Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–1946) [First Edition] 9780520274150

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The Philip E. Lilienthal imprint honors special books in commemoration of a man whose work at University of California Press from 1954 to 1979 was marked by dedication to young authors and to high standards in the field of Asian Studies. Friends, family, authors, and foundations have together endowed the Lilienthal Fund, which enables UC Press to publish under this imprint selected books in a way that reflects the taste and judgment of a great and beloved editor.

Vietnam

F ROM I N DOCH I NA TO V I ET NA M: R EVOLU T ION A N D WA R I N A GLOBA L PE R SPEC T I V E Edited by Fredrik Logevall and Christopher E. Goscha 1. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, by Mark Atwood Lawrence 2. Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954, by Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery 3. Vietnam 1946: How the War Began, by Stein Tønnesson 4. Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina, by Eric T. Jennings 5. Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, by Charles Keith 6. Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–1946), by David G. Marr

Vietnam State, War, and Revolution (1945–1946)

David G. Marr

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California Ch 3 is reprinted by permission of the publisher from “Creating Defense Capacity in Vietnam, 1945–1947” in THE FIRST VIETNAM WAR: COLONIAL CONFLICT AND COLD WAR CRISIS, edited by Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, pp. 74–101, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2007 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marr, David G. Vietnam : state, war, and revolution, 1945–1946 / David G. Marr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27415-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Vietnam (Democratic Republic)—History. 2. Indochinese War, 1946–1954. I. Title. DS560.6.M37 2013 959.704'1—dc23 2012036193

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For our grandchildren Grace, Billy, Jimmy, and Ella

Con t en ts

List of Illustrations Foreword Preface Introduction

ix xi xiii 1

1. Forming the DRV Government

19

2. The Government at Work

57

3. Defense

111

4. Peace or War?

183

5. Seeking Foreign Friends

258

6. Material Dreams and Realities

315

7. Dealing with Domestic Opposition

383

8. The Indochinese Communist Party and the Vidt Minh

442

9. Mass Mobilization

499

Epilogue Notes Sources Index

569 579 689 701

I l lust r at ions

MAPS

1. Northern Vietnam xx 2. Central and southern Vietnam

xxi F IG U R E S

1. First DRV cabinet, September 1945 21 2. Hanoi electees to the National Assembly meet the public 51 3. Hò Chí Minh presenting new Cabinet to National Assembly, 2 March 1946 62 4. Hò Chí Minh standing outside Northern Region Office 72 5. 1946 postage stamps 92 6. Allied flags festoon Saigon’s former Hôtel de Ville 115 7. Poorly armed patriots face British-Indian-French force in the south 117 8. “Southern Advance” volunteers at Tuy Hòa station, October 1945 124 9. Southern militia group 129 10. Franco-Vietnamese military parade, 22 March 1946 147 11. Refi lling cartridges 164 12. Võ Nguyên Gíap in the Vidt Båc 178 13. French residents of Hanoi welcome Leclerc convoy, 18 March 1946 204 14. Dalat Conference 216 15. Young “Vietnam” offers 6 March 1946 Preliminary Accord to “France,” in exchange for something more lasting 230 ix

x

Illustrations

16. Hò Chí Minh and Marius Moutet shaking hands after signing modus vivendi, with Lord Buddha as witness 233 17. “International situation” 263 18. General Lu Han in Hanoi, 14 March 1946 267 19. “Vietnamese-Chinese Amity” poster 281 20. Colonel Nordlinger attending an antifamine rally with Nguyën Văn Tó, Vĩnh Thky/Bho Ðai, Hò Chí Minh, and Ngô Tû Ha 290 21. The Nationalist Party mocks Hò Chí Minh seeking rice donations, accompanied by Vĩnh Thky/Bho Ðai and Ngô Tû Ha 323 22. One-hundred đòng DRV “finance note” 368 23. “Vidt Minh Resistance Work” as seen by the Nationalist Party. 416 24. Rome and Vietnam are juxtaposed geographically, Vatican and DRV standards fly side by side, and readers are told to love both Christ and the Fatherland 431 25. Trufng Chinh, ICP general secretary 446 26. Tràn Huy Lidu 465 27. “Revolution: First Destroy . . . In Order to Build” 501 28. A Vidt Minh youth group sings patriotic songs to warm up a Hanoi mass meeting, 14 March 1946 521 29. Female section of 14 March 1946 mass meeting 521 30. A French soldier offers money for information 526

