Although the dissolution of the ICP had caused grumbling within the ranks and raised eyebrows in fraternal parties around the globe, the move did serve to lubricate the peace talks. On instructions from Zhang Fakui, on November 19 General Xiao Wen sponsored a meeting between representatives of the Hanoi government and members of the nationalist parties. The parties agreed in principle on the formation of a broad coalition government composed of members of several parties. They also agreed to issue a joint program, to unify all military units under government command, and to convene a military conference to discuss how best to aid their beleaguered compatriots in the south.
A few days later, the Party Central Committee met secretly to assess the general situation and explain the current policy. Exactly what took place at the meeting has never been divulged, but the decisions reached at the conference were contained in a resolution issued at its close. Titled “Resistance and Reconstruction,” the resolution analyzed the many contradictions that were now emerging among the victorious Allies and charted a course to manipulate them to the advantage of the Vietnamese revolution. By now, the resolution concluded, both China and the United States were prepared to cooperate with France in returning Indochina to French sovereignty. Before agreeing to withdraw its forces, however, the Nationalist government in Chongqing would undoubtedly seek to exact a number of concessions from the French. As far as the United States was concerned, its hostility to Vietnamese independence had now been unmasked:
Although the United States is still talking of its neutrality in Indochina, the United States already secretly helps the French to let the French borrow ships to send troops to Indochina. On the one hand, the United States wants to compete with Great Britain and France for advantages in Indochina and Southeast Asia; on the other hand, it also wants to cooperate with Great Britain and France in establishing an alliance to encircle the Soviet Union and therefore may be willing to sacrifice some of its interests in Southeast Asia.”
Under these circumstances, the resolution concluded, in the domestic arena the Party must act so as to divide the opposition. In foreign affairs, it must minimize its enemies and maximize its friends, particularly the Chinese, who viewed the Hanoi government as the only force able to help them realize their own goals of evicting a European colonial regime from beyond their southern borders. France remained the main enemy, but it too could be manipulated. It was possible, for example, that the French might decide to concede national independence in order to save face in the international arena and preserve their economic rights in Indochina. If so, Party leaders concluded, they should be prepared to make the necessary concessions in the realm of economics in order to seek independence.6
The November 19 agreement had set out only the general outlines of a coalition government, with the details to be worked out in further talks. In the meantime, all groups were henceforth called upon to stop their mutual attacks upon each other and unite against the common adversary. But the negotiations dragged on for weeks with no result. At first the nationalists demanded the presidency and six seats in the cabinet. Ho Chi Minh rejected the proposal and offered three cabinet posts, in addition to forming a political advisory group to be directed by Nguyen Hai Than. That in turn was rebuffed by the nationalists. As the talks continued, tensions rose and the VNQDD journal Viet Nam accelerated its written attacks on the government. The government struck back. Vo Nguyen Giap later recalled that on one occasion he and a colleague mobilized militia units and members of a local National Salvation Association, ordered them to dress in plain clothes and armed them with weapons, and then took them to Hang Dau Street to disrupt nationalist activists who were passing out leaflets in the central market in the Chinese sector of the city. There was a brief scuffle before Giap’s followers cast the leaflets to the ground and the nationalists fled. After another such incident, Ho Chi Minh was called to Chinese headquarters and given a stern lecture.7
One of the stumbling blocks in the negotiations was the fact that a government decree issued on September 8 had called for general elections in two months to choose a new national assembly. After the meeting on November 19, the government announced that the elections would be held on December 23, but representatives of the nationalist patties complained that this gave them inadequate time to prepare. General Xiao Wen, on Zhang Fakui’s instructions, stepped in to break the deadlock, and on December 19 an agreement was hammered out, postponing elections for fifteen days, until early January, and setting out the terms for the creation of a new provisional coalition government to be established on January 1, 1946. According to a communiqué issued at the end of the meeting, the VNQDD was guaranteed fifty seats and the Dong Minh Hoi twenty seats in the future national assembly, regardless of the results of the voting. Ho Chi Minh was to be named president and Nguyen Hai Than vice president. The cabinet was to be composed of two members of the Vietminh Front, along with two each from the VNQDD, the Democratic Party, the Dong Minh Hoi, and two independents. The Vietminh and the nationalists then agreed to stop their mutual attacks and to settle differences by negotations.
The decision to form a coalition government aroused a firestorm of debate within the Party and the Vietminh Front. On heating that Nguyen Hai Than was to be assigned a senior position in the government, one cadre voiced his concern directly to Ho Chi Minh, whose relations with Than had been strained since the 1920s. “Manure is dirty, isn’t it?” Ho replied. “But if it’s good for the rice plants, would you refuse to use it?” When some of his colleagues questioned the decision to guarantee seventy seats to the opposition, pointing out that the difference between the Vietminh and their rivals was like that between fire and water, Ho (ever ready with a metaphor) concurred, but pointed out that if water was placed over fire, it would boil and could then be drunk safely.”8
On January 1, the new government was presented to the people in a ceremony held at the Municipal Theater. In a speech delivered from the balcony, President Ho Chi Minh called for national unity and announced the program of the government, which called for national elections on democratic principles and the unification of the various armed forces under government command. In his own address, Nguyen Hai Than accepted partial responsibility for the delay in achieving national union and promised to cooperate in resisting the French takeover of the south.
