Category Archives: migration

by | 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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Filed under Cambodia, democracy, France, Laos, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

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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Filed under Africa, China, economics, France, Germany, Maghreb, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 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 | 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 | 28 April 2025 · 5:48 am

Fall of Saigon, September 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. 158-164:

Although an ICP-dominated “Committee of the South,” led by Tran Van Giau, had seized control of the city and other parts of Cochin China, its control was precarious. Until early September, order was maintained, despite grumbling from the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Trotskyites over Tran Van Giau’s decision to negotiate with French representative Jean Cédile (the latter having parachuted into Cochin China on August 22). As the futility of the talks became widely known—the Viet Minh would discuss the country’s future ties to France only on condition that the French first recognize Vietnam’s independence, which Cédile refused to do—the frustration boiled over. French residents, afraid of losing their colonial privileges, braced for a struggle, while political skirmishing among the rival Vietnamese groups increased. In short order, Giau and the committee lost control of events.

Even worse, they did so precisely at the moment when Allied troops were about to arrive in Saigon. The first contingent of British troops, largely comprising Nepalese Gurkhas and Muslims from the Punjab and Hyderabad in the Twentieth Indian Division, entered the city on September 12. On every street hung large banners: “Vive les Alliés,” “Down with French Imperialism,” “Long Live Liberty and Independence.” The troops’ orders were to disarm the Japanese and to maintain law and order. More broadly, though, British officials, in London as well as in Saigon, saw their task as facilitating a French return. Unlike in the Middle East, where France was a rival to British interests, in Southeast Asia she was a de facto ally, a partner in preserving European colonial control in the region.

As ever, London strategists had to tread carefully, so as not to offend anticolonial sentiment in the United States or complicate relations with China. “We should avoid at all costs laying ourselves open to the accusation that we are assisting the West to suppress the East,” one junior official observed. “Such an accusation will rise readily to the lips of the Americans and Chinese and would be likely to create an unfavorable impression throughout Asia.” Other British analysts expressed similar concerns. But the course to be traveled was never in doubt. A failure to bolster the French in Vietnam could cause chaos in the country and also spur dissidence in Britain’s possessions—two very frightening prospects indeed. Hence the fundamental British objective: to get French troops into Indochina as quickly as possible, and then withdraw British forces with dispatch.

The man assigned to this task, Major General Douglas Gracey, commander of the Twentieth, has been described by historians as miscast for his role, in view of his pro-French bias and his paternalistic philosophy that “natives” should not defy Europeans. An unreconstructed colonialist, born in and of the empire, Gracey had spent his whole career with the Indian Army. “The question of the government of Indochina is exclusively French,” he said before leaving for Vietnam. “Civil and military control by the French is only a matter of weeks.” But if Gracey was unusual for his forthrightness, his thinking was fully within the mainstream of British official thinking in the period. Thus Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin could tell the Chinese ambassador in September: “We naturally assumed that Indo-China would return to France.” And thus Anthony Eden could recall that “an Anglo-Indian force under General Gracey occupied the southern half of the country until the French were able to resume control.”

Still, it cannot be denied that Gracey by his initial actions in Saigon exacerbated an already-tense situation. His nickname was “Bruiser,” and it fit. When he arrived at Tan Son Nhut airfield aboard an American C-47 on September 13, he walked straight past the Viet Minh delegation waiting patiently by the tarmac and departed in the company of a group of Japanese soldiers. Gracey refused to meet Viet Minh leaders in the days thereafter, and indeed ordered that they be evicted from the former Governor-General’s Palace. “They came to see me and said ‘welcome’ and all that sort of thing,” he later said. “It was an unpleasant situation and I promptly kicked them out. They were obviously communists.”

