Indochina

35.5: Indochina

35.5.1: France and Indochina

After decades of serving as France’s colony of economic exploitation, Indochina fell under Japanese control during World War II. Although the French regained control of the region after the war, independence movements across Indochina grew strong enough to continue their anti-French struggle.

Learning Objective

Describe the relationship between France and Indochina prior to Indochina’s independence

Key Points

  • French Indochina, officially known as the Indochinese Union after 1887 and the Indochinese Federation after 1947, was a group of French colonial territories in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese regions of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina were combined with Cambodia in 1887. Laos was added in 1893 and the leased Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan in 1898.
  • French Indochina was designated as a colony of economic exploitation by the French government. Funding for the colonial government came by means of taxes on local populations and the French government established a near monopoly on the trade of opium, salt, and rice alcohol. Unlike in Algeria, French settlement in Indochina did not occur at a grand scale.
  • In 1940, colonial administration of French Indochina passed to the Vichy French government. In September 1940, Japan launched its invasion of French Indochina. Keeping the French colonial administration, the Japanese ruled from behind the scenes in a parallel of Vichy France. Indochinese communists set up hidden headquarters in 1941 and Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese communist leader, returned to Vietnam from China to lead the Viet Minh independence movement. In March 1945, the Japanese took direct control of Vietnam.
  • After the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh immediately launched the insurrection (the August Revolution). Ho Chi Minh declared independence for the newly established Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945. However, the Viet Minh faced various problems in the southern part of the country, where it had been unable to establish the same degree of control. On August 25, the communists established a Provisional Executive Committee with Tran Van Giau at its head. The committee took over public administration in Saigon, but followed Allied orders that the Japanese maintain law and order until Allied troops arrived.
  • As southern Vietnam’s disunited resistance forces struggled to push back French advances, Ho Chi Minh started to negotiate with France in hopes of preserving national independence while avoiding war. Instead of obtaining French recognition of Vietnamese “independence,” Ho Chi Minh agreed to his government being weakly identified as a “free state” within the Indochinese Federation under the French Union. The reached accord, which called for a referendum to determine whether the south would rejoin the rest of the country or remain a separate French territory, left the fate of former Cochinchina in flux. Negotiations broke down over the fate of southern Vietnam. Nearly one year after the August Revolution, Vietnam and France were at war.
  • After World War II, the French reestablished control in Laos and Cambodia. In 1946, the French endorsed the unity of Laos as a constitutional monarchy within the French Union. In Cambodia, King Sihanouk reluctantly proclaimed a new constitution in 1947. While it recognized him as the “spiritual head of the state,” it reduced him to the status of a constitutional monarch of a Cambodia within the French Union.

Key Terms

Khmer Issarak
A loosely structured anti-French and anti-colonial independence movement in Cambodia, formed around 1945 and composed of several factions, each with its own leader. Most of its bands fought actively from 1945 to 1953, when Cambodia gained independence. The initial objective of the movement was to fight against the French to gain independence. Later, overthrowing the Cambodian government was added to some bands’ agendas.
Vichy France
The common name of the French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. In particular, it represents the southern, unoccupied “Free Zone” that governed the southern part of the country. From 1940 to 1942, while the regime was the nominal government of France as a whole, Germany militarily occupied northern France and the state was a de facto client and puppet of Nazi Germany.
August Revolution
A revolution launched by the Viet Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) against French colonial rule in Vietnam, on August 14, 1945.
Viet Minh
A national independence coalition formed in 1941 with the initial goal to seek independence for Vietnam from the French Empire. After World War II, the organization opposed the reoccupation of Vietnam by France and later opposed South Vietnam and the United States in the Vietnam War.
French Indochina
A grouping of French colonial territories in Southeast Asia. A grouping of the three Vietnamese regions of Tonkin (north), Annam (center), and Cochinchina (south) with Cambodia was formed in 1887. Laos was added in 1893 and the leased Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan in 1898.

 

French Indochina

French Indochina, officially known as the Indochinese Union after 1887 and the Indochinese Federation after 1947, was a grouping of French colonial territories in Southeast Asia. The three Vietnamese regions of Tonkin (north), Annam (center), and Cochinchina (south) were combined with Cambodia in 1887. Laos was added in 1893 and the leased Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan in 1898. The capital was moved from Saigon to Hanoi in 1902 and again to Da Lat (Annam) in 1939. In 1945 it was moved back to Hanoi.