The national elections were held as scheduled on January 6, the first in the history of the country. Although there were a few minor incidents, for the most part they were peaceful. According to Vo Nguyen Giap, 90 percent of those eligible in the south voted, although the election was held only in areas controlled by Vietminh forces. Vietminh sources claimed victory after their candidates received a reported 97 percent of the popular vote. Such results would have given the Vietminh 300 seats in the assembly but, as promised, 70 seats were assigned to the opposition.9
Ho Chi Minh himself ran for office in a Hanoi constituency. Colleagues had suggested that as president he should be exempted from running for office in a single district, and simply be put forward as a single candidate for the whole country, but Ho refused. According to government statistics, he received 98.4 percent of the votes in the election that was held in his Hanoi constituency.
Ho Chi Minh had hoped that the formation of a new coalition government would enable him to present a united front to the French. As we have seen, in its meeting in late November the ICP Central Committee expressed the hope that Paris might be persuaded to offer national independence to the Vietnamese in return for economic concessions.
Whether Paris would be amenable to such a solution, however, was an open question. French President Charles de Gaulle was unwilling to negotiate until he had restored French aurhority in Indochina. In a letter to General Leclerc dated September 25, he stated in his characteristically imperious manner: “Your mission is to reestablish French sovereignty in Hanoi and I am astonished that you have not yet done so.” But French representatives in Indochina appeared to be somewhat more realistic. After meeting with Ho in l
ate September, Léon Pignon and General Alessandri had described him as “a strong and honorable personality,” while Jean Cédile had cabled from Saigon that a moderate faction within the government was amenable to a settlement, and therefore it was worrh talking to. On October 10, Paris cabled Alessandri to open talks with the Hanoi government “on all of Indochina.”10
Jean Sainteny had returned to Hanoi two days previously. He had gone to India in September to see Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu, de Gaulle’s high commissioner designate. Sainteny, whose position as the French plenipotentiary in negotiations over Indochina had never been formalized, had offered to resign, but d’Argenlieu asked him to return to Indochina with full powers to negotiate on his behalf. So Sainteny returned to Hanoi with the formal title of Commissioner of the Republic for Tonkin and North Annam, and took up residence at the Bank of Indochina.11
Sainteny met President Ho Chi Minh for the first time in mid-October. Although a tough negotiator and deeply imbued with a sense of French amour propre (he would later become prominent in international banking circles), the courtly Sainteny was genuinely fond of Ho Chi Minh and felt that, at heart, Ho was pro-French. He was accompanied by his political adviser, Pignon, a career colonial official who had served in Indochina before World War II and was irrevocably committed to the restoration of French sovereignty. Ho was joined by Minister of Culture Hoang Minh Giam. Sainteny’s instructions were to obtain Ho’s agreement for the return of French military forces to Tonkin, where about 30,000 French nationals still resided, in return for a French commitment to bring about the departure of Chinese occupation troops. General Leclerc already had in Cochin China a force of about 8,000 men, in the form of the prestigious Second Armored Division, which had played a major role in the seizure of Normandy from the Germans.
Sainteny’s task was undoubtedly a delicate one. An outright invasion would encounter stiff resistance, not only from the Vietminh but also from Chinese occupation troops, who were carrying out the disarming of 30,000 Japanese with an alarming lack of urgency. Sainteny thus needed not only to reassure Ho Chi Minh about French intentions, but also to reach an accommodation with the Chinese occupation command. Given these realities, Sainteny strongly advised his government against the use of force: “If we attempt to reinstate the French government in Tonkin by force of arms,” he warned, “we must be prepared to meet with powerful resistance.”12
As he soon became aware, Sainteny had some advantages of his own. Vietminh military forces were still woefully weak, and Ho badly needed French assistance to get rid of the Chinese. At the same time, neither of the two major Allied powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, had shown interest in the proceedings. Moscow was preoccupied with the promising political situation in France, where the French Communist Party (FCP) appeared to be on the brink of coming to power, and had not bothered to send a representative or even an observer to Hanoi. Washington, increasingly concerned at the prospects of postwar Soviet domination over Eastern Europe, was fearful at the prospects of a leftist government in Paris and attempted to reassure the French that it had no thought of opposing their return to Indochina.
Ho Chi Minh took these factors into account in his talks with Sainteny. From the start, he was disarmingly frank in expressing the position that, although his long-term objective was to achieve full national independence for his country, he was willing to accept an arrangement that would not bring that about for several years. For the time being, he explained, his government was willing to accept a French presence in north Vietnam and membership in the French Union, so long as Paris agreed on the eventual goal of independence.