On the twenty-first, following more unrest, Gracey proclaimed martial law. He banned public meetings and demonstrations, imposed a curfew, and closed down the Vietnamese press—even as he allowed French newspapers to continue to publish. Looters and saboteurs, he said, would be summarily shot. In effect the nationalist government was being shut down. The next day, encouraged by Cédile, Gracey released and rearmed more than a thousand excitable French soldiers. The soldiers, their ranks swollen by angry French civilians, promptly set about terrorizing any Vietnamese they encountered. Hundreds were beaten and jailed, and some Committee of the South members were hanged. One French woman who sympathized with the Viet Minh had her hair shaved off like those who collaborated with the Germans in metropolitan France. By midmorning on the twenty-third, the French flag was once more flying from most important buildings.

It was, in the words of one Briton on the scene, a coup d’état ….

Another observer, the Paris-based photojournalist Germaine Krull, who had arrived with the first contingent of Gurkhas on September 12, noted with disgust in her diary the sight of “these men, who were supposed to be the soldiers of France, this undisciplined horde whose laughing and singing I could hear from my window, corrupted by too many years in the tropics, too many women, too much opium and too many months of inactivity in the camp,” and who were now wandering through the streets “as if celebrating 14 July, their guns slung over their shoulders, cigarettes dangling from their lips.” On the rue Catinat she observed “soldiers driving before them a group of Annamites bound, slave-fashion to a long rope. Women spat in their faces. They were on the verge of being lynched.” That night Krull “realized only too well what a serious mistake we had made and how grave the consequences would be.… Instead of regaining our prestige we had lost it forever, and, worse still, we had lost the trust of the few remaining Annamites who believe in us. We had showed them that the new France was even more to be feared than the old one.”

…

Gracey, angered by the brutality of these “tough men,” ordered the former detainees back to barracks as punishment, but the damage was done: Viet Minh leaders on the twenty-fourth mobilized a massive general strike that paralyzed Saigon. French civilians barricaded their houses or sought refuge in the old Continental Hotel. Bursts of gunfire and the thuds of mortar rounds could be heard throughout the city, as Viet Minh squads attacked the airport and stormed the local jail to liberate hundreds of Vietnamese prisoners. At dawn on the twenty-fifth, Vietnamese bands of various political stripes slipped past Japanese guards in the Cité Herault section of town and massacred scores of French and Eurasian civilians, among them many women and children.

Thus began, it could be argued, the Vietnamese war of liberation against France. It would take several more months before the struggle would extend to the entire south, and more than a year before it also engulfed Hanoi and the north, which is why historians typically date the start of the war as late 1946. But this date, September 23, 1945, may be as plausible a start date as any.

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by | 24 April 2025 · 5:36 am

Vietnamese Uprising of 1930

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 42-43:

The Moscow interlude must have been a heady time for Ho, as he communed with what he called “the great Socialist family.” No longer did he have to fear that the French police were watching his every move, ready to arrest him and charge him with treason. He was seen in Red Square in the company of senior Soviet leaders Gregory Zinoviev and Kliment Voroshilov and became known as a specialist on colonial affairs and also on Asia. In the autumn of 1924, the Soviets sent him to southern China, ostensibly to act as an interpreter for the Comintern’s advisory mission to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government in Canton but in reality to organize the first Marxist revolutionary organization in Indochina. To that end, he published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925, and set up a training institute that attracted students from all over Vietnam. Along with Marxism-Leninism, he taught his own brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, modesty, and generosity—virtues that, as biographer William J. Duiker notes, had more to do with Confucian morality than with Leninism.

In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow. The Comintern sent him to France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years organizing Vietnamese expatriates. Then, early in 1930, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Eight months later, in October, on Moscow’s instructions, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), with responsibility for spurring revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.

