Those ‘barbarians’ who refused to submit to imperial power often paid with their lives. Survivors found themselves jailed, banished, demoted, or homeless. Pragmatic-minded Han authorities realized, however, that such hard-handed methods would get them nowhere in the long run. Blind military conquest and assimilation without a political endgame were costly affairs and only create a sea of hate from which the ‘barbarians’ would recruit their own armies. Perceptive colonial officials also realized that while the empire circulated Han administrators, officers, and settlers to work in the south, their numbers would never be large enough to operate the state effectively at the lower, yet vital levels of the administration in which few spoke Chinese. One Chinese administrator posted to the south bemoaned the gap between colonial theory and practice in a report: “Customs are not uniform and languages are mutually unintelligible, so that several interpreters are needed to communicate… If district level officials are appointed, it is the same as if they were not.”

Located far from the metropolis, many Han authorities had no choice but to accommodate local leaders by offering them a role in the provincial administration. Rather than defeating aristocratic families, warlords, or shamans, compromises were reached and concessions were made. Outside the provincial capital, colonial authorities used pre-colonial administrative structures, kinship networks, and cults to rule indirectly, regardless of the orders they received from on high calling for uniformity and assimilation. Over time, the imperial court eventually opened the doors of the imperial army, administration, and academies to Red River Viet as a way of instilling loyalty, building legitimacy, and ruling effectively.


Secondly, the attack on the imperial order in the Red River did not come from nomads descending from the Central Asian steppes on the scale of the Mongols and the Manchus who would later seize China. Dissent came from within the colonial order, from military and administrative elites (the two often overlapped) convinced that they could do better without the Tang. In 939, Ngo Quyen, a high-standing prefect and general in Jiaozhi province, took advantage of the disintegration of Tang power to rally his men, beat back an enemy naval attack, and secure the province’s independence. That enemy attack, in fact, came from a very similar state based in Guangzhou whose leaders had declared their independence from the vanishing Tang to create the “Great Viet” in 917 before changing it to the “Southern Han” a year later. Ngo Quyen did not secure national independence from “China”, but rather from a sibling rival state in this overland and maritime zone shared by Vietnam and China. Within a century, Ngo Quyen’s men spoke of their own Dai Viet, or “Greater Viet”.


In any case, taking power was one thing, holding on to it quite another. Regional powers like the Cham and Khmer continued to pose real threats to the fledgling Viet state and a Chinese counter-attack was always a real possibility. Just as important were a dozen or so Red River lords who had always been there and were not going to sit idly by as Ngo Quyen consolidated his power at their expense. The rapid Tang withdrawal of its military and colonial personnel created a power vacuum which these lords sought to exploit as much as Nog Quyen. As is so often the case in times of decolonization, civil war quickly broke out. For half a century, different groups scattered across the plains into the highlands of Jiaozhi. They competed with each other until Ly Thai To emerged victorious and, in 1009, formed a dynasty carrying his family’s name.

All of these families seeking to transform colonial Jiaozhi province into an independent Dai Viet state faced similar challenges — to what extent should one rely on the pre-existing colonial order and Chinese statecraft to rule independently? Should one create something entirely new or fall back on something that had never disappeared? How does one legitimate and structure a new postcolonial polity ideologically, religiously, and historically? Could one family or one charismatic leader rule a state for more a generation against local lords who had never really been defeated? Or was it time to use a major world religion like Buddhism to structure, build, and impose a more centralized form of exercising power?

While early leaders like Ngo Quyen and Ly Thai To embraced monarchy as their core model, they all had to confront these deeper questions in one form or another.


Between 1407 and 1428, precisely the time during which the Ming pushed their southward imperial expansion hardest, Dai Viet returned to the Chinese empire as its 13th province, essential to further Chinese expansion southwards by land and sea. For better or for worse, this was a watershed in modern Vietnamese history. On the one hand, Ming re-conquest of Dai Viet was militarily harsh and the imposition of direct political rule and cultural assimilation all too real. Upon arriving, the Ming burned Dai Viet books in an attempt to reset the Vietnamese clock to Chinese imperial time. Scores of Chinese bureaucrats debarked to run the province, pushing local leaders out of the way and scorning “barbarian” customs as they did so. Few of these officials could speak Vietnamese, and they saw no reason to do so. Jiaozhi, in their view, was and should be a part of the northern empire.

