene was the MRP under Georges Bidault, which opposed not only negotiations with Ho but the granting of independence to any Vietnamese regime. Thrust into the heart of government not long after liberation, the MRP would maintain a tight hold on foreign and colonial policy for years to come and as such would hold extraordinary sway over the speed and complexion of imperial reform. As a group, the party’s leaders lacked experience in colonial affairs, and its senior figures—Bidault, Robert Schuman, and René Pleven—adhered to a rigid and intransigent colonial policy that stood in marked contrast to their often supple and forward-thinking approach to European affairs.

French public opinion, meanwhile, did not register significant opposition to the use of military force in Indochina. Information, for one thing, was hard to come by. In 1946, French newspapers did not have their own correspondents in Indochina, which left journalists dependent on the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse (AFP) for news. D’Argenlieu, deeply suspicious of independent journalism, maintained strict control over the AFP, making it in essence a government propaganda arm. Not surprisingly, therefore, the six main Paris dailies did little in-depth reporting in November and December and generally blamed the Vietnamese for the outbreak of violence. On November 28, after the French bombardment of Haiphong had leveled parts of the city and killed thousands, Le Monde’s Rémy Roure assured readers that, from the French side, “not a single shot had been fired, except in defense.”

Looming large over the entire process was one man: Charles de Gaulle. Though technically absent from the political stage after January 1946, his influence remained enormous, as historian Frédéric Turpin’s careful research makes clear. As leader of the Free French, he had possessed the power in 1944–45 to foil the plans of his country’s colonial lobby; he did not do so. Indeed, the general’s policy during and after World War II had been to reclaim Indochina for France, on the grounds that French grandeur demanded it. The choice of Admiral d’Argenlieu for high commissioner had been his. He, no one else, instructed d’Argenlieu and Leclerc to be uncompromising in their dealings with Vietnamese nationalists and to prepare to use force. During the conference at Fontainebleau, de Gaulle pressed Bidault to resist giving in to Vietnamese demands, and he announced publicly his conviction that France must remain “united with the territories which she opened to civilization,” lest she lose her great power status. Throughout the autumn, he stuck firmly to this position, and in the November-December crisis, he maintained staunch backing for d’Argenlieu’s uncompromising posture. On December 17, de Gaulle hosted the admiral for more than three hours at his home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and assured him that as far as Indochina was concerned, it was d’Argenlieu and not the government that represented France.

A week later d’Argenlieu, now back in Saigon, expressed satisfaction with the turn of events. “Personally,” he wrote in his diary, “I have since September 1945 loyally executed the policy of agreement in Indochina. It has borne fruit everywhere, except with the Hanoi government. It’s over.”

It was anything but.

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 27 April 2025 · 6:11 am

Fall of Hanoi, August 1945

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 135-137:

When Ho entered the city on August 26, it was for the first time. He had risen from his provincial Nghe An upbringing to travel to the far reaches of the globe—to Paris, to London, to New York City—and to become a nationalist leader, yet only now, at age fifty-five, did he set foot in his country’s cultural and political center. Almost four decades the journey had taken. In the immediate sense, the trip had started four days earlier, when Ho left Tan Trao by foot and by boat, bound for the capital. Still weak from his illness, he had to be carried part of the way on a stretcher, and after crossing the Red River on the twenty-fifth, the entourage halted in the northern suburbs of Hanoi. The next day, accompanied by Party Secretary Truong Chinh in a commandeered car, Ho crossed the Doumer Bridge and made for a three-story row house on Hang Nhang Street, in the Chinese section of town.

It was a heady time for Ho Chi Minh and his comrades, the critical stage of what would become known as the August Revolution. Things had moved rapidly since news reached Tonkin of the atomic bombings and Japan’s collapse. Already on August 11, as rumors circulated that Tokyo was about to surrender, members of the Indochinese Communist Party regional committee began to prepare for an insurrection to seize Hanoi from the Japanese. Two days later Viet Minh leaders from many parts of the country met in Tan Trao to the north for a previously scheduled party conference (to be known in history as the Ninth Plenum) and reached a resolution that a nationwide insurrection should occur immediately to bring about an independent republic under the leadership of the Viet Minh. Using the name Nguyen Ai Quoc for the last time, Ho issued an “appeal to the people.” “Dear fellow countrymen!” he declared. “The decisive hour has struck for the destiny of our people. Let all of us stand up and rely on our own strength to free ourselves. Many oppressed peoples the world over are vying with each other in wresting back independence. We should not lag behind. Forward! Forward! Under the banner of the Viet Minh, let us valiantly march forward!”