Initially, the ICP was but one of a plethora of entities within the Vietnamese nationalist movement. The more Francophile reformist groups advocated nonviolent reformism and were centered in Cochin China. Most sought to change colonial policy without alienating France and vowed to keep Vietnam firmly within the French Union. Of greater lasting significance, however, were more revolutionary approaches, especially in Annam and Tonkin. In the cities of Hanoi and Hue, and in provincial and district capitals scattered throughout Vietnam, anticolonial elements began to form clandestine political organizations dedicated to the eviction of the French and the restoration of national independence. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party—or VNQDD, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang—was the most important of these groups, and by 1929 it had some fifteen hundred members, most of them organized into small groups in the Red River Delta in Tonkin. Formed on the model of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, the VNQDD saw armed revolution as the lone means of gaining freedom for Vietnam, and in early 1930, it tried to foment a general uprising by Vietnamese serving in the French Army. On February 9, Vietnamese infantrymen massacred their French officers in Yen Bai. The French swiftly crushed the revolt, and the VNQDD’s leaders were executed, were jailed, or fled to China. The party ceased to be a threat to colonial control.

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by | 23 April 2025 · 3:59 am

Early Origins of the Vietnam 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. 15-17:

FEW TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY have been studied and analyzed and debated more than the Vietnam War. The long and bloody struggle, which killed in excess of three million Vietnamese and wreaked destruction on huge portions of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, has inspired a vast outpouring of books, articles, television documentaries, and Hollywood movies, as well as scholarly conferences and college courses. Nor is there any reason to believe the torrent of words will slow anytime soon, given the war’s immense human and material toll and given its deep—and persisting—resonance in American politics and culture. Yet remarkably, we still do not have a full-fledged international account of how the whole saga began, a book that takes us from the end of World War I, when the future of the European colonial empires still seemed secure, through World War II and then the Franco–Viet Minh War and its dramatic climax, to the fateful American decision to build up and defend South Vietnam. Embers of War is an attempt at such a history. It is the story of one Western power’s demise in Indochina and the arrival of another, of a revolutionary army’s stunning victory in 1954 in the face of immense challenges, and of the failure of that victory to bring lasting peace to Vietnam. To put it a different way, it is the story of how [U.S. soldiers] Dale Buis and Chester Ovnand came to be stationed and meet their fates in a far-off land that many of their compatriots barely knew existed.

But it’s not merely as a prelude to America’s Vietnam debacle that the earlier period merits our attention. Straddling as it did the twentieth century’s midpoint, the French Indochina War sat at the intersection of the grand political forces that drove world affairs during the century. Thus Indochina’s experience between 1945 and 1954 is intimately bound up with the transformative effects of the Second World War and the outbreak and escalation of the Cold War, and in particular with the emergence of the United States as the predominant power in Asian and world affairs. And thus the struggle is also part of the story of European colonialism and its encounter with anticolonial nationalists—who drew their inspiration in part from European and American ideas and promises. In this way, the Franco–Viet Minh War was simultaneously an East-West and North-South conflict, pitting European imperialism in its autumn phase against the two main competitors that gained momentum by midcentury—Communist-inspired revolutionary nationalism and U.S.-backed liberal internationalism. If similar processes played out across much of the globe after 1945, Vietnam deserves special study because it was one of the first places where this destructive dynamic could be seen. It was also where the dynamic remained in place, decade after bloody decade.

My goal in this book is to help a new generation of readers relive this extraordinary story: a twentieth-century epic featuring life-and-death decisions made under profound pressure, a vast mobilization of men and resources, and a remarkable cast of larger-than-life characters ranging from Ho Chi Minh to Charles de Gaulle to Dean Acheson to Zhou Enlai, from Bao Dai to Anthony Eden to Edward Lansdale to Ngo Dinh Diem, as well as half a dozen U.S. presidents. Throughout, the focus is on the political and diplomatic dimensions of the struggle, but I also devote considerable space to the military campaigns that, I maintain, were crucial to the outcome. Laos and Cambodia enter the narrative at various points, but I give pride of place to developments in Vietnam, far more populous and politically important than her Indochinese neighbors.

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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

by | 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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Filed under anglosphere, China, democracy, economics, education, Japan, migration, military, nationalism

by | 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.