Sometime in late March, Nguyen Ai Quoc left Hong Kong on a swing through Southeast Asia to bring about the reorganization of the South Seas (Nan Yang) Communist Party, which had been decided upon by Moscow the previous year. Traveling via Bangkok, he went first to Udon Thani, in the Khorat plareau, where he reported to his compatriots on the founding of the VCP and gave them instructions on future operations in the region. According to Hoang Van Hoan, then a young VCP activist, Quoc passed on Comintern instructions that all Communists should participate in the revolutionary activities of the country where they resided in order to make contributions to the international Communist revolution, Quoc suggested that members of the now defunct league working in the area should join the soon-to-be-established Siamese Communist Party to help carry out the first, or bourgeois democratic, stage of the Siamese revolution. To assuage the fears of those Vietnamese who feared that they would no longer be identified with the struggle to liberare Vietnam, he suggested that the league’s office in Udon Thani be transformed into a provincial committee of the VCP.
In mid-April, Nguyen Ai Quoc returned to Bangkok, where he presided over a meeting to establish a new Siamese Communist Party and select a provisional executive committee, which would include one Vietnamese member from the Udon Thani group. He then proceeded on to Malaya and Singapore, where he attended a conference of the South Seas Party, which had been ordered to transform itself into a new Malayan Communist Party. Both the Malayan and Siamese parties were to be placed under the FEB in Shanghai, through Nguyen Ai Quoc’s Southern Bureau in Hong Kong. He returned to Hong Kong in mid-May.2
While Nguyen Ai Quoc was busy assisting in the birth of Communist parties throughout the region, the situation inside Indochina was becoming increasingly tense. The first clear sign of trouble came in early February, when a revolt provoked by the VNQDD broke out at military posts in various parts of Tonkin. From the start, the leaders of the VNQDD had appeared to be in a hurry. Scorning the painstaking Leninist approach of building up a mass organization with popular roots throughout the country, they created an elite corps of revolutionaries dedicated to the violent overthrow of French colonial authority by means of a military insurrection. Crucial to their plans was the subversion of native Vietnamese troops serving in the colonial army.
The colonial army, which had been created in 1879 by Ly Myre de Villers, the French Governor of Cochin China, consisted of about 30,000 troops, two thirds of whom were ethnic Vietnamese. It was divided into thirty-one battalions, all of which were commanded by French officers. There was also a militia force of about 15,000 troops serving under French noncommissioned officers. Many of the Vietnamese troops had been drafted, sometimes involuntarily, by local mandarins who were required to meet an assigned quota of conscripts from their own region, regardless of the means employed. By the late 1920s, many of the Vietnamese troops serving in the ranks harbored feelings of deep resentment against the brutality of their French officers and were susceptible to the appeal of nationalism.
By 1929, the VNQDD had begun to stockpile weapons at secret depots scattered throughout the country. Most such arsenals, however, were quickly located and destroyed by the French. Then the party’s problems began to escalate. When a French recruiter for plantation labor was assassinated while leaving the home of his mistress on a public street in Hanoi, the authorities suspected the VNQDD of being implicated in the plot. Hundreds of party members or followers were arrested and charged with complicity in the assassination.
Convinced that unless they acted quickly their movemenr would be crushed, parry leaders decided to incite a revolt. By now they possessed a core following among Vietnamese troops serving in French military camps throughout Tonkin: there were more than one thousand cells, each with three to five members. In early February 1930, planned uprisings among native troops broke out at several small military posts in the Tonkin highlands, including the camp at Yen Bay, a small town located along the Red River northwest of Hanoi. The mutiny was a disaster. The insurgents at Yen Bay had planned to poison their French officers and NCOs and then launch their uprising in the middle of the night. But one participant took fright and divulged the plot to the post commandant in advance. Although the commandant was initially skeptical, he decided to take precautionary measures. As a result, when the attack broke out shortly after midnight on the morning of February 10, the French were prepared. By midmorning the rebels had been routed and the authorities had the situation under control. Other attacks at scattered outposts nearby were put down with equal ease. Most of the leaders of the party were captured; thirteen of the ringleaders were executed on June 17, 1930.3
Conceptually, the uptising had been badly flawed. There had been no plans for inciting the population to rise, and no fall-back measures in case of defeat. Communications links were unexpectedly disrupted at the last minute, so there was virtually no coordination between the plotters at various posts in the region. Worst of all, there was little response to the revolt in the country at large, and those members of the party who escaped capture were forced to flee across the border into China, where they split into two factions—one dedicated to the original strategy of fomenting an armed uprising, the other inclined toward a reformist approach. For a brief moment, the French were able to bteathe a sigh of relief.