French Indochina was designated as a colonie d’exploitation (colony of economic exploitation) by the French government. Funding for the colonial government came from taxes on local populations, and the French government established a near monopoly on the trade of opium, salt, and rice alcohol. The French administration established quotas of consumption for each Vietnamese village, thereby compelling villagers to purchase and consume set amounts of monopolized goods, including alcohol and opium. The trade of those three products formed about 44% of the colonial government’s budget in 1920 but declined to 20% by 1930. Beginning in the 1930s, France began to economically diversify the region and exploit it for its natural resources. Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin (modern-day Vietnam) became a source of tea, rice, coffee, pepper, coal, zinc, and tin while Cambodia became a center for rice and pepper crops. Only Laos was seen initially as economically nonprofitable, although timber was harvested at a small scale from there.

At the turn of the 20th century, the growing automobile industry in France resulted in the growth of the rubber industry in French Indochina and plantations were built throughout the colony, especially in Annam and Cochinchina. France soon became a leading producer of rubber through its Indochina colony and Indochinese rubber became prized in the industrialized world. The success of rubber plantations resulted in an increase in investment in the colony. With the growing number of investments in the colony’s mines, rubber, and tea and coffee plantations, French Indochina began to industrialize as factories opened in the colony. These new factories produced textiles, cigarettes, beer, and cement which were exported throughout the French Empire.

Unlike in Algeria, French settlement in Indochina did not occur at a grand scale. By 1940, only about 34,000 French civilians lived in French Indochina, along with a smaller number of French military personnel and government workers. The fact that Indochina was the economic colony (as opposed to settlement colony) and its distance from France were the principal reasons why French settlement did not grow in a manner similar to that of French North Africa (which had a population of over 1 million French civilians). Despite this limited presence of the French in the colony, the French language was the principal language of education, government, trade, and media. It became widespread among urban and semi-urban populations and was the principal language of the elite and educated. However, local populations still largely spoke native languages.

World War II

In 1940, France was swiftly defeated by Nazi Germany and colonial administration of French Indochina passed to the Vichy French government, a puppet state of Nazi Germany. In September 1940, Japan launched its invasion of French Indochina, mirroring its ally Germany’s conquest of metropolitan France. Keeping the French colonial administration, the Japanese ruled from behind the scenes in a parallel of Vichy France. The United States, concerned by this Japanese expansion, put embargoes on exports of steel and oil to Japan. The desire to escape these embargoes and become resource self-sufficient ultimately led to Japan’s decision to attack the British Empire in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore and simultaneously the USA at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in 1941.

Indochinese communists had set up hidden headquarters in 1941, but most of the Vietnamese resistance to Japan, France, or both, including communist and non-communist groups, was based over the border in China. In 1941, Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese communist leader,returned to Vietnam from China to lead the Viet Minh independence movement. The “men in black” was a 10,000-member guerrilla force that operated with the Viet Minh, but Ho was soon jailed in China by Chiang Kai-shek’s local authorities.As part of the Allied fighting against the Japanese, the Chinese formed a nationalist resistance movement, the Dong Minh Hoi, which included communists but was not controlled by them. When the movement did not provide the desired intelligence data, Ho Chi Minh was released from jail and returned to lead an underground centered on the communist Viet Minh. This mission was assisted by Western intelligence agencies, including the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Free French intelligence also tried to affect developments in the Vichy-Japanese collaboration.

Japanese troops on bicycles advance into Saigon, ca. 1941.

Japanese troops on bicycles advance into Saigon, ca. 1941.  Vichy signed the Protocol Concerning Joint Defense and Joint Military Cooperation in 1941. This agreement defined the Franco-Japanese relationship for Indochina until the Japanese abrogated it in March 1945. It gave the Japanese a total of eight airfields and allowed them to have more troops present and use the Indochinese financial system, in return for a fragile French autonomy.

In March 1945, the Japanese imprisoned the Vichy French and took direct control of Vietnam. After the Japanese removed the French from administrative control in Indochina, they made no attempt to impose their own direct control of the civilian administration. Primarily concerned with the defense of Vietnam against an Allied invasion, the Japanese were not interested in Vietnamese politics. However, they also understood the desirability of a certain degree of administrative continuity. It was to their advantage to install a Vietnamese government that would acquiesce in the Japanese military presence. With this in mind, the Japanese persuaded the Vietnamese emperor, Bảo Đại, to cooperate with Japan and declare Vietnam independent of France. In March 1945, Bảo Đại did just that. Vietnam’s new “independence,” however, rested on the government’s willingness to cooperate with Japan and accept the Japanese military presence. From March until August 1945, Vietnam enjoyed what was called “fake independence,” when all the affairs of Indochinese were still in the hands of the Japanese.