Much more than they would later acknowledge, Viet Minh leaders rode to power on the wave of suffering in the north, caused by the famine that had hit earlier in the year and further strengthened by the overthrow of the French and the defeat of the Japanese. In official Vietnamese historiography, this dimension is largely absent; Ho and his colleagues are depicted as the masters of events, directing developments from the top. Their decisions and actions were important, but there is no question that they were beneficiaries of an upswell of protest from below.

Throughout the third week of August, Viet Minh forces took control in towns and villages in various parts of Annam and Tonkin. Resistance was usually minimal, as local authorities simply handed over power to the insurgents and as Japanese forces, now part of a defeated empire, stayed neutral. In Hanoi on August 19, Viet Minh forces seized control of all important public buildings except the Japanese-guarded Bank of Indochina, and announced their seizure of power from a balcony of what was then and remains today the Hanoi Opera House. For the first time since Francis Garnier seized it for France in 1873, the city was in Vietnamese hands. In Hue, Emperor Bao Dai announced he would support a government led by Ho Chi Minh, but a mass rally in Hanoi demanded that he abdicate his throne. He did so on August 25, declaring his support for the Viet Minh regime and handing over the imperial sword to the new national government, with all the legitimacy that that symbolic act conferred.

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by Joel | 19 April 2025 · 9:27 am

Overseas Chinese and Qing Reforms

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 298-301:

After the Opium Wars, the Qing had struggled to figure out how to relate to the West, how to develop domestic industry, how to enact administrative reforms. But even as foreign businesses and culture were implanted in China, especially in the treaty ports and in industrializing areas, modernizing efforts were slowed by internal divisions within the Qing and by the weight of vested bureaucratic interests, not to mention the inertia of China’s long dynastic tradition. By the late nineteenth century, the Qing teetered on the brink of fiscal insolvency, the result of the high cost of the military suppression of the Taiping and other domestic rebellions, which had ravaged southern and central China (1850–64), and of its foreign indemnities.

Chinese emigrants living abroad in the Anglo-American world were not marginal actors in the history of the late Qing. Those who went to the gold rushes were among the first Chinese to experience the West first hand. Their participation in the gold rushes in North America and Australasia in the late nineteenth century and in the revival of the gold industry in South Africa in the early twentieth were integral to a new era of long-distance migrations and global trade that transformed international finance and political relations. Chinese gold miners contributed to the global financial hegemony of Great Britain, and then the United States, based on the power of the gold. Their contribution was doubly ironic. At one level, the gold rushes both materially and symbolically consolidated the shift to gold-based trade and investment in the global economy, which disadvantaged China. At another level, the presence of Chinese on the goldfields and in other industries gave rise to racial conflict and discrimination, violence, and finally, legal policies of exclusion from immigration and citizenship, which policies also disadvantaged China. Chinese exclusion did not directly cause either the West’s rise or China’s decline. But it was part of a constellation of policies that privileged Anglo-American settler nationalism, and that contributed to China’s oppression in myriad ways. The exclusion laws, moreover, loom large in nineteenth-century Chinese history because they were, along with the unequal treaties, the most potent symbols of China’s humiliation on the global stage.

But if Chinese emigrants were despised and marginalized by Euro-American societies, they were also conduits of knowledge and resources to their hometowns and regions. They built dense networks—migration, commercial, and political networks—across the Pacific that contributed to an emergent Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The anti-American boycott exemplified this national consciousness, which connected diasporic communities with the urban middle classes in China and linked the injustice of the exclusion laws to China’s weakness as a nation.

The Qing, while fiscally enfeebled and burdened by a sclerotic bureaucracy, did try to assert its independence in the face of foreign encroachment and aggression. China refused to adopt the gold-exchange standard; it mattered that China was not a colony, like India or the Philippines, where imperialism arbitrarily imposed monetary policies that inscribed dependency. Qing diplomats intervened to protect Chinese merchants and laborers living and working abroad from discrimination and abuse, although not always successfully. European and American encroachments were bad enough; the Japanese were, in turn, arguably even more rapacious, seizing Taiwan, going to war to take Korea, long a Chinese tributary state, and building up its forces in Manchuria. The stakes became even greater with the Boxer Rebellion of 1900–1, a peasant uprising in North China against foreign missionaries that split the Qing court, led the Western powers and Japan to send troops into Beijing, and resulted in another raft of indemnities.

