Nationalist Movement in Indo-China

Vietnam declared its independence in 1945, earlier than India, yet roughly thirty more years of war followed before the country was finally united. The Vietnamese nation that came out of that war was shaped in two ways at once, by colonial rule itself and by the long struggle against it.

Indo-China is the region now made up of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. For centuries its peoples lived under the dominance of the Chinese empire, and even after an independent state emerged in what is now northern and central Vietnam, its rulers kept Chinese forms of government and Chinese culture. The region also sat on the maritime silk route, a sea network that carried goods, people and ideas, while other trade routes linked it to inland peoples such as the Khmer of Cambodia.

French troops landed in Vietnam in 1858. Cochinchina in the south became a French colony in 1867, and in 1873 the officer Francis Garnier attacked Hanoi in a bid to win Tonkin in the north, dying in the fighting. After the Franco-Chinese war France took Tonkin and Annam, and in 1887 it bound its territories together as French Indo-China, the Indo-China Union of Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia and later Laos.

France valued colonies as sources of raw materials and goods, and it justified them with the belief that 'advanced' nations owed civilisation to 'backward' ones. Its first large project was in the Mekong delta, where canals and drained land, dug largely by forced labour, spread rice farming. The area under rice grew from 274,000 hectares in 1873 to 1.1 million in 1900 and 2.2 million in 1930. Two-thirds of the harvest was sold abroad, and by 1931 Vietnam was the world's third-largest rice exporter. Railways came next, built to move trade goods and troops and to hold the region together. Work began on a trans-Indo-China railway to link northern and southern Vietnam with China, and the link to Yunnan was finished by 1910, though the Hanoi-Saigon line was completed only in 1936. A separate line in Cambodia ran from Phnom Penh to the border with Siam (Thailand).

French policy-makers agreed that a colony existed to serve France but disagreed about how. The writer Paul Bernard argued that France would profit most if Vietnam grew richer, because prosperous Vietnamese would buy more French goods. He blamed slow growth on a large population, poor farm productivity and heavy peasant debt, and called for land reform and, following Japan's example, industry to create jobs. France largely ignored him. The economy stayed built on rice and on rubber plantations owned by the French and a small Vietnamese elite, worked heavily by indentured labour. Very little industry appeared, landlords grew stronger and rural living standards fell.

French power was most visible in the army and the economy, but France also set out to remake Vietnamese culture, and resistance grew in each of these spheres as Vietnamese began to ask what their country was losing. The blind poet Nguyen Dinh Chieu (1822-88) wrote that he would rather stay blind for ever than look at traitors and watch his country being torn apart.