The result was predictable: resistance and collaboration. Opposed to such heavy-handed rule and sidelined from power, in 1418 a group led by Le Loi retreated to their southern bases in today’s Thanh Hoa and Nghe An provinces to take up arms against the Chinese occupation. The Ming reaction was swift and brutal: sending in tens of thousands of well-armed troops to crush the resistance. However, as resistance forces captured modern Chinese arms and copied their military science and gunpowder-production techniques (they could read Chinese), Le Loi’s officers began transforming their ragtag forces into an increasingly strong military force. Le Loi’s partisans also began to use Chinese bureaucratic techniques to organize and deploy tens of thousands of their own troops. Under Le Loi’s command, after a decade of war, the Vietnamese drove the Ming out of the country in 1427, in battles that went beyond simple “guerrilla warfare.” As short as their rule was, the Ming ironically helped the Vietnamese achieve a modern military revolution of their own; one which they turned on the colonizer and would use to build a new state.


As Harmand warned the Nguyen court in the aftermath of the Battle of Thuan An, failure to conclude a treaty meant annihilation:

Now, here is a fact which is quite certain; you are at our mercy. We have the power to seize and destroy your capital and to cause you all to die of starvation. You have to choose between war and peace. We do not wish to conquer you, but you must accept our protectorate. For your people it is a guarantee of peace and prosperity; it is also the only chance of survival for your government and your Court. We give you 48 hours to accept or reject, in their entirety and without discussion, the terms which in our magnanimity we offer you. We are convinced that there is nothing in them dishonorable to you, and, if carried out with sincerity on both sides, they will bring happiness to the people of Vietnam. If you reject them, you must expect the greatest evils. Imagine the most frightful things conceivable, and you will still fall short of the truth. The Dynasty, its Princes and its Court will have pronounced sentence on themselves. The name of Vietnam will no longer exist in history.


Other sources of income were the state-run monopolies on alcohol, salt, gambling and opium production. The opium license generated large amounts of revenue, tripling from 500,000 francs in 1862 to 1.5 million in 1865. Between 1874 and 1877, it generated 3.2 million francs. If the income from the gambling and prostitution monopolies is added to this, Cochinchina reaped 4.2 million francs in monopoly income in 1878, and 6.7 million in 1881. Opium largely financed the creation of French Cochinchina.


Chau landed in Yokohama in early 1905 as the Russo-Japanese war reached its climax. He quickly befriended Liang Qichao and, thanks to an indefatigable writing brush, explained the sad plight of the Vietnamese people and his group’s desire to obtain Japanese assistance to expel the French and modernize the country. Well aware of Japan’s imperial ambitions, Liang warned his counterpart fo the dangers of relying too heavily on the Japanese and their Pan-Asianism. He advised Chau to focus first on reform, on educating the young, and awakening the patriotism of the people. “Your country should not be concerned about not having a day of independence,” he counseled, but “should be concerned about not having an independence-minded people.” Liang knew what he was talking about. China was in much the same situation. He was himself bringing students to study in Japanese schools and military academies.


Taking Liang’s advice to heart, the put pen to paper to provide some of the foundational texts of modern Vietnamese nationalism. This meant closely reading Japanese, Chinese, and Western materials in search of models, styles, and comparisons. Tokyo libraries and bookshops and his numerous encounters in East Asia provided him with a goldmine of information. One of the most important things he realized was that in order to explain the sad state of his country in the present and imagine a new future, he had to return to, indeed rethink, the past. The result was the publication in 1905 of The History of the Loss of Vietnam. In it, Chau lambasted the Nguyen for losing the country and failing to implement reforms in time. He celebrated the Can Vuong heroes who had resisted valiantly and condemned those who had collaborated. He focused on the evils fo the French colonialism, detailing the terrible effects of Doumer’s tax and labr demands on the common people. To communicate his ‘awakening’ message more effectively, Chau dropped much of the flowery style and arcane allusions of the Confucian tradition to write in direct, hard-hitting prose. Although he was still writing in characters, he and others realized that in order to communicate their message to a wider audience, they had to recalibrate their prose and their own ways of thinking. In the last section, Chau turned to his “Future Vietnam”, insisting that all of the people had to join hands to save the country, regardless of class, religion, or race.