In 1905 the Empress Dowager Cixi initiated a series of reforms, including abolishing the examination system, building up the military, and streamlining the bureaucracy. But they were slow to be implemented (in part because the Qing could not pay for them), and popular opposition to the Qing only grew. By decade’s end, the idea of reforming the monarchy had given way to popular demands to overthrow it. Armed uprisings throughout China in the summer and fall of 1911, many associated with Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary party, finally toppled the Qing and with it, four thousand years of dynastic rule. The new Republic of China faced myriad challenges, from how to form a modern government on the ash heap of the Qing to how to end fighting among warlords and corruption at high levels. The Republican era saw the establishment of a constitution, a modern university system, investments in domestic industry, the end of foot binding, and a cultural renaissance. But the needs of the peasantry, the vast majority of the population, remained largely unaddressed. Instability, both political and economic, was endemic, especially with the burden of foreign indemnity payments continuing well into the 1920s. Just as the Qing had run out of time, so did the republic, when Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and then invaded China proper in 1937.

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by Joel | 17 April 2025 · 1:33 am

Labour, Het Volk, and Asiatic Exclusion

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 247-249, 253:

In 1906 and 1907 the Chinese Question on the Rand emerged as a key issue in two major political elections: the general election in Britain and the election for responsible government, or home rule, in the Transvaal. Both elections brought new parties into power that spelled the speedy demise of the Chinese labor program and, moreover, influenced broader political trajectories. In Britain, the Chinese Question helped the Liberal Party overturn more than twenty years of nearly unbroken Conservative rule and galvanized the trade unions to form the Labour Party, which would by the time of the Great War eclipse its Liberal ally as the main opposition to the Tories. The emergence of Labour as an independent political force was inextricably linked to a self-conscious identity that placed it at the center of an imperial white working class. Labour not only acted in solidarity with British workers in the settler colonies, it also expressed a self-interested vision of the colonies as destinations for working-class emigration as a hedge against domestic economic uncertainty. The trade union movement put its own stamp on social imperialism, claiming it from Milner and Chamberlain in a more class-based, yet eminently racialized, politics.

In the Transvaal, the Chinese Question emerged as a common complaint among diverse interests, which hurt the political fortunes of the establishment Progressive Party, dominated by the mining interest. It proved a sensational issue that helped stir Afrikaans-speaking voters to the new Het Volk party organized by the former Boer commandos Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. Het Volk won the election; a few years later, in 1910, Botha would be premier of the newly federated Union of South Africa, with Smuts in his cabinet. Their ascent signaled the electoral strength of Afrikaners in South Africa, even as Afrikaner politics would remain diverse across the subcontinent, from racial hard-liners in the Orange River Colony to moderates in the Cape Colony. Notably, Botha, and especially Smuts, while advocating for white supremacy and racial segregation, committed themselves to the mining interest and more broadly to British imperialism.

South Africa was the most bluntly racist of the British settler colonies. But it was of a piece with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all established as dominions of the British Empire, the concept of “dominion” signaling not a colony but a polity akin to a country, and one that indeed signaled its own dominion over native peoples. Dominions possessed maximum autonomy within the British Empire, which protected the rule of local white settlers while conveniently distancing the metropole from the openly racist modus operandi of native removal, racial segregation, and Asiatic exclusion—tenets of white settlerism that had, in fact, been forged in the United States.

…

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST Chinese labor was not just that it cost whites jobs. Critics believed that an additional, if not greater, danger lay in the prospect that indentured Asian labor would lead to a settled Asian population of merchants and traders. The use of indentured Indians on the Natal sugar plantations was an object lesson in the consequences of importing indentured colored labor. Indian indenture had led inexorably to a free, settled population, including merchants and traders who undersold white businesses. By 1905 there were more Indians than whites in Natal, and they were migrating to the Transvaal. Whites worried that the small population of Chinese merchants in Johannesburg would likewise grow, especially with an indentured labor force potentially offering an ethnic market. They warned that the “imported Asiatic gains a grip on a country with wonderful rapidity.” Although Natal passed laws to restrict immigration of Asiatics, the colony was “a back door wide open” because indentured Indian laborers were not required to repatriate at term: “the indentured coolie of to-day is the free man of tomorrow, and the free man becomes the trader.”

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Filed under anglosphere, Australia, Britain, Canada, democracy, economics, labor, migration, nationalism, New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, U.S.

by Joel | 2 April 2025 · 7:13 pm

Australia’s Afghan Crisis, 1888

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 178-181:

THE CONFLICT IN AUSTRALIA reached a climax in 1888 when officials in Melbourne and then Sydney, backed by public agitation, refused to allow 268 Chinese passengers arriving from Hong Kong on the Afghan to disembark, including some sixty Chinese who held British naturalization papers. The crisis paralyzed British officials in London, while hysteria that the Afghan represented the leading edge of a new “invasion” swept Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Cheok Hong Cheong led a committee of Chinese merchants to protest the agitation surrounding the Afghan affair, which tried to meet with Victorian premier Duncan Gillies but was continually rebuffed.

