Tai Lieu Chat Luong Mass Mobilization in the Democr atic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960 Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960 • Alec Holcombe University of Hawai‘i Pr ess Honolulu © 2020 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. 25 24 23 22 21 20 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover photo: Peasants thresh rice at the An Thắng Collective Farm (An Lão District, Haiphong, 1960). Courtesy of Vietnam News Agency (Thông tấn xã Việt Nam). Dedicated to the Alta Bates Hospital NICU • This book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.
With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. Free digital editions can be downloaded from: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and many other open repositories. While the digital edition is free to download, read, and share, the book is under copyright and covered by the following Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.
Please consult www.org if you have questions about your rights to reuse the material in this book. When you cite the book, please include the following URL for its Digital Object Identifier (DOI): https://doi.36960/9780824884468 We are eager to learn more about how you discovered this title and how you are using it. We hope you will spend a few minutes answering a couple of questions at this url: https://www.org/shmp-survey/ More information about the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot can be found at https://www. Contents Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations, Common Terms, and Administrative Units xiii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Vietnamese Revolution, August 1945 to March 1946 17 Chapter 2 Coexistence with the French, March to December 1946 38 Chapter 3 The Shift to the Countryside, 1947–1948 59 Chapter 4 The Turning Point, 1949–1950 79 Chapter 5 Military Stalemate and Rice-Field Decline, 1951–1952 98 Chapter 6 The Move to Land Reform, 1952–1953 119 Chapter 7 The Basic Structure of the Mass Mobilization 139 Chapter 8 Propagandizing the Land Reform 159 Chapter 9 Hunger, 1953 179 Chapter 10 Điện Biên Phủ and Geneva, 1954 200 Chapter 11 The Period of the 300 Days, 1954–1955 219 Chapter 12 Reinvigorating the Land Reform, 1955–1956 239 Chapter 13 Fallout, 1956 259 Chapter 14 Re-Stalinization and Collectivization, 1957–1960 281 Conclusion 298 Notes 309 Bibliography 343 Acknowledgments I am grateful for the support, in different forms, provided by Peter Zinoman and Nguyễn Nguyệt Cầm at the University of California, Berkeley.
Thanks go as well to Virginia Shih, the university’s indefatigable Southeast Asia librarian, and to a stimulating cohort of Vietnam-focused graduate students whose paths crossed with mine. They include Jason Morris, Martina Nguyen, Jason Picard, Gerard Sasges, and Nu Anh Tran. In Vietnam, countless regular people gave me patience, warmth, and encour- agement as I learned to speak their language. I am also grateful to the many in- tellectuals, archival staff members, and librarians in Vietnam who supported my research in various ways.
Over the past decade, Đỗ Kiên has been an invaluable liaison with the Vietnam Studies Institute, my sponsoring institution and an affiliate of the Vietnam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities. For their insights, advice, and friendship, the literary scholars Lại Nguyên Ân, Phạm Xuân Nguyên, and Phạm Toàn have my warmest thanks. In Hanoi, two Western friends and dedicated Vietnamese language learners—Shay MacKen- zie and Thadeus Hostetler—have long been sources of inspiration, knowledge, and humor. Across the field of Vietnam studies more broadly, Christopher Goscha, Tuong Vu, Keith Taylor, Shawn McHale, Charles Keith, Haydon Cherry, Liam Kelley, and Michael Montasano have provided feedback on various writings and ideas of mine over the years.
I thank them for their time and insights. Thanks also go to the scholar Alex Thai Vo who, to my good fortune, overlapped with me for several fruitful months in Vietnam’s National Archives III. At the University of Hawai‘i Press, Masako Ikeda has my warmest gratitude for her help in the publication process. I conducted much of the work for this book as part of Ohio University’s his- tory department, whose members I thank for their support and friendship.
I am especially grateful to Ingo Trauschweizer, Robert Ingram, Josh Hill, Ziad Abu-Rish, and Katherine Jellison for their guidance and support. In the wider Ohio University community, Jeffrey Shane, Pittaya Paladroi, Jeff Ferrier, Taka Suzuki, and William Frederick have helped me in different ways. xi xii acknowledgments Extending farther back in time, I am grateful for the support that I have re- ceived from the Gowan family over the course of my life. During elementary and secondary school, I was blessed to have many outstanding teachers, includ- ing Rachel D’Ambrosio, Leonard Gulotta, Bruce Adams, the late Robert Pratt, Edward Dunn, and the late O.
Since my undergraduate years, my life has been enriched by the ideas and experiences of seven university friends: Brian Dickinson, Albert Hanser, Benjamin Holbrook, Ludovic Hood, Trevor Patzer, Scott Roop, and Professor David Josephson. In various indirect ways, they are a part of this book. So too are my fellow teachers at the Timbertop School in Australia, especially Barnaby Buntine, Rachel Dobson, Roger Herbert, David Hobbs, Sam Ridley, Charlie Scudamore, Russell Shem, and Sophie Stuart. Most of all, I thank my family.
Melissa and Wendy, my two older sisters, were a positive influence during my younger years and remain so for my family and me today. My brother-in-law, Carl Kawaja, with the exception of times playing tennis or ping-pong, has been a tremendous source of support and inspiration. As for my mother and father, Marty and Tom Holcombe, I thank them for the many hours spent reading drafts of my work and, of course, for the years of love and support. To my daughter, Asa, and to my son, Thomas, in the words of the late Joseph Levenson, “You added years to the writing, but joy to the years.” And finally, to my beloved Dieu—I am proud to be your husband and friend.