But the lack of public response to the Yen Bay mutiny was deceptive, for discontent with conditions in Indochina was brewing. Preliminary signs had appeared with the rise of student activism in the major cities during the mid-1920s. Although there had been a steady increase in the number of students (in 1930, there were about 7,000 public schools enrolling a total of over 340,000 students), unrest among Vietnamese youth had been sharpened by a variety of factors, including the lack of educational opportunities at higher levels. The vast majority of students were enrolled in elementary schools in their home villages. There were still fewer than 5,000 students attending high school, and only about 500 were enrolled at the University of Hanoi, the sole institute of higher learning in Indochina. Students were also frustrated at the lack of attractive job opportunities after graduation, and the fact that in many vocations Vietnamese weie paid less than their European counterparts for similar work. Such sentiments undoubtedly added to the rising chorus of protest among Vietnamese in all three regions against foreign domination.
After the student activism of the mid-1920s subsided, it was quickly replaced by a new wave of worker discontent. Under the impact of a rise in French capital investment, the commercial and manufacturing sector had been growing rapidly in Indochina, particularly since the end of World War I. The primary beneficiaries of this rise in business activity were the thousands of Europeans residing in Indochina, as well as the large community of overseas Chinese. Inevitably, however, the effects began to be felt among the native population, most notably in the growth of a small but increasingly vocal urban middle class. At the same time, a proletariat numbering almost 200,000 by the late 1920s was forming. Some worked in factories in the big cities, producing consumer goods such as matches, textiles, furniture, and food products. Others were employed in the coal mines along the coast east of Hanoi (there were about 50,000 coal miners in 1929, five times the level at the end of World War I), on the docks in Saigon and Haiphong.
The working conditions for workers on the tea and rubber plantations in the Central Highlands and along the Cambodian border were especially bad. As one observer described them:
On all the rubber plantations, the workers had to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning.... Many people did not have time to eat their breakfast, yet when the gongs sounded at about 5 o’clock or a little after urging them out for the roll call all the workers had to be out in the yard by that time—for nobody was allowed to be late. The roll call took only about 20 minutes, but what a very nerve-racking twenty minutes this was! The workers’ hearts thumped with fear since during roll call the supervisors and the French owners would try to find fault with them in order to have an excuse to scold them or
beat them up.
After the roll call, workers proceeded to the rubber lots to begin their day’s labor. Each worker had a personal responsibility for a group of 280 to 350 trees daily. Each tree first had to be tapped, then the latex had to be collected into large pails and carried back to the collection center. Those who were too weak to fulfill their quota were often beaten, unless they were able to bribe their supervisors to ignore the infraction. Afternoons were spent performing odd chores for the owners, such as weeding or cleaning up the residential area. Not until near sundown were the workers able to return to their compounds. “For the above reasons,” remarked the observer, “on the rubber plantations the people had a habit of saying that children did not have a chance to know their fathers, not dogs their masters.”4
The social effects of early industrialization are rarely pleasant in any society—conditions in the industrial cities of nineteenth-century Europe amply attest to that. The situation in Vietnam was no exception, for the living and working conditions for the new laboring class were almost uniformly atrocious, whether in the sweatshops of Hanoi and Haiphong, in the mines at Hong Gai along the Gulf of Tonkin, or on the rubber plantations in Cochin China. The recruitment of laborers often involved coercion and the means employed were frequently brutal, as press gangs sometimes accosted innocent passersby and forcibly bundled them into trucks for delivery to the work site. Salaries were barely at subsistence levels and working hours were long, sometimes more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Many members of the new working class were peasants who had been forced to abandon their farms because of debt or foreclosure by their landlord. Their new employmenr, however, was rarely an improvement, and frequently involved physical brutality, undernourishment, and a total absence of safety precautions. It was a situation that Charles Dickens would have recognized and deplored.
As bad as rhings were when capital was flowing into Vietnam, they became worse when the shock waves of the Great Depression began to have an impact on the Indochinese economy; French capital fled the country, leading to a rapid increase in unemployment. In some enterprises over half the workers were laid off. Many were forced to flee back to the overcrowded villages whence they had come, searching for a way out of their grinding poverty. Others took to protest. By the end of the 1920s, labor strikes were becoming an increasingly common phenomenon. The strikers’ goals varied according to local circumstances, but most prevalent were a reduction in working hours, improved working conditions, the prohibition of cruel treatment by plant foremen (they often flogged employees who were too sick or exhausred to perform their duties), and the abolition of piecework. In some cases, the agitation was promoted by political activists of the Revolutionary Youth League or the Tan Viet Party, but for the most part it was spontaneous.
Although such sporadic strike activity was undoubtedly disquieting to the French, in itself it was no major cause for alarm, because workers were still too poorly organized and isolated from one another to coordinate their activities. More significantly, however, unrest was beginning to appear in rural areas, particularly in the coastal plains of central Vietnam. The last major expression of peasant unhappiness in the area had occurred more than two decades earlier, during the so-called Revolt of the Short-Hairs in 1908. Since that time, rural conditions had not improved. High taxes and high rents, along with mandarin venality and corruption, were a particular characteristic in Annam, where the old imperial bureaucracy still retained considerable local authority.