He criticized the monarchy and the mandarinate for failing to save the country and to help the people in their hour of greatest need. He argued that a new type of community was in order: a national one by which the pre-existing bond between ‘emperor’ and ‘subject’ would now be replaced by one associating the ‘people’ with the ‘nation’. It was at this point that Chau and others began to use new Atlantic revolutionary terms to communicate ideas based on Meiji models and Japanese loan-words, such as ‘revolution’ (cach mang), ‘nation’ (quoc gia), and ‘citizen’ (dan quoc). ‘Why was our country lost?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘First, the monarch knew nothing of popular affairs; second, the mandarins cared nothing for the people; and third, the people knew only of themselves.’ And yet the people had built ‘the foundations of our country.’ The conclusion was obvious: ‘The people are in fact the country, the country is the people’s.’ He repeated the same mantra in another national history of Vietnam and undoubtedly in hundreds of conversations. He also reminded readers that the Viet had themselves once been colonizers, the conquerors of Champa. Now, he lamented, the tables had been turned. They were the colonized, who could disappear as the Cham had under Vietnamese rule.


However, Trinh wanted more than just a ‘colonial Meiji’. Though he could never say it publicly, he wanted to use the French to help him accomplish a colonial revolution — the overturning of the monarchy. It is unclear where Trinh’s visceral hate of the monarchy originated, but it was real. In his memoirs, Phan Boi Chau wrote that during their travels together in East Asia in 1906, they argued repeatedly over which came first: relying on the French to reform Vietnam or driving them out of it. For Trinh, the emperor had to go, and if the French could help on that score, then the choice was clear.


The Romanized script is increasingly appeared as a powerful tool of modernization and socialization. As one Dong Kinh slogan read: ‘Quoc Ngu is the saving spirit in our country, we must take it out among our people.’ More literati also began to study French. History lectures attracted large gatherings as speakers sought to distance the Vietnamese past from its civilizational association with China in favor of crafting a distinct history, a unique set of heroes, indeed a separate cultural identity.


Moreover, what the Third Republic offered in terms of a special relationship in Indochina was a largely Franco-Vietnamese partnership. The French never offered an alliance to Cambodia or Laos before WW2. Convinced that the had to offer something to the Vietnamese in order to obtain the collaboration and thwart Thai expansionism, the French intentionally pushed the Vietnamese elite to remember their own imperial past and to think in Indochinese terms in the present. In 1885, Jules Harmand, a leading proponent of association, laid out the premise for promoting a policy of dual colonialism in Indochina at the very moment when he demanded that the court in Hue surrender completely:

“The day that this race understands that its historical ambition can, thanks to us, come to fruition in ways that it never before imagined; when [the Annamese] sees our aid allow him to take vengeance for the humiliations and defeats that he has never forgiven his neighbors; when he feels definitely superior to them and sees his domination expand with ours, only then will we be able to consider that the future of French Indochina is truly assured.”


In the late 19th century, a few hundred Japanese moved to Saigon, Hanoi, and Haiphong. Most were prostitutes whose clients were the European soldiers involved in colonial conquest. WW1 changed this, however. Allied with the French against Germany, Tokyo improved its terms of trade and, as it did so, Japanese entrepreneurs, bankers and businessmen opened their offices in Indochina. The first Japanese consulate began operations in Hanoi in 1920. Diplomats immediately ended the prostitution business and focused on promoting commercial interests, with considerable success. And despite persistent fears of the ‘yellow peril’, the French classified the Japanese living in Indochina as ‘Europeans’, based on their ‘civilizational’ parity with the West.


The constant flow of European colonial soldiers through the colony from 1858 to 1956 gave rise to a large number of live-in partnerships or concubinage. The Vietnamese word for ‘girl’, con gai, rapidly became in colonial parlance a synonym first for a ‘concubine’, then a ‘prostitute’.