For ewor d

David G. Marr’s scholarship on modern Vietnam needs no introduction. In a series of path-breaking studies published by the University of California Press, Marr has provided defi nitive accounts of Viet namese anticolonialism, sociocultural change, and revolution. Now, in Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945–46), Marr draws on a wide array of Vietnamese-language memoirs, newspapers, and government archives captured by the French to provide the first fulllength study of the emergence and formation of the postcolonial state of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Through a series of thematic chapters, Marr shows in masterful detail how a state emerged in Vietnamese hands, one capable of mobilizing people and allocating resources as well as preparing an army for war with a French government determined to reestablish colonial sovereignty, first in the south, then in the north. Whereas many scholars have focused on the invisible hand of the Viet namese communists operating from on high, Marr takes us down below to follow intermediary civil servants, hardly any of them communists, as they did their best to keep the DRV functioning. The communist leadership, including Ho Chi Minh, receive careful attention as well, but Marr shows that the communists were much weaker at the time than they and their detractors would like to admit later. In addition, Marr provides important insights into the conceptualization of Vietnam’s fi rst constitution and the difficult yet fascinating debates that went into it and the creation of the country’s fi rst National Assembly in 1946. Of equal importance is the attention he pays to policing and to the economy, neither of which has received sustained treatment in the existing historiography. xi

xii

Foreword

In Marr’s hands, contingency and incoherence become as important to understanding this fledgling state’s early evolution as the revolution from which it was born and the war that the French hoped would allow them to shut it down. Those readers interested in modern Vietnam in general and the DRV in par ticular will be richly rewarded, as will those working on the wars for Vietnam, postcolonial state formation, and decolonization. It is an honor and a pleasure to be able to introduce this volume to our readers and to count it among the titles in our series. Christopher E. Goscha, Université du Québec à Montréal Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University

Pr eface

I began my encounter with Vietnam in the 1960s, wondering why so many people talked with such excitement about where they were and what they were doing in 1945–46. Viet namese materials about that era proved very hard to fi nd, however. There was almost nothing in Saigon libraries or bookshops. I located a left-wing book store in Hong Kong that sold subscriptions to Hanoi periodicals, notably Nghiên Cúu Lich Sû (Historical Research). One day in 1964 two FBI agents came to our Berkeley graduate student apartment to ask why I was receiving enemy propaganda in the mail. The following year, while researching student political agitation in Saigon, I was given a stack of confiscated Hanoi publications by Colonel Pham Ngec Liëu, chief of the Republic of Vietnam’s National Police. These whetted my appetite, but were hardly the makings of a PhD project. My 1968 dissertation and first book focused on the minority of Vietnamese who contested French occupation and colonization during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They left a legacy of failures tinged with heroism, as well as a blunt challenge to the new generation of French-educated youth to learn from their mistakes. My second book pursued the intelligentsia of this generation as it debated issues of ethics and politics, language and literacy, the status of women, lessons from the past, harmony and struggle, knowledge power, and political praxis. These lively exchanges took place amidst rapid socioeconomic change, repeated changes in French colonial policy, and finally the turmoil of World War II. Not solely intellectuals, but other Vietnamese as well became convinced that life was not preordained, liberation and modernity were open to all peoples of the world, and one could join with others to force change. xiii

