Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 9 May 2025 · 4:25 am

Graham Greene in 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. 391-393:

MORE THAN ANY OTHER OF GREENE’S NOVELS, THE QUIET AMERICAN contains firsthand reportage, much of it done on this three-and-a-half-month stay in 1951–52. A comparison of the book with his letters home, his journal, and his articles makes this clear. Much of the time he was in Saigon or Hanoi, but occasionally he accompanied French troops into the field. Tall and unarmed, he was an easy target, but he showed complete disregard for his own physical safety, even when at Phat Diem he found himself in the midst of heavy fighting. (This action too features in the novel.) Greene was not at this point pro-Communist, but the talent and fierce dedication of the Viet Minh impressed him. In his article for Life, he acknowledged that many of Ho Chi Minh’s supporters were motivated by idealism and were not part of any monolithic Stalinist movement. Even worse from the editors’ perspective, Greene saw little chance of stopping Communism in Indochina. The article urged France to prepare herself for retreat from the region and warned Washington that not all social-political problems could be overcome with force. Hughes and Luce, aghast at this message, rejected the piece, despite the fact that Greene also offered up a crude articulation of the domino theory of the type that Fowler ridicules in the novel. (“If Indo-China falls,” Greene wrote, “Korea will be isolated, Siam can be invaded in twenty-four hours and Malaya may have to be abandoned.”) Thus rebuffed, Greene offered the article to the right-wing Paris Match, which published it in July 1952.

Greene concluded the article with a jarringly sentimental tribute to the courage and skill of French soldiers. Maybe he was trying to soften the blow of the impending defeat. But it’s also the case that he retained in 1952 a good measure of sympathy for the French cause, and for European colonialism more generally. He had himself been born into the British Empire’s administrative class, and its worldview and mores continued to imbue him. He could write movingly of Saigon as the “Paris of the East,” and he much enjoyed spending time in the cafés along the rue Catinat in the company of French colons and officials. He was indeed in this period something of a Frenchman manqué. Castigating the Americans for being “exaggeratedly mistrustful of empires,” Greene said the Old World knew better: “We Europeans retain the memory of what we owe Rome, just as Latin America knows what it owes Spain. When the hour of evacuation sounds there will be many Vietnamese who will regret the loss of the language which put them in contact with the art and faith of the West.”

Little wonder that Greene and the colons got on so well; they spoke in the same terms regarding all that European colonialism had wrought and the damage the Americans could do. It is ironic, therefore, that some leading French officials mistrusted him. General de Lattre, eager to win more American aid and aware that Greene was in Indochina on assignment from an American magazine, initially went out of his way to woo the novelist, inviting him to informal dinners and giving him the use of a military plane. But the general’s opinion changed after Greene visited Phat Diem and showed keen interest in Bishop Le Huu Tu. De Lattre hated the bishop’s seeming double-dealing, blaming him for his son Bernard’s death near Phat Diem the previous year—the bishop, de Lattre believed, had tacitly allowed the Viet Minh to sneak up on the position Bernard’s unit was defending. In the general’s mind, Greene became a kind of accomplice in the treachery.

The elder de Lattre became convinced that Greene and his friend in Hanoi, the British consul Trevor-Wilson, were in fact spies, working for the British secret service. He blurted out to the head of the Sûreté: “All these English, they’re too much! It isn’t sufficient that they have a consul who’s in the Secret Service, they even send me their novelists as agents and Catholic novelists into the bargain.” De Lattre placed both men under Sûreté surveillance and used Vietnamese to assist in the effort. “The French gave us orders to watch Graham Greene very closely,” recalled Pham Xuan An, a self-taught English speaker who was tasked with censoring the Englishman’s dispatches, and who would later lead an extraordinary double life as a Time reporter and Viet Cong spy. “While he was in Asia, smoking opium and pretending to be a journalist, the Deuxième Bureau assured us he was a secret agent in MI6, British Intelligence.”

The title of this chapter is “The Quiet Englishman,” referring to Greene as the author of The Quiet American (1955).