The disconnect between French and Vietnamese nationalist thinking could not have been greater than when Ho Chi Minh stepped up to the microphone on 2 September 1945 and declared before tens of thousands of Vietnamese the independence of all Vietnam. In an extraordinary transformation, Ho was no longer the angry young man arguing with Phan Chu Trinh in Paris. Sporting a wispy beard and dress simply, he now intentionally played the role of the wise humanist Confucian grandfather, or ‘cu Ho’, a man of the people. Papers carried his picture on the front page, for Ho was almost completely unknown inside Vietnam before mid-1945. His anticolonialism remained as ardent as in Paris, but he carefully hid his internationalist communist faith and connections in order to embody the national desire for independence and lead its bid towards it. When he asked his ‘compatriots’ that day if they could hear him as he prepared to read the country’s declaration of independence, the crowd roared back with a resounding ‘Co!’ (‘Yes!’). Communist though the most certainly was, Ho had every intention of ensuring that the communists were seen as the true defenders of the nationalist faith, and creating a personality cult was an essential part of that project. Two new nation-states and two new nationalist leaders had thus emerged from WW2 — the French Republic under de Gaulle and the Vietnamese one under Ho. Both men had real charisma and both held opposing yet strong feelings about the future of this Asian territory. This was a very dangerous mix.


Still, life in the buffer zone became more and more difficult and risky. In every village, there were some people who worked as spies for either side. In my village, a man of thirty years old volunteered to play a double agent to protect the village from both French and Viet Minh terrorism. With help from villagers, he regularly reported military intelligence information to the French by a ‘secret letter box’, an intermediary, in the adjacent village. At the same time, he provided the Viet Minh intelligence services with what he collected in the French-controlled areas. Sometimes the French paid him money for his information. Among the teenagers, I was the only one he trusted. He told me about some of his tasks in exchange for my help in writing short messages for reports. I was sure that my village had some others who worked for both sides. Owing to these spies, my village was not terrorized in the second half of 1949.


Like French mayors faced with heavily armed German soldiers patrolling their villages a few years earlier on, in WW2, more then one Vietnamese village headman repelled collaboration with the ‘resistance’ since it could draw reprisals of the worst kind from the occupiers. Indeed, as colonial ‘pacification’ rapidly turned into a drawn-out affair, angry French Union troops unable to let loose their firepower on their invisible adversaries adopted increasingly violent measures towards nearby civilian populations suspected of harboring, feeding, or protecting nearby civilian populations suspected of harboring, feeding, or protecting enemy combatants. The discovery of enemy propaganda or Democratic Republic of Vietnam-stamped papers in a village, but above all the loss of one soldier to a guerrilla sniper or booby trap, could spark a frenzy of violence against nearby civilians. This included the bombing and burning of entire villages as well as the indiscriminate killing of men and women, young and old. The use of torture spread throughout the French army quickly — at what rate, no one knows, but both French and non-communist Vietnamese memoirs leave no doubt that it was all too real. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam authorities also tried to bring the use of torture under control, especially against other Vietnamese. Rape became a disturbing weapon used by the Expeditionary Corps, as did summary executions. Young Vietnamese women who could not escape approaching enemy patrols smeared themselves with any stinking thing they could find, including human excrement.


Liberal intellectuals and politicians in the DRV parliament accepted this in order to maintain national unity, all the while hoping in secret that Vietnamese communists would respect the constitution guaranteeing parliamentary democracy. They would be disappointed, like their counterparts who had allied with the French colonialists. Indeed, the French leaders may have ridiculed the DRV’s elections in late 1946, but, if they did so, they had conveniently forgotten that in mid-1946 they themselves had named the new leaders of the Cochinchinese ‘republic’, censored the pres, and had been careful to avoid any kind of vote on national unification. Democracy would never come easily to Vietnam, neither under the French, nor their communist adversaries.