xiv

Preface

My third book tried to bring alive the events and explain the significance of what Vietnamese still call the August Revolution of 1945. First I canvassed the previous five years, when Vichy French, Japanese, Chinese, Americans, British, Free French, Vietnamese communists, and Vietnamese nationalists all tried to control or influence events in Indochina. On 9 March 1945, the Japanese Army overturned the French colonial administration, which meant that France was removed from the contest for a vital six months. Vietnamese quickly discovered they could publish, organize, and demonstrate in favor of national independence, so long as they did not hinder Japanese defense preparations. The antiJapanese Vietnam Independence League (Vidt Nam Ðöc Lãp Ðòng Minh), or Vidt Minh, continued to extol Allied victories and denounce the “dwarf bandits” (gicc lùn), but mostly avoided confrontation in favor of popular proselytizing and preparations for eventual revolt. In some localities peasants raided rice granaries, seized landlords’ properties, incarcerated village headmen, and caused district mandarins to flee for their lives. News of Tokyo’s capitulation to the Allies on 15 August spread quickly across Vietnam, triggering scores of exuberant demonstrations, seizures of government offices, burning of documents, and formation of revolutionary committees. Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) members took control in Hanoi, Hud, Saigon, and some provincial towns in the name of the Vidt Minh, while elsewhere bands of young men and women accomplished much the same thing of their own volition. It was a moment when everything seemed possible, when people felt they were making history, not just witnessing it. Some Japa nese commanders made available to local Vietnamese groups stocks of arms and ammunition they had seized from the French. Vidt Minh cadres, having identified themselves with the Allies, now enjoyed a major propaganda advantage over groups that previously had cooperated with the Japanese. As a result, most youth groups were soon waving Vidt Minh flags and repeating available Vidt Minh slogans, even though they had no contact with higher Vidt Minh echelons and no familiarity with the overall Vidt Minh platform. Vietnam 1945 ends on 2 September, when big crowds gathered in Hanoi and Saigon to celebrate Vietnamese national independence. In Hanoi, Hò Chí Minh, provisional president of the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), read a short independence declaration designed for international as well as domestic consumption. Loudspeakers ensured that the audience not only heard what Hò and others had to say, but responded loudly and eagerly on numerous occasions. After Hò brought the meeting to a close, Vidt Minh contingents marched downtown, disbanded, and joined in the general merriment until the hour of curfew. In Saigon, however, members of the Southern Provisional Administrative Committee had just finished addressing the crowd when shots rang out on the periphery, people stampeded, and mobs proceeded to hunt down French civilians, killing

Preface

xv

several, beating up others, and terrorizing the rest. These two denouements, one orderly, the other anarchic, showed how the popular upheavals of August could propel Vietnam in starkly different directions. People sensed that their lives had changed irrevocably, yet no one could predict what the next week might bring, much less subsequent months and years. Th is book focuses on events of the next sixteen months, when Vietnam’s future course was largely determined. Between September 1945 and December 1946, the DRV state began to function, a national army was created, the Japanese, British, Americans and Chinese faded from the Indochina power equation, and France and the DRV maneuvered vigorously to gain advantage. A second famine was mostly averted, French properties were appropriated, and informal fundraising campaigns were used alongside formal tax levies. The ICP gradually extended its control over local Vidt Minh groups, then pressured other parties to either accept ICP hegemony or be treated as traitors. Millions of men, women, and children joined local associations for the defense and development of the nation. Hò Chí Minh spent the summer of 1946 in Paris trying to negotiate a settlement, but tensions increased at home. This culminated in French seizure of Haiphong in November, and DRV attacks in Hanoi and elsewhere on 19 December. The First Indochina War would last another seven and a half years. The DRV survived and eventually prevailed largely due to the unprecedented participation of ordinary citizens, most of whom never fired a shot in anger. Why and how people took part are questions I approach from multiple angles. Clearly individuals had other aspirations besides defeating the enemy. The DRV state took on many functions that had no direct bearing on the armed struggle, although it usually justified these expansions in resistance terms. The ICP also used the war to justify its grabs for power. Amidst all these attempts to control affairs, war and revolution produced a host of unintended consequences that Vietnamese had to live with for decades thereafter. Often I have asked myself the same question that Thomas Carlyle did when he embarked on his history of the French Revolution: What was it like to be there? Lacking Carlyle’s dramatic flair, I cannot evoke a Vietnamese Mirabeau or Robespierre. Well-known personages like Hò Chí Minh, Võ Nguyên Giáp, and Trufng Chinh do tread the stage here, yet I’m equally interested in the teenage Vidt Minh activist, the aggrieved village petitioner, the provincial committee chairman, the former colonial fonctionnaire, the eager journalist, and the high school pupil heading south to fight the French, armed only with a machete. Archival dossiers, newspapers, and books generated in 1945–46 have motivated me for years to get up each morning, tackle inconsistent evidence, find patterns but also contradictions, and then try to craft an historical narrative of human beings responding to and making events at this par ticular place and time. Most exhilarating has been the gouvernement de fait (GF) collection at the