Still, the talks did not go easily. The problem was partly a question of semantics, although there were real issues at stake. Ho and his advisers insisted on the inclusion of the term “independence” (doc lap) in any final document, a term that was firmly resisted by the de Gaulle government back in Paris. On his return to Saigon after holding talks with SEAC Commander Mountbatten in Ceylon, General Leclerc attempted to bridge the gap by suggesting to Paris the possibility of offering a form of dominion status to postwar Indochina (the French term he suggested was “autonomie”). But de Gaulle was adamant: “If I listened to such nonsense, soon France would have no more empire. Please reread my declaration of March 24 and adhere faithfully to the text.” When in October the U.S. Embassy in Chongqing asked for a new declaration of French intentions in Indochina, de Gaulle replied testily: “It is unacceptable that the French government should now issue a new declaration concerning Indochina. That of March is sufficient. A reiteration would just complicate the situation.”13
A second Major obstacle was the future status of Cochin China. Ho Chi Minh demanded that it be included in the negotiations with the other regions of Tonkin and Annam, but Sainteny, under orders from Paris, insisted that as a former colony, the status of Cochin China must be viewed as distinct from other areas. The people living there, he argued, should be allowed to determine their own destiny.
The talks proceeded for several weeks, as the two sides huddled in a smoke-filled room, arguing over the precise meaning of particular French words and phrases. While Sainteny smoked his pipe, Ho puffed incessantly on Chinese, American, or the acrid French Gauloise cigarettes. Occasionally, the talks were interrupted so that Ho Chi Minh could consult with his government, or with his supreme counselor, the former emperor Bao Dai. President Ho’s relations with “Citizen” Vinh Thuy were indeed puzzling to Sainteny and other observers. Ho constantly referred to the ex-emperor in deferential terms, and on occasion even suggested that he might become the constitutional monarch of a future Vietnam. Once he reprimanded a subordinate for referring to Bao Dai simply as “counselor”: “You might address him as ‘My Lord,’ as I do,” he admonished.14
As supreme counselor to the Hanoi government, Bao Dai participated regularly in meetings of the cabinet, and was quickly made to feel at home, even by members of what he called the “old guard,” a group of hard-liners such as Minister of Propaganda Tran Huy Lieu who had lived in the USSR and spent considerable time in prison. At a dinner held shortly after his appointment, Ho had assured Bao Dai that “we will work together for the independence of our country.” At first, Bao Dai was smitten with the fragile physique and soft manners of the new president, who appeared more interested in Chinese literature and philosophy than in matters of politics, and looked and acted more like a Confucian scholar or a village ascetic than a Comintern agent or a head of state. He compared Ho favorably with non-Communist nationalists who were, in his words, “puppets in the hands of the Chinese”; Ho, in his own negotiations with Chinese commanders, managed to keep a cool head. Eventually, however, Bao Dai saw what he viewed as Ho’s true visage and that of his government. When he heard of the arrest of Pham Quynh, his former prime minister, and the prominent Catholic official Ngo Dinh Khoi, brother of Ngo Dinh Diem, he had protested to Ho Chi Minh and asked for their release along with other political prisoners. But Ho demurred, explaining that the people wouldn’t understand it. (As mentioned earlier, both were eventually execured.)
Bao Dai eventually began to suspect that he was being used as a pawn to provide the government with an aura of legitimacy with the Americans. In October, when tensions between the Vietminh and their nationalist rivals began to heighten, he was sent to Thanh Hoa province, allegedly for his own safety. Returning after the formation of the provisional coalition government in January, he was elected as a member of the new National Assembly. During the next few weeks, he joined Ho Chi Minh at Têt ceremonies and on several other state occasions “to reassure public opinion,” as he put it regally, “of my presence.”15
Armed with the imprimatur of a new coalition government, Ho Chi Minh resumed his negotations with Sainteny in the first weeks of 1946. At first, it appeared that the gap might be too wide to bridge. Such at any rate was the concern of Kenneth Landon, a U.S. diplomat with extensive knowledge of Asian affairs in the State Department’s Division of Southeast Asian Af
fairs. When Landon arrived in Hanoi on a fact-finding mission in mid-January 1946, Sainteny assured him that the French government would adopt a conciliatory tone in its talks with the Vietnamese. But in his conversations with Ho Chi Minh, Landon found that the Vietnamese president was less optimistic about prospects for a settlement. Ho questioned the sincerity of the French and pointed out the depth of Vietnamese determination to achieve total independence from colonial rule. At the end of the visit, Ho handed Landon a letter addressed to President Truman. Noting that the United States was in the process of granting total independence to the Philippines, Ho appealed for U.S. support in his own country’s struggle for national liberation.
Ho Chi Minh’s skepticism about French intentions appeared justified when the Foreign Ministry in Paris told U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery that although France would adopt a “liberal and progressive” attitude toward Vietnamese demands, total independence was not under consideration. Caffery responded with the hope that Paris would adopt an enlightened position on the question, noting to Washington that some “old-line military leaders” had heretofore exerted an “unfortunate influence” on government policies toward Indochina.16
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