Abbreviations, Common Terms, and Administr ative Units CCP Chinese Communist Party DRV Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa) GF General File: Democratic Republic of Vietnam documents from 1945 and 1946 captured by French and held in Archives national d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Province. HCMTT Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập (The Complete Collection of Hồ Chí Minh’s Writings) ICP Indochinese Communist Party (Đảng Cộng sản Đông Dương): The name for Vietnam’s Communist Party from 1930 until 1945. PRC People’s Republic of China TTLT3 Trung Tâm lưu trữ quốc gia số 3 (Nationial Archive Center no. 3, Hanoi) VWP Vietnamese Workers’ Party (Đảng lao động Việt Nam): The name for Vietnam’s Communist Party from 1951 to 1976.
VKDTT Văn kiện Đảng toàn tập (The Complete Collection of Party Documents) Village Làng or thôn Subdistrict Xã (a collection of roughly four to eight villages). I follow Benedict Kerkvliet’s avoidance of the more common translation, “commune,” which could be confused with a collective farm. District Huyện: a group of several subdistricts. Province Tỉnh Party Congress Đại hội Đảng: Usually occurring once every five to eight years, it is the Communist Party’s most important event.
Party congresses involve the election of new Central Committee members, retire- ments of current members, various changes in the administrative assignments, and the establishment of a new party agenda. Party Plenum Hội nghị Ban chấp hành trung ương Đảng: A meeting of the party’s Central Executive Committee that usually occurs twice a year. The plenums are numbered in sequence following the most recent Party Congress. For example, the 3rd Party Plenum means the third meeting of the Central Executive Committee since the last Party Congress.
Politburo Bộ Chính trị: The party’s highest office, usually containing from ten to twenty members. xiii Introduction The English word “mobilize” has three Vietnamese equivalents: huy động, vận động, and phát động. A popular Vietnamese dictionary defines huy động as “to call upon the majority to work at some essential task;” vận động as “to propa- gandize, to explain, to convince others to volunteer to do some sort of work;” and phát động as “to push something to action.”1 All three versions of “mobilize” reflect themes explored in this study. When Hồ Chí Minh and other Indochinese Communist Party (ICP)2 lead- ers seized power in August of 1945, they did so with little cash and few reliable means of generating it.
During the previous four years, these revolutionaries had promoted their Vietminh front3 as an organization that would “abolish the head tax and other French and Japanese taxes.” According to party propaganda, a Vietminh government would replace these taxes with a system that was “very light and fair.”4 Yet, when the party leaders established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on September 2, Hồ concluded his inspiring Declaration of Independence with a line that suggested the opposite: “To guard freedom and independence, the Vietnamese people are determined to contribute all their physical and mental strength, and to sacrifice their lives and property.”5 The following day, September 3, Hồ chaired the first official meeting of the new DRV government and, in the spirit of the old Vietminh propaganda, re- quested that the government “immediately abolish” the head tax, market tax, and ferry tax as “inhumanely exploitative.”6 However, at the same meeting, he announced that every province should establish an Independence Fund. This would be aimed at “collecting money and goods that the people are happy to give to the government for the cause of national independence.” As a party newspa- per explained, “before sacrificing our flesh and blood to preserve our freedom, we have a responsibility to sacrifice our personal wealth.”7 On September 7, DRV leaders released a directive clarifying that, although the head tax would be abolished, all other taxes would be “changed gradually,” 1 2 introduction which was to say, preserved for the time being.8 Yet, the patchy nature of what the historian Christopher Goscha calls the DRV’s “archipelago state,”9 com- bined with widespread conditions of revolutionary upheaval, severely limited tax collection. That same day, DRV leaders announced that “anywhere the Vietnamese Liberation Army stays or passes through, the people must provide all possible help.” According to the announcement, “the Liberation Army has permission to seize needed things such as furniture, houses, cars, etc.” Owners of these commandeered articles would be supplied with “receipts” guaranteeing “full reimbursement.”10 For the moment, at least, the new government could not afford to pay for these items. The DRV’s precarious financial situation compelled the party leaders to adopt a similarly practical approach to the old colonial state’s salt, alcohol, and opium monopolies.
Instead of disbanding these French colonial revenue gener- ators, Hồ and his comrades decided to preserve them for the new DRV state.11 In the near term, though, the ability of these monopolies to strengthen the new government’s financial situation was limited. Five years of occupation by Japan, isolation from France, and, more recently, bombardment by Allied planes had crippled Vietnam’s economy. Another potential source of revenue was rice, the primary economic output of about 80 percent of Vietnam’s population. However, only six months earlier, during the winter of 1945, a famine had devastated northern Vietnam.
Accord- ing to a study conducted by Vietnam’s provincial governors in July of 1945, the total number of famine-related fatalities in the northern half of the country was 401,316.12 Most scholars feel that the number was closer to one million. Ex- porting meaningful amounts of rice to raise cash would not be possible for the foreseeable future. With hunger still widespread, the Vietnamese population would need every grain of rice. And, even with the DRV state’s efforts to fight the “enemy famine,” an estimated eleven to twelve thousand people starved to death in northern Vietnam during the first half of 1946.