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When the conquest of Vietnam was completed, the mandarins became a tool in the hands of Vietnam's new foreign masters. The French were sure they control the situation in the colony, but the outbreak of the communist revolution during the Colonial War proved the opposite. The aim of the paper is to find what did the French and the United States failed to recognize about the situation in Vietnam. Outline 1. Colonial War 2. Independence 3.
Rise of Communism 4. French and the U. S. failures Vietnam Independence Colonial War years 1946 - 1954, during which Vietnam was devastated, made up the worst period in the history of Vietnam since the West had come in contact with the East. But this time of misery and horror for the Vietnamese people was also a most harrowing period for the unenlightened men who ruled and exploited Vietnam in the name of France. And the cost to France of the Indochina war was infinitely higher than her expenses during the forty years it had taken to conquer and pacify Vietnam.
The Colonial War was the duel between world communism and democracy; a people's fight for freedom that produced a Communist dictatorship in a nation of peasants, which was a poorly disguised effort to perpetuate colonialism. Vietnam, in gaining full national independence, lost its unity together with the hope that the end of colonialism would bring also an end to oppression of all Vietnamese. More than one half of the nation had to accept a Communist dictatorship that was regarded as powerful enough to extend its rule also over the other half soon. But the emergence of a strong anti-Communist leadership in the South with United States sponsorship changed these prospects as radically as it had dashed all hopes of the French to remain in control in the non-Communist part of the country.
The Communist victory in China and the arrival of Communist military units in the Vietnamese border areas in late 1949 added a new and potentially crucial element to the situation. In this communist revolution, the anti-imperialist task had clear priority over the anti-feudal task and the French were expecting it to have place in Vietnam. In the face of the Communist challenge, the French attempted to put together a Vietnamese government under Bao Dai that could attract nationalist support while accepting a continued French presence in the area. Bao Dai was reluctant to accept a settlement promising less than complete statehood, but he was increasingly hostile to the Vietminh, and the French astutely played on his fears that they would deal with Ho Chi Minh if he refused to cooperate. In 1949, the ex-emperor was persuaded to sign an agreement providing for "associated statehood" for all of Vietnam within the French Union. It was considerably less than full independence, but it was an advance over the status quo, and Paris hoped that it would provide a credible counter-force to the Vietminh.
The new government was greeted more critically in Vietnam than in Washington. The continuing colonial presence made French claims of independence appear a travesty. Within the nationalist community the French relied on, relatively few rallied to the new regime, except for the affluent Saigon bourgeoisie and some anti-Communist groups such as Catholics and the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao official hierarchy. France did not notice the challenge of communism. The whole mandarin feudal system gradually became a tool in the hands of the French. It failed to grant sufficient autonomy to moderate political forces, to comprehend the dynamics of political and social change in a traditional society in transition.
The intransigence in Paris over indigenous participation in the political process, at a time when most other colonial societies in Southeast Asia had already reached independence, undoubtedly undercut the power of moderate nationalists and left a vacuum that the Communists were eager to fill. The same problem was later faced by the United States, who in eyes of the Vietnamese guided by Communists from outside were trying to build another empire. By 1954, the Vietnamese revolution had become a hostage to the Cold War -- to the rising determination of the United States to counter the expansive force of communism in Asia and the decision of Moscow and Beijing to moderate their own support for revolution in order to avoid a confrontation with Washington. Bibliography: 1. Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919 - 1950; University of North Carolina Press, 2000 2. Melvin Gurtov, The First Vietnam Crisis: Chinese Communist Strategy and United States Involvement, 1953 - 1954; Columbia University Press, 1967
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Research essay sample on Bao Dai Communist Revolution