Pignon’s internationalization reached its zenith in January 1950, when Mao and Stalin formally recognized the DRV. Worried that Sino-Soviet support the DRV could turn the tide against the French militarily, the high commissioner repeated to his government in the clearest possible terms why the French had to internationalize the war now. The French would continue the fight ‘to keep Indochina out of the communist grip’, but in so doing the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had to provide increased military aid, recognize the Associated States of Indochina diplomatically, and accept a continued French colonial presence there. This was, Pignon concluded, ‘the price which we can accept for this [our military] commitment’. In reality, his team had already prepared for this course of action in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In February 1950, the British and Americans recognized the Associated States of Indochina, followed by the rest of the Atlantic alliance. The Indians did not, nor did the Indonesians or Burmese. They preferred to remain unaligned.


From 1950 onwards, the French too mobilized the Vietnamese population in unprecedented numbers. In other words, there were three conventional armies now in play — one French, two Vietnamese. All of them increasingly well armed and competing intensely for Vietnamese recruits and laborers.


Drawing upon the Na San battle experience, General Henri Navarre ordered the creation of an even bigger and more solidly entrenched camp in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. An airstrip would serve as the vital lifeline to supply some 15,000 French Union troops. Many high-ranking French and American military officials and politicians agreed that the camp could hold and break the back of the enemy’s main forces. French artillery, air power, and resistance positions would mow down the attacking enemy soldiers, destroy Giap’s core divisions, and thus hand the Vietnamese an even worse defeat than the one they had suffered in Na San. The French stationed 12 battle-hardened battalions in all to defend the valley. Morale ran high. Many were actually worried that the Vietnamese would not attack, mirroring, paradoxically, Vo Nguyen Giap’s fear that the French would pull out before he could ‘break the French’.


Moreover, the debacles of the lost battles at Dien Bien Phu and Pleiku only reinforced a growing stereotype in official American minds which portrayed the French in Indochina in 1954, as it did Europe in 1940, as a second-rate world power. Mendes France only added to the frustration by failing to secure ratification of the treaty that would have created a European army. To many American officials, the French seemed unreliable in both Europe and Asia.


Those moving southwards with the Associated State of Vietnam implored relatives in the countryside to leave the DRV zone before it was too late, while those allied with the DRV pleaded with their kin not to leave now that the colonialists were finally going. A bright future was on the horizon, they said. Such arguments did not always convince those who had already experienced or feared the radical communization of the DRV had implemented since 1950. Thousands of Vietnamese left communist zones, traumatized by violent land reform and the rectification campaigns discussed in the previous chapter. But it could work the other way too. One cocky young anticommunist nationalist on his way out of Hanoi in 1954 was dumbfounded when a beggar boy took his money and thanked him with a word of caution: “The Viet Minh will come here before long. We poor people will be given property, you dirty rich people will be felled, and you’ll beg us for money.”


To supervise this socio-economic upending, the Vietnamese Workers Party relied on its cadre-run ‘special people’s courts’, endowed with extraordinary legal powers authorizing arbitrary arrest, capital punishment, the determination of class, the dismissal of local authorities, and the confiscation of individual property and assets. Over the next two years, these mobile courts visited the majority of villages in the new zones. Military cadres identified landholders, brought them before the courts, carefully gathered the villagers around the accused, and encouraged the crowd to denounce their ‘cruel’ exploiter. These hate-filled ’struggle sessions’ often ended in violence.


What French bombers had dropped during the two-month Battle of Dien Bien Phu was the equivalent of what the Americans dropped in one day. This was hugely asymmetrical warfare.


The VWP refused to let many of the maimed and disfigured return hom for fear of undermining morale, while desperate parents, wives, and family did everything they could to find out why their loved ones had not returned home.


The draft hit the male peasant population hardest, though. High-ranking administrators and party officials as well as bribe-paying urbanites were always better at finding ways to keep their sons out of combat. Thousands of their children were sent to Moscow or Budapest to study, just like their republican counterparts heading to the US and France.


War trauma on the trail was so intense that many women stopped menstruating.


To lower a powerless person from his status as a human being to that of a horse, to give him two wooden shafts and say “I will sit up here while you pull me” is the same as saying “You are not a human being.”


A rickshaw puller knows all the cruelty of human beings far better than a scholar. A room boy knows more about the debauchery of humanity than a surgeon. A servant understands more clearly the behavior of human being than a realist writer.


In the north, the Vietnamese Workers Party closely controlled how writers, poets, and artists represented the war in their work. War had to remain sacred. It had to be glorified. It had to be heroic.