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Filed under Britain, France, Korea, military, nationalism, publishing, U.S., Vietnam, war

by Joel | 7 May 2025 · 12:30 pm

U.S. Doubts About French Vietnam

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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Filed under China, France, Korea, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

by Joel | 3 May 2025 · 10:21 am

1950: Ho, Stalin, and Mao

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by 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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Filed under Burma, China, democracy, France, Indonesia, Malaysia, military, nationalism, Philippines, Taiwan, U.S., USSR, Vietnam, war

by Joel | 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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Filed under Britain, France, Japan, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

by Joel | 26 April 2025 · 6:14 am

Japan’s March 1945 Coup in 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. 102-103, 105-106:

SHORTLY AFTER SIX P.M. ON MARCH 9, 1945, A VISITOR ARRIVED AT the opulent Saigon offices of the French governor-general, Admiral Jean Decoux. It was Shunichi Matsumoto, Japan’s ambassador to Indochina, there ostensibly for the purpose of signing a previously worked-out agreement concerning rice supplies and French financial support for Japanese troops. As the signing ceremony ended, Matsumoto asked Decoux to linger for a private conversation. Matsumoto appeared nervous, the Frenchman later recalled, “something rare in an Asiatic.” It soon became clear why: Tokyo had ordered the ambassador to present an ultimatum, which required unconditional French acceptance no later than nine o’clock that same evening. The entire colonial administration, including army, navy, police, and banks, were to be placed under Japanese command.

For almost five years, Decoux had dreaded the arrival of this moment. Ever since he took office, in July 1940, his overriding objective had been to preserve French sovereignty over Indochina, at least in a nominal sense, so that after the armistice the colony could still be a jewel in the empire. Now Tokyo had issued a demand that, if agreed to, would abolish French colonial control over Indochina. Decoux played for time, but Matsumoto did not budge—the deadline was firm. The Frenchman consulted with several associates, and at 8:45 sent a letter via messenger urging a continuation of the discussions beyond the nine o’clock deadline. The letter carrier went to the wrong building, and it was not until 9:25 that he could at last present the letter to Matsumoto. By then, reports of fighting in Hanoi and Haiphong had already come in. Matsumoto scanned the document, declared, “This is doubtless a rejection,” and ordered the Japanese military machine into action.

It was a carefully planned campaign, code-named Operation Bright Moon. Ever since October 1944, when U.S. forces began their reconquest of the Philippine Islands, the Japanese Military Command had feared that the Allies would use the islands to invade Indochina in order to cut off Japan from her forces in Southeast Asia. And indeed, South East Asia Command (SEAC), based in Kandy, Ceylon, under British admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, viewed Indochina as an increasingly important theater of operations. Bombers of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force under Major General Claire L. Chennault operating from South China regularly attacked Japanese targets in Vietnam, sometimes ranging as far south as Saigon to hit ports and rail centers. To add to Tokyo’s concerns, French resistance inside Indochina appeared to be growing, and the Decoux regime seemed clearly to be switching its allegiance from Vichy to de Gaulle’s Free France. The concerns grew in January 1945, when American forces attacked Luzon in the Philippines. In conjunction with this attack, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the U.S. Third Fleet, launched a brief but devastating naval raid along the Indochina coast between Cam Ranh Bay and Qui Nhon, in order to deflect Japanese attention from Admiral Nimitz’s advance on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese Thirty-eighth Army responded with a major reinforcement of garrisons in Indochina, especially in Tonkin, Annam, and Laos.

…

Viewed in totality, the available evidence—including the MAGIC intercepts—suggests strongly that Tokyo officials, increasingly resigned to the inevitability of defeat in the war, saw a takeover in Indochina as giving them a stronger position either for negotiation or for fanatic resistance. It’s also clear that their task was made easier by the chronic inability of French Resistance forces to keep their activities and plans secret. Many colons openly expressed their support for the Resistance, and French soldiers collected arms dropped in the countryside and deposited them in arsenals in full view of the Japanese. Portraits of de Gaulle even hung in the public offices of the French High Command. On top of all that, the Japanese had cracked the French codes and were reading all the French ciphers. Their surveillance of French activities was child’s play, and on the evening of March 9 they had their troops ready in strategic positions to negate the anticipated French moves.

Certainly the French were taken by surprise, even though they had drawn up plans to counter just this kind of Japanese thrust and even though intelligence reports had warned that an attack might be imminent. One by one that evening their garrisons fell. Almost without exception, the senior French commanders were captured in their homes or in those of Japanese officers with whom they were dining (the meal invitations being part of the ruse). In Saigon, Japanese forces moved immediately on Decoux’s palace and seized him as well as several other high-ranking French ministers. Throughout Indochina, they took over administrative buildings and public utilities and seized radio stations, banks, and industries. Public beatings and executions of colonial officials occurred in numerous locales, and there were widespread reports of French women being raped by Japanese soldiers—including in Bac Giang province, where the province résident’s wife was gang-raped.

