Indo-China

on the World Today

IN INDO-CHINA the United States is supporting a shaky native government erected about the exEmperor of Annam, Bao Dai. To see why northern Indo-China is important, you must look at a relief map of southern China. A glance will show a vast natural wall of mountains, stretching from the Himalayas to the South China. Sea, which cuts China off from the rest of the world. There are two gaps in this wall. Both are in that part of northern Indo-China known as Tonkin. One, at Laokay, leads to Kunming and the heart of south-central China. The other, at Langson, leads to Canton and the riches of Kwangsi.

These are the historic gates to China, which command the only easy overland routes between China and Southeast Asia. The master of Tonkin is the master of these gates, and can decide which way money, arms, and, above all, ideas shall flow - whether the flow shall be upward, from a Southeast Asia friendly to the Western democracies, or downward from Moscow via Peking.

Whoever controls Tonkin controls not only the direction of this movement but its outlets. From this hub natural overland routes fan out south and west. The spokes of this hub — highways, trails, and caravan routes — cross indefensible frontiers into Burma, Siam, Laos, Cambodia, and Cochin China. With Tonkin in Stalinist hands, there would be no effective way to stop a flood of propaganda, of revolutionaries, or of the arms and money that they use, from engulfing the rest of Southeast Asia. With such a base of operations, it would be only a question of time before Communisim rounds out its borders at Singapore, Bangkok, and Rangoon.

How we came to support Bao Dai

The Franco-American policy toward Indo-China is a considered and logical one. Our support of Bao Dai means the support of a democratically-minded native government of the Vietnamese people against: a rebellious horde led by known Communists. On principle, we are backing the French colonial army as the only effective force available to fight on behalf of this anti-Communist government. On these premises, our present position became inevitable.

The Franco-American policy has ignored the two most vital elements in the Indo-China of today: the French colonial mentality and the history of the Vietnamese people. The French colonialists refuse to admit the possibility of real independence for a French colony. The historic hatred of foreign domination has led the Vietnamese people to submit to the only leaders tough enough to drive the French out. Those leaders are native Communists.

For eighty years the French regime in IndoChina has faced almost insuperable obstacles. It began with an effort to convert one of the most antireligious peoples to Catholicism. It continued by trying to bring a people that has been for ten centuries almost pathologically xenophobic under the law and order of Fax Francisca. During its best period it brought the roads and harbors, the industry and trade, the sound administration and great public health services of Western civilization to a people who cared little about them.

Some of the ablest and most high-minded French of a whole era gave their best for this cause. There were religious leaders like Pigneau de Behaine and explorers like Francis Gamier, followed by generals like Lyautey and Gallieni; governors like Sarraut and Paul Bert; sociologists like Lévy and scientists like Yersin. They brought with them a train of builders, engineers, public health experts, and highly trained administrators who gave enormous energy and devotion to the labor of making IndoChina French. One and all they were greeted with a permanent sullen resistance which burst periodically into a savage, bloody rebellion.

The tragedy of the French position in Indo-China is that such outbursts were, and still are, ascribed to the wicked plotting of a handful of malcontents. The French felt, and still feel, that the great mass of the Vietnamese people are incapable of any progress or of self-government on their own. It is therefore the clear responsibility of France to continue the task that they have undertaken, that of civilizing and governing.

Assuming that the mass of the people wanted nothing better than a sound French administration, the French naturally felt that those who opposed the French regime were enemies of their own people, and that any steps taken to frustrate them were thoroughly justified.

To cope with the problem of native subversives, a large and efficient Sûreté was created, which soon had whole jails full of political prisoners. By the early thirties they were so numerous as to overflow into hastily constructed concentration camps and to fill the cell blocks at Poulo Condore, the local Devil’s Island. Those Leaders who were released or somehow escaped were followed, with inquisitorial zeal, throughout Europe and Asia. It is not surprising that a good many of them wound up in Russia and Red China.

With the Japanese occupation of Tonkin in 1941, many of these escapees returned to organize guerrilla units among their own people. After World War II broke out, more of them turned up at Chungking, demanding and getting modern weapons from the Allied arsenal. By war’s end they had created, with the help of political prisoners released by the Japanese, a functioning native government, supported by a well-disciplined guerrilla army. During the Chinese Nationalist occupation of northern Indo-China, elections were held, in which Ho Chi Minh was the overwhelming choice for the presidency.

A condition for the Chinese withdrawal from Indo-China was that this government should be recognized by the French. Pursuant to this condition, Ho Chi Minh went to France, and returned in October, 1946, to his capital at Hanoi with something like dominion status for his regime.

The Communists come in

In Ho Chi Minh’s absence there had been a typically Vietnamese parthogenesis, with dozens of small political factions fighting over trivialities. Although the Indo-Chinese Communist Party was officially dissolved in November, 1945, its leaders remained the one cohesive element in the government. As they emerged at the head of the coalition Viet Minh party, many of their opponents disappeared or took off for Nationalist China.

The emergence of this Communisttrained leadership and