Official Vietnamese historians in the SRV like to compare their struggle and social revolution in the 20th century to that of the Tay Son brothers 200 years earlier. Like the communists, the brothers had fought for the poor, driven out foreign invaders, and unified the country against all odds. However, when it comes to state-building, there are equally compelling reasons to compare the communists’ methods of the late 20th century to those used by their neo-Confucian-minded predecessor in the 1820s and 1830s, the Nguyen emperor Ming Mang. Both groups came to power after some thirty years of civil and interstate wars. Postwar loyalties were divided. Both were determined to create highly centralized, unitary states by tailoring foreign ideologies and techniques to local needs. Both confronted a heterogeneous southern society and economy very different from their northern-centered ones in Hue and Hanoi.

Worried by the fragile nature of their unitary states, the communists and their Confucian predecessor were also remarkably determined to impose unflinching loyalty right down to the lowest levels of state and society. Just as Minh Mang had imposed the dual, interlocking Confucian policies of ‘Cultivation’ and ‘Sino-Vietnamization’ to establish loyalty to his court in Hue and homogenize the civil service and his subjects, so too did the communists turn to Sino-Soviet communists techniques such as rectification, emulation campaigns, hero worship, and self-edifying propaganda to take control of the bureaucracy and society from top to bottom, homogenize both ideologically, and subordinate them to the political center, now in Hanoi.


While brotherly internationalism had once underpinned Eurasian communist collaboration, paranoia, racism, and raw hate now took over as Vietnamese officials expelled the Chinese in their country, the Khmers Rouges ordered the massacre of the Vietnamese in theirs, and the Chinese and Soviet armies faced off across Eurasia, accusing each other of betraying the Marxist-Leninist canon.


Communism provided Chinese and Vietnamese leaders with extraordinary instrument fo creating single-party states capable of controlling and mobilizing massive numbers of people resources for making war. But once the guns finally fell silent, the Vietnamese, like the Chinese, discovered that communism — whether Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist or Maoist in design - offered no miracle for attaining rapid economic, industrial, and technological modernization. ‘Waging war is simple,’ Pham Van Dong conceded to Western reporters in 1983, ‘running a country is difficult.’ Indeed, by 1983, hardcore communists like Pham Van Dong had to admit that their failing socio-economic policies, and not just war and international isolation, were also responsible for their troubles. By that year, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were fleeing the country by boat. Hunger, indeed famine in several places, stalked the countryside. Vietnam remained one of the poorest nations on the planet, with a humiliating annual per capita income stuck at below 100 American dollars. The legitimacy of the party had never been lower at the moment that its international isolation was highest.


It was in this wider context that a remarkably charismatic Cham king named Po Binasor (Che Bong Nga, in Vietnamese) took power and presided over a golden age in Cham history in the late 14th century. Not only did Po unite the various Cham polities under his control, but he also sought to regain lands the Cham had ceded or lost to the Dai Viet. In 1371, with a green light from China, Po drove his armies overland into the Red River delta, landed his warships on the coast, and marched his men on the Dai Viet capital of Hanoi. Cham troops looted Hanoi and burnt the enemy’s palace to the ground as civilians ran for cover. In 1376, Po Binasor struck again, overpowering the Dai Viet forces and this time even killing the country’s king. By the late 14th century, the Cham had not only recovered their lands, but they had also pushed their polity into the lower Red River basin and fostered better relations with China in doing so. If the Dai Viet had repelled the Mongol invaders, they nonetheless failed to stop the Cham from sacking their capital, twice.


Ho Chi Minh Thought asks all to emulate this fatherly, gentle, humanistic, indeed Confucian man in their lives and deeds. And there is an exemplary Ho for everyone — the army, the party, teachers, peasants, workers, the young, and the old. But, as in earlier chapters of Vietnamese history, this political religion seeks above all to establish ideological homogeneity and reinforce party control over the state and society from top to bottom. Whether it does so in practice is questionable. But, as in North Korea’s state-sponsored adulation of Kim Il-sung, a communist form of the accusation of lese majeste awaits those in Vietnam who would challenge the deification of Ho Chi Minh.