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by Joel | 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 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 | 29 March 2025 · 9:35 pm

First Chinese Laborers in Australia

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 111-114:

THE FIRST CHINESE WHO arrived in the Australian colonies in the late 1840s were, in fact, indentured workers, contracted to work on the huge sheep runs of New South Wales. As convict transportation declined and, with it, the use of “assigning” convicts for shepherding and other rural work, the pastoralists—Australia’s first big capitalists—turned to indentured Asian labor from India and China. In the late 1830s and early ’40s, pastoralists imported several hundred contract laborers from West Bengal; between 1847 and 1853, Australians brought another 500 Indians and 3,608 Chinese, the latter recruited overwhelmingly from Xiamen on the South China coast of Fujian province. Australians likely recruited in Xiamen because that port was a major source of Chinese labor emigration to Singapore, another British colony. Indentured Chinese went to Australia to work as shepherds, hut-keepers, farmhands, and domestic servants under contracts of four to five years. They earned about ten pounds a year (less than half the average European wage) and were subject to the colonies’ masters and servants laws, which imposed penal sanctions for absconding or disobedience.

From the outset, Australian colonists were skeptical about the use of Asian indentured labor. Many believed free British emigrants should settle Australia and not unfree labor, whether convicts or coolies. They feared that Australia would come to resemble the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean, where the use of indentured Indians as a replacement for enslaved Africans seemed to barely diminish the evils of slavery. In 1843 four thousand people in New South Wales, self-described working people, signed a petition declaring that the importation of “coloured workers” would be a “grave injustice to freemen who had come to better their condition.” A contemporary warned that British emigrants, even the poorest Irish laborers and servants who came on government assistance, would find their wages reduced to 20 rupees a year or be “trampled into beggary and ruin.” The antitransportation movement, modeled on the British antislavery societies, deemed the importation of indentured coolies even worse than that of convicts, whom they considered at least potentially redeemable. But the Colonial Office in London conceded, “The supply of really eligible Emigrants, that is, of those of the proper age, and possessing the requisite health and knowledge of some useful description of labor, is limited. . . . [It] is doubtful whether the requisite number will be obtainable.”

The sheep ranchers were defensive about using indentured workers but adamant that they had no other recourse to labor. As on other settler frontiers, indigenous people resisted working for Europeans. A Port Phillip pastoralist, Charles Nicholson, declared, “The fact is that we must have labour in some shape or other—free labour if we can get it; if not, prison labour; and failing either, coolie labour.” The Melbourne Age echoed that rationale with the view that importing Asians was the “dernier resort.”

By the early 1850s the opponents of indentured labor had largely prevailed, owing to the association of coolies with convict labor and the penal origins of the colonies, beyond which proper settlers wished to progress. Many settlers argued that replacing convict labor with indentured Asians would create vast inequalities and thus would make democracy impossible. A critic of the wool capitalists asserted, “Chinese laborers were the offspring of that morbid craving for cheap convict labor, which cannot be appeased while hope remains that it may be supplied. Chinese emigration is merely an extension of the slave trade.” When the Port Phillip District separated from New South Wales as the new colony of Victoria in 1851, it founded as a free colony and banned all indentured labor, regardless of origin. In New South Wales, where the pastoralists wielded considerable political clout, the use of indentured Chinese continued, albeit modestly and not without public criticism.

But the onset of the gold rush in the early 1850s shifted the framework for how white Australians imagined the Chinese question. The gold rush was an unexpected answer to Australians’ prayers for free labor, and much more. It promised a level of prosperity previously unimaginable and brought tens of thousands of people to Australia. In general, they were free emigrants of diverse social background who hailed mostly from the British Isles but also from continental Europe (especially Germany), the United States, and China.

Chinese arrived on the Victorian goldfields in 1853, about a year and a half after the initial rush. By 1854 there were ten thousand Chinese in the colony, a relatively small number, but their presence sparked controversy. Historians have recounted the animosity of Europeans toward the Chinese, and some have compared it to the racism on the California goldfields. But the Chinese Question in Australia began quite differently than it did in California.

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Filed under Australia, China, labor, migration, slavery, South Asia, U.S.

by Joel | 28 March 2025 · 6:16 pm

Sad Fate of Sihanoukville

From Sihanoukville: Rise and Fall of a Frontier City, by Ivan Franceschini, with photos by Roun Ry, Global China Pulse, September 2024:

From quiet seaside town known mostly as a backpacker destination, the place turned first into a booming frontier city with aspirations to become the ‘new Macau’ and then into a notorious haven for online scam operations. How did it come to this? How did a city once famous as a destination for low-end tourism turn into a hub for human trafficking and modern slavery linked to cybercrime?