Cheong went on to deliver a public address and publish it. He rebuked Australia for waging a shameless campaign rooted in “the selfishness, the prejudices, and the shams, which form the warp and woof of the present agitation.” He asked, “Is it possible that common human rights, accorded to other civilized peoples, are to be denied to us? That it is to be a crime, punishable by imprisonment with hard labor, if man or woman of the Chinese race travels over the line separating any of the colonies without a permit?”

Cheong and his colleagues were constructing a rhetoric about China and Chinese rights on the world stage that mirrored the perspective articulated by Qing diplomats. Cheong echoed Marquis Tseng’s assertion of China’s awakening: “That such a time may come, nay, probably will come sooner than is supposed, when the presence and power of China as a great nation will be felt in these seas, and it lies with you to say, as wise men or otherwise, if this is to be for good or evil.”

Victoria placed the Afghan in quarantine and declared the passengers’ travel documents to be fraudulent, barring their entry. The ship then ventured to Sydney, where authorities also refused to land the Chinese, goaded by a crowd of five thousand demonstrators shouting “Out with the Chinamen” in front of the New South Wales Parliament. South Australia pledged that it would also refuse the ship. With three colonies vowing to refuse admission of the Chinese aboard the Afghan, the Chinese Question took center stage in intercolonial politics.

Taking advantage of the crisis, Premier Parkes rushed legislation through the NSW assembly that exponentially increased poll taxes and residence fees on Chinese and declared that NSW would no longer recognize naturalization papers, including those previously issued by NSW. He backdated the law so it applied to the passengers on the Afghan. It was not a full victory, however, because the courts heard the habeas cases of naturalized Chinese and ordered their disembarkment. The Afghan then returned to Hong Kong with the remaining passengers.

The Afghan affair raised disturbing questions. When the Chinese passengers aboard the ship obstructed the unloading of cargo, they threw open the idea that Australia could refuse people while welcoming goods. From a simple business calculus, Hong Kong shippers considered the Australian trade finished, as passenger fees had kept cargo rates down. In London, officials struggled over how to sever migration from trade, that is, how it might possibly accommodate Australians’ demands for immigration restriction while protecting its broader commercial interests in Asia.

The Afghan crisis also accelerated the movement to federation. Parkes had long been a proponent of federation, a strategy to strengthen Australia’s position in Asia and within the British Empire. The Chinese Question provided a racial urgency that rallied the masses and brought divergent colonial interests into closer alignment. In June 1888 an intercolonial conference in Sydney discussed the need for the uniform restrictions on Chinese immigration. Much was riding on the outcome. The southern colonies hoped to bring the tropical colonies firmly to the side of restriction and to present a united front to London. The Colonial Office hoped that the conference would produce an agenda reasonable enough—or at least not as obnoxious as standing colonial policies—to take to the Qing as the basis for a new treaty. London asked the colonies to behave as responsible imperial partners, expressing to them the hope that the “Conference will endeavour to conciliate the susceptibilities of [the] Chinese Government as far as practicable.”

The conference agreed that immigration restriction should be secured simultaneously through imperial diplomacy and by uniform colonial legislation. But it could not get unanimous support for all its resolutions. Tasmania and Western Australia abstained on a general statement in support of exclusion and on specific legislative models, which included the continued criminalization of unauthorized intercolonial travel and stricter shipping regulations. Tasmania balked at the blatant disregard for the home (British) government’s authority and discrimination against Chinese who were British subjects. Western Australia’s reticence lay in the territory’s use of Asian labor in the northern maritime industries, although in 1886 it had banned Chinese from work on the huge goldfields discovered at Kalgoorie. South Australia agreed to all points in the interests of intercolonial unity, but it insisted that restrictions should apply only to Chinese and not to Indians or Pacific Islanders, who continued to work in the Northern Territory, which South Australia administered. Although unanimity eluded the conference, the basis was laid for further negotiations toward a full White Australia policy.

In 1891 the Privy Council, the official advisory body to Queen Victoria, conceded broader discretion to the colonies over Asiatic restrictions, ruling that foreign aliens had no legal right to enter British territories. Although the rule did not cover Chinese in Hong Kong or Singapore, who were British subjects, it confirmed the colonies’ use of local legislation to restrict Chinese immigration.