Detested French monopolies on the sale of salt, opium, and alcohol all contributed to peasant resentment. One French official admitted that peasants were being forced to buy salt from the government at ten times the original price. In his book Le procès de la colonisation française (French Colonialism on Trial), Nguyen Ai Quoc quored a letter from Governor-General Alberr Sarraut instructing all French provincial residents to arrange for alcohol and opium “houses” to be construcred in each village in areas under their jurisdiction. Some villages, Sarraut complained, were almost completely without spirits and opium. “It is only through complete and constant undersranding between your administrarion and ours,” he intoned, “that we shall obtain the best results, in the best interests of the Treasury.” No wonder, Quoc observed sarcasrically, that the worthy Mr. Sarraut called himself the “little father of the natives” and was adored by them.5
French official reports frequently enthused over the improvements brought to rural areas of Indochina by the colonial regime; in a prime example, the steady rise in the export of rice and rubber (rubber exporrs increased from 200 tons in 1914 to over 10,000 tons in 1929) was cited as a testimony to the benefits of French rule for the rural population. But other statistics demonstrated that the average Vietnamese farmer benefited little from French agricultural policies. With the commercialization of agriculture, land ownership was increasingly concentrated in the hands of wealthy absentee landlords, particularly in the newly expanded cultivated areas in the Mekong delta, while small farmers were frequently forced into tenancy.
In many instances, landlords forced their tenants to perform labor over a period of several weeks a year, or to contribute gifts or money at festival time. Many landlords also served as local moneylenders, charging exorbitant rates of interest to villagers, who were forced to borrow in order to feed their family or purchase seeds for next year’s harvest. Village commune lands, long used as a safety valve to provide small plots for the landless poor, were absorbed by influential landlords through legal and illegal manipulation. In one case, wrote Nguyen Ai Quoc, a French official confiscated several hectares of land from one village and turned them over to a Catholic village nearby. When the plundered peasants lodged a complaint, they were jailed. Some observers critical of the French colonial regime have claimed that despite the rise in grain production throughout the country during the first quarter of the twentieth century, the per capita consumption of rice actually declined during the same period. While such estimates might be exaggerated, even French officials at the time conceded that by the beginning of the 1930s, there was a high level of peasant misery in some areas. In a few villages in Quoc’s home province of Nghe An, where overpopulation had become a serious problem, over half of the population had no land.6
To these chronic conditions were now added three new factors: disastrous floods in central Vietnam, drought conditions in other regions, and a severe fall in the price of rice. With rice losing value in the Great Depression, land values themselves tumbled and countless acres of land were simply abandoned by their peasant owners. French reports conceded that in some districts one third of the population was suffering from hunger.
A pervasive sense of disquiet—and in some cases desperation—affected much of Vietnamese society as the new decade dawned. In March 1930, riots broke out at the Phu Rieng rubber plantation, situated in the “terre rouge” zone in western Cochin China near the Cambodian border. A few weeks later, labor strikes erupted at a thread factory in Nam Dinh, a manufacturing center in Tonkin, and at a match factory at Ben Thuy, an industrial suburb of Vinh, the capital of Nghe An province. As a result of official efforts to suppress the unrest, several demonstrators were killed and scores wounded. The incident at Vinh was of particular significance, because many of the workers involved were recent migrants from rural areas and still had close ties with their relatives in the neighboring villages. As problems in the countryside began to intensify, peasants began to join worker riots and mount demonstrations of their own. In Thanh Chuong district, a few miles to the north of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s home village of Kim Lien and one of the areas suffering most from the economic malaise in the central provinces, several thousand angry farmers marched to a local plantation whose owner had allegedly confiscated communal land and brutalized his workers. Property was destroyed and a hammer-and-sickle flag was placed on the administration building. When units of the French Foreign Legion arrived to suppress the attack, dozens of demonstrators were killed or wounded.
According
to a French report written after the suppression of these riots, the aims of the demonstrators were diverse. Many of the leaders were intellectuals motivated by the desire for national independence or the creation of a “Communist paradise.” Peasants tended to join the movement out of misery and desperation, or as the result of a generalized hatred of the French that had been deliberately aroused by outside agitators. Thai Van Giai, an activist who was later captured by the authorities and interrogated, said, “The masses aren’t Communists, but they are discontented. The landlords exploit the peasants. The government hasn’t introduced irrigation to increase land productivity. And the mandarins live off the population.” Asked why the peasants resented the French, he replied, “The people know nothing about the French administration, which is too far removed from their daily lives. They know only the mandarins, whom they despise.”7
From the start, Communist organizers had played a major part in provoking the unrest in central Vietnam. In late 1929, the CPI leadership had sent one of its leading members, a Nghe An native named Nguyen Phong Sac, to central Vietnam to help organize the workers in the Vinh area. To carry out his assignment, he took employment at the Ben Thuy match factory. In February 1930, only two weeks after the unity conference in Hong Kong, a provincial committee was founded in Nghe An and began to form cells in factories and peasant associations in the villages. Lacking firm directions from the Party leadership, local cadres acted on their own initiative. As Thai Van Giai commented to his captors a few months later:
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