Founded in the mid-1950s around a then new deep-water port funded by France and named after the late Cambodian king and long-term ruler Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012), the Sihanoukville of old [once known as Kampong Som] is often remembered as an enchanted place. Youk Chhang (2021), director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) that played a fundamental role in documenting the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, has described how, when he was growing up in Cambodia in the 1960s, he used to hear about the city in popular music. Although he had never visited the place, his youthful fascination was also fuelled by the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy had travelled there in 1967 to inaugurate a boulevard named after her late husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As his words in the epigraph to this essay show, his first visit to the city in the early 1990s did not disappoint.

I had a chance to visit Sihanoukville myself in the early 2010s and have some very distinct memories of a somnolent town of low-rise buildings, with seaside resorts beside white-sand beaches where one could lie in a hammock and simply relax. The temptation to nostalgia is strong. Yet, even at that time, it was widely known that, behind the beautiful scenery, the city was an imperfect paradise. Not only were certain areas a haven for sex tourists, including several notorious paedophiles, it was also a favourite haunt of a handful of Russian oligarchs and gangsters, who for years dominated the city with their extravagant behaviour and penchant for violence.

In the early 2010s, Sihanoukville was the long-term home of a growing community of about 200 former Soviet citizens and attracted as many as 5,000 to 6,000 Russian-speaking tourists every year (Plokhii 2011). They had their own Russian-language newspaper, a monthly Russian community meeting, at least six Russian restaurants, street signs in Russian, and a Russian-owned beachside disco. There were also plans to build the first Russian Orthodox church in the city, which came to fruition a few years later (Orthodox Christianity 2014). Money—often of uncertain provenance—was pouring in. Yet, the situation on the ground was quickly shifting as new Chinese investors began to eye the lucrative opportunities in the city.

In fact, China’s presence in Sihanoukville goes way back. Under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), the city was the site of one of the main Chinese aid projects in what was then known as Democratic Kampuchea: the reactivation and expansion of an oil refinery that had been built by a French company in the 1960s and abandoned due to continuous attacks from Cambodian and Vietnamese communist insurgents and US bombing in May 1975.

In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha (2014: Ch. 5) documents in painstaking detail the bureaucratic and personal challenges that Chinese workers faced as they attempted to rebuild the refinery—their long-ago voices resonating with the complaints of some of their successors of today as they bemoan the lack of skills of Cambodian co-workers and the impossibility of understanding who is in charge of what (Franceschini 2020). The refinery would never be completed, the project reaching a premature end due to the onslaught of the internal purges in the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy and then the Vietnamese invasion. As the Vietnamese forces entered Kampong Som, the place ‘became noteworthy’ as a ‘site of the disorganized and panic-ridden retreat of the Chinese’ (Mertha 2014: 117). Convinced by Khmer Rouge propaganda into believing that all was well on the Vietnam front, Chinese technicians and workers took a while to realise the impending danger. It was then too late for them to escape and as many as 200 became de facto prisoners of war.

Fast forward two decades. In the newly pacified Cambodia of the 1990s, Sihanoukville gained renewed importance as the country’s only deep-water port, which made it an important hub for international trade. In the new millennium, Chinese businesses began to gain a foothold in the city and the surrounding Preah Sihanouk Province. An important event in this sense was the establishment of the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone—a development that would later be branded a landmark project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia (IDI 2021). A priority of both the Chinese and the Cambodian governments since its approval in 2006, the project showcased the alignment of their agendas in that period, with Cambodia prioritising the zone’s development to attract foreign capital to build its export capacities, and China eager to push its well-established manufacturers to head overseas and seek lower-cost production bases and explore access to foreign markets (Loughlin and Grimsditch 2020; Bo and Loughlin 2022).

The transformation of Sihanoukville began abruptly in the mid-2010s, accelerating around 2017, as online gambling operators set up shop in the city. They soon spread rapidly across Cambodia, but Sihanoukville was the perfect location: relatively good access to the capital, Phnom Penh, a functioning airport, and plenty of land—much of it already grabbed by local elites—available for purchase or rent; an already thriving in-person gambling industry; and very lax law enforcement. Possibly, it was made even more desirable by the impending construction of China-funded infrastructure, especially a new expressway that would connect the city to Phnom Penh, dramatically cutting travel time between the two cities.

Given these considerations, industry operators began to descend en masse on the city, investing not only in their online activities, but also in a host of new casinos, hotels, and entertainment venues, most of which were targeting the rapidly growing Chinese market. This generated a bubble that, at its peak in 2019, produced annual revenue conservatively estimated between 3.5 and 5 billion USD a year, 90 per cent of which came from online gambling (Turton 2020). The Chinese population in the city grew exponentially, as did the percentage of businesses owned by Chinese nationals, which in mid-2019 was a staggering 90 per cent of the total in the city (Hin 2019).