After World War II

Three conflicting visions of post-war French Indochina emerged: Western anticommunists saw the French as protectors of the area from communist expansion; nationalists and anti-colonialists wanted independence from the French; and communists focused on the expansion of communism. Lines between the movements that promoted these three visions were not always clear, and their co-existence shaped the post-war fate of French Indochina.

When the Japanese surrendered, the Viet Minh immediately launched the insurrection, which would be known as the August Revolution. People’s revolutionary committees across the countryside took over administrative positions, often acting on their own initiative, while in the cities the Japanese stood by as the Vietnamese took control. On August 19, the Viet Minh took control of Hanoi, seizing the northern Vietnam in the next few days. Ho Chi Minh declared independence for the newly established Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), headquartered in Hanoi, on September 2, 1945. However, the Viet Minh faced various problems in the southern part of the country. The south was politically more diverse than the north and the Viet Minh had been unable to establish the same degree of control there that they had achieved in the north. There were serious divisions in the independence movement in the south, where different nationalist groups competed for control. On August 25, the communists established a Provisional Executive Committee with Tran Van Giau at its head. The committee took over public administration in Saigon, but followed Allied orders that the Japanese maintain law and order until Allied troops arrived.

The uprising in capital Hanoi on August 19, 1945.

The uprising in capital Hanoi on August 19, 1945. At the Potsdam conference in July 1945, the Allies divided Indochina into two zones at the sixteenth parallel, attaching the southern zone to the Southeast Asia command and leaving the northern part to Chiang Kai-shek’s China, to accept the surrender of the Japanese. However, in the north, occupation period became a critical opportunity for the Viet Minh to consolidate and triumph over domestic rivals.

As southern Vietnam’s disunited resistance forces struggled to push back French advances, Ho Chi Minh and the DRV started to negotiate with France in hopes of preserving national independence while avoiding war. In March 1946, the two sides reached a preliterate accord. Instead of obtaining French recognition of Vietnamese “independence,” Ho Chi Minh agreed to his government being weakly identified as a “free state” within the Indochinese Federation under the French Union. For their part, the French agreed to two provisions they had no intention of honoring: French troops north of the sixteenth parallel would be limited to 15 thousand men for a period of five years, and a referendum was to be held on the issue of unifying the Vietnamese regions. This agreement entangled the French and Vietnamese in joint military operations and fruitless negotiations for several months. However, the status of southern Vietnam remained the sticking point. The March accord, which called for a referendum to determine whether the south would rejoin the rest of the country or remain a separate French territory, left the fate of former Cochinchina in flux.

The preliminary accord was but the first step toward an intended overall and lasting agreement. Southern Vietnam’s future political status had to be negotiated. From June to September 1946, Ho Chi Minh met with French representatives in Vietnam and France to discuss this and other issues. However, almost immediately after the signing of the March accord, relations began to deteriorate. Negotiations broke down over the issue of the fate of southern Vietnam. As talking failed to bring results, both sides prepared for a military solution. Provocations by both French and Vietnamese troops led to the outbreak of full-scale guerrilla war on December 19, 1946. Nearly one year after the August Revolution, Vietnam and France were at war.

After World War II, the French also reestablished their control in Laos and Cambodia. In October 1945, supporters of Laotian independence announced the dismissal of the king and formed the new government of Laos, the Lao Issara. However, the Lao Issara was ill-equipped and could only await the inevitable French return. In 1946, the French forced the Lao Issara leadership to flee into exile in Thailand and formally endorsed the unity of Laos as a constitutional monarchy within the French Union. The Japanese occupation of Cambodia ended with the official surrender of Japan in August 1945 and the Cambodian puppet state lasted until October 1945. Some supporters of the kingdom’s prime minister Son Ngoc Thanh escaped to north-western Cambodia, then still under Thai control, where they banded together as one faction in the Khmer Issarak movement. Although their fortunes rose and fell during the immediate postwar period, by 1954 the Khmer Issarak operating with the Viet Minh by some estimates controlled as much as 50 percent of Cambodia’s territory. King Sihanouk reluctantly proclaimed a new constitution in May 1947. While it recognized him as the “spiritual head of the state,” it reduced him to the status of a constitutional monarch of a Cambodia within the French Union.

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