xvi

Preface

Archives national d’outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, seventy-eight cartons of DRV documents captured by the French Army in Hanoi in late 1946. It is one measure of the high-level confusion bedev iling the DRV on 19 December 1946 that government clerks were still at their desks in Hanoi only two hours before Vietnamese attacks began; they then failed to destroy thousands of dossiers lodged in the basement of the Northern Region Office (Båc Bö Phl) before leaving. If it had been feasible to write this book twenty years ago, Vietnam watchers would quickly have recognized the political rhetoric, the policy assumptions, and attitudes of people carried over from the late 1940s. Now a lot has changed. Amidst today’s mobile phones, vibrant markets, foreign investors, Nike shoe factories, and nouveau riche families, stories of war and revolution may seem embarrassingly antiquated. For young Vietnamese it is still necessary to learn enough about the anti-French resistance to pass school examinations, but beyond that the period appears distant and inconsequential. For many young scholars of Vietnam in the West there seems to be an assumption that amidst all the Communist Party propaganda nothing of continuing significance can be found out about the DRV, the Vidt Minh, or the resistance. Yet many of the state institutions created in the late 1940s remain intact in Vietnam today, as do popular beliefs in modernity, efficiencies of scale, and centralization of power. Just below the surface, fears of foreign intervention or manipulation persist as well. The party continues to justify its dictatorship by reference to alleged achievements in the August 1945 Revolution and anti-French resistance. Critics of the party sometimes harken back to the relatively open press of 1945–46, the January 1946 national elections, the Democratic Party, and the November 1946 constitution, yet they lack detailed knowledge of events. My debts to friends, colleagues, archivists, librarians, research assistants, and students in regard to this book extend back almost half a century, starting in 1965 with staff at the Institute of Ancient History in Saigon who let me photograph a 1945 newspaper. From 1969, I had help and guidance in Paris from Georges Boudarel, Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hémery, and Christian Rageau. From 1974, members of the Institute of History in Hanoi shared publications, ideas, and personal contacts—above all Duong Trung Quóc, more recently a vigorous member of Vietnam’s National Assembly. In 1983, I made my first of seven trips to the archives in Aix-en-Provence, where François Bordes, Lucette Vachier, and Sylvie Clair gave me unparalleled access and encouragement. During the 1990s, Phan Huy Lê, head of the Vietnam Studies Center at Hanoi National University, introduced me to his history colleagues and sponsored my entry to the Vietnam National Archives, Center No. 3. Pham Thd Khang, director of Vietnam’s National Library, facilitated my multiple sojourns among 1945–1946 periodicals and resistance-era monographs.

Preface

xvii

Many colleagues have graciously loaned or given me publications, forwarded documents, and provided valuable source leads, including Ðào Hùng, Phan Huy Lê, Pham Khiêm Ích, the late Ðcng Phong, Andrew Hardy, Christopher Goscha, Stein Tønnesson, Ðinh Xuân Lâm, Nguyën Văn Km, Ben Kerkvliet, Hùynh Kim Khánh, Christophe Dutrône, Howard Daniel III, John Kleinen, Tony Reid, Pham Mai Hùng, Rob Hurle, François Guillemot, Paul Sager, Michael Di Gregorio, and Martin Grossheim. On each visit to Hanoi I walked up Tin Street, climbed three flights of stairs, and was invited by Tràn Tán Chnh, owner of the Hidu Sách Cũ bookshop, to drink strong tea, chat, and peruse stacks of publications. Jennifer Brewster, Ðr Quý Tán, Nguyën Thanh, Nguyën Thi Huong Giang, Ðr Thidn, Nguyën Ðinn, and Nguyën Thi Hòng Hanh gave excellent support as research assistants in Canberra, Paris, and Hanoi. Their notes will fuel writing projects beyond this book. William Turley and Stein Tønnesson read each chapter draft as it appeared, reacting promptly and constructively. Bùi Ðình Thanh gave me verbal observations on chapters each time we met in Hanoi. Portions of the manuscript were read by Ben Kerkvliet, Mark Selden, Marilyn Larew, Nile Thompson, and John Spragens Jr. David Elliott and Christopher Goscha provided valuable comments after reviewing the manuscript for the University of California Press. Hoàng Oanh Collins took each of my chapter penscripts and with professional flair turned them into sterling typescripts. She handled subsequent drafts with equal precision. Without her experience with Vietnamese fonts it would have been impossible to employ full diacritics in the text and endnotes of this book. During 2005–8 I received a grant from the Australian Research Council; I am thankful to our division administrator, Dorothy MacIntosh, for taking care of its procedural intricacies on my behalf. Karina Pelling, of Cartographic & GIS Services, Australia National University, created the two vital maps that follow this preface, using data collected by me over the decades. At the University of California Press, Niels Hooper, Kim Hogeland, and Mari Coates piloted the book through its many requisite stages. I especially appreciated the professional care and friendly disposition of my assigned copyeditor, Caroline Knapp. Chapter 3, “Defense,” is a revised and expanded version of my contribution to Mark Atwood Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, editors, The First Vietnam War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Part of Chapter 6, “Material Dreams and Realities,” appeared originally in Christopher E. Goscha and Benoît De Tréglode, editors, Naissance d’un État-Parti: Le Viêt Nam depuis 1945 (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2004). Both are used by permission. A few words about terminology. To make the text more friendly to nonspecialists, I employ English translations of Vietnamese organizational names, administrative titles, and the like, while providing the original Vietnamese in parentheses