…

In January 2018, authorities in China launched a three-year campaign known as ‘sweeping away the black and eliminating the evil’ (扫黑除恶), to root out ‘underworld forces’ (Greitens 2020). Destinations like Sihanoukville likely presented an enticing prospect to gangsters trying to avoid the crackdown. It was around this time that reports of kidnappings, human trafficking, and forced labour to fuel the burgeoning online gambling and online scam industry in Sihanoukville started appearing with increasing frequency in Chinese-language media. As the presence of illicit online operations became better known, in July 2018, the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia released a warning about the ‘high-paying traps of online gambling recruitment’—one of the earliest instances of such advisories that we were able to locate (Chinese Embassy in Cambodia 2018). The embassy encouraged Chinese nationals who planned to come to Cambodia, especially young people, to be vigilant about offers of well-paid jobs as ‘typists’, ‘network technicians’, ‘network customer service’, and ‘network promotion’, regardless of whether these were promoted in online advertisements or introductions by friends or relatives.

…

The day in 2019 when then prime minister Hun Sen announced the online gambling ban, 18 August, was a watershed moment for Sihanoukville. No-one was more aware of this than the Chinese nationals in Cambodia, who began to refer to the event simply as ‘818’—a supposedly auspicious number transformed into a symbol of doom. If up to that point the city’s economy was soaring, afterwards the edifice showed hints of cracking. Signs began to emerge that many operations had closed and rushed to relocate, dragging with them not only their workforce but also that of ancillary industries. According to some reports, an estimated 10,000 Chinese fled Sihanoukville in the space of a few days after the ban was announced (Inside Asian Gaming 2019). Reports followed of more Chinese leaving the city and Cambodia and, in January 2020, Cambodia’s Immigration Department revealed that about 447,000 Chinese nationals had left the kingdom (Ben 2020). While this is a huge number, there was no breakdown of how many of these departures were residents and how many were short-term visitors. During the same period there were 323,000 inbound Chinese travellers, meaning the net influx of Chinese was down by more than 100,000 people. While it is not possible to isolate any other potential factors that could have caused this drop, it can be assumed that 818 had an impact.

…

Many Chinese developers decided to write off their losses and flee. Having lost faith in the future of the city and worried about the contractual obligations that bound them to pay exaggerated rents even in the face of an economy that was collapsing, many chose to evade their legal obligations and return to China. In so doing, they left behind hundreds of buildings at different stages of completion. On one hand, this spelled the ruin of local landowners, many of whom had sought to capitalise on the gambling-fuelled boom. As one of them complained to a journalist from Voice of Democracy (VoD) in July 2022: ‘I borrowed money to buy land worth more than $200,000 because I thought it was a great opportunity … We could earn $7,500 [per month]—why wouldn’t we dare to pay $2,000 per month [in loan repayments]? The banks were happy to lend money between $200,000 and $300,000’ (Mech 2022b). On the other hand, this caused mayhem among the Chinese and Cambodian workers employed on these sites, many of whom were not notified that their bosses had fled and continued to work for weeks or even months without being paid.

…

I was in Sihanoukville between December 2019 and January 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and encountered several of these workers. While by that time many Cambodian workers had already returned to their homes in the provinces, having received the back salaries they were owed—which were much lower than those of their Chinese colleagues—or having given up on being paid at all, many of their Chinese counterparts were still stuck in the city. Many were living in conditions of destitution in the half-finished construction sites, unable to go home either because they did not have the money or because they were still clinging to the hope of retrieving the often-significant amounts they were owed. As I recounted at length elsewhere (Franceschini 2020), this was a heartbreaking experience.

…

Although the online gambling ban had clear immediate impacts, paradoxically, this marked a point when awareness of the scale of the online industries and their associated crimes really came to the fore. Scam operations had existed for years in the city, discreetly hosted within the same operations that were home to ostensibly more legitimate gambling activities. As news emerged of the hardships occurring in Sihanoukville, it became clear that business was still booming in many of the larger hotel and casino-based online scam operations, and in the major compounds that proliferated across the city. Many companies providing real online gambling services (rather than rigged games or scams) likely left, and recently arrived scam operators and smaller players with less well-established connections probably got cold feet. However, at the same time, the compounds became increasingly secretive, and failing casinos converted premises to provide more space for online operations. In both cases, security increased and the movement of workers in and out became tightly restricted.