xviii

Preface

on first mention. One exception is “Vidt Minh,” introduced above. Although formally an organization established in 1941 by the ICP, the term “Vidt Minh” came to be used spontaneously by hundreds if not thousands of local revolutionary, anticolonial groups in late 1945. To complicate matters, the ICP, following its “self-dissolution” in November, employed “Vidt Minh” as a cover name to signify patriotic commitment above and beyond party affi liation. The Vidt Minh General Headquarters (Tmng Bö Vidt Minh) issued public statements as if it was in charge, but actually left the job of gaining control over local Vidt Minh groups to the underground ICP. Among the public at large, “Vidt Minh” gradually became conflated with the DRV state. The French called their opponents “les Vietminh,” never the DRV or National Guard. I try to alert readers to which meaning of Vidt Minh I am referring. I have chosen not to homogenize regional designations, since the way in which these geographical terms were employed tells us something about the times and the people involved. Readers thus need to know from the outset that: Tonkin = Båc Bö = northern Vietnam; Annam = Trung Bö = central Vietnam; and Cochinchina = Nam Bö = southern Vietnam. When it comes to provincial identifications, we are fortunate that after four decades of renaming provinces and creating new ones, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1989–96 decided to return mostly to the provincial names and borders of 1945. Most Vietnamese place names come in two separated syllables, for example, Lang Son, Nam Ðinh, Ðà Nbng, Nha Trang, and Càn Tho. However, I conflate syllables in the following place names: Vietnam, Hanoi, Haiphong, Saigon, and Dalat. Some Viet namese personalities in this era employed a variety of aliases. I have used the name by which an individual was best known in the late 1940s, be it his or her given name, pen name, code name, or revolutionary pseudonym. I introduce each individual by full name, then follow Viet namese practice by referring to a person’s given name rather than surname. Thus, within a given paragraph Huynh Thúc Kháng is identified subsequently as Kháng. One exception is Hò Chí Minh, who is always Hò and never Minh. Individuals with no middle name, for example Phan Anh or Trufng Chinh, are allowed to keep their full names. Throughout this period, the Bank of Indochina (BIC) piastre continued to dominate Vietnamese as well as French financial calculations and transactions. One piastre (1$00BIC) was valued at seventeen francs in late 1945. One franc was worth less than one cent American, and the franc declined further for years thereafter. When the DRV began to issue its own money in 1946 it hoped one đòng would be exchanged for one piastre, but that proved a chimera. Many DRV documents use đòng to mean the BIC piastre without spelling this out, which creates a monetary minefield for unwary researchers. With this awareness, I reserve đòng for the few values that are explicitly in DRV currency

Preface

xix

As I strove to impart structure to this book, I was reminded of a par ticular type of bark cloth I came upon in Ðåk Tô (Kontum province) in 1962, with rough strips that were dark and light, wide and thin. My nine chapters here constitute the warp, while the ideas, beliefs, and behavior of Vietnamese during these sixteen months make up the weft. Terms like “independence,” “nation,” “the people,” “struggle,” “revolution,” “reactionary,” and “resistance” appear in different circumstances. Some preoccupations vanish or go underground, perhaps to emerge a decade or five decades later. When the Vietnam History Association organized a seminar in Hanoi in 1995 to discuss my Vietnam 1945 book, the passage to which a number of participants took exception was the assertion that “the only truth in history is that there are no historical truths, only an infinite number of experiences.” By contrast, only one person criticized me for underrating the role of the ICP in events, while several others chose to recount personal experiences in 1945 that supported my argument, without saying so explicitly. Today, younger generations in Vietnam seem less wedded to historical truths, more willing to question dogma. I look forward to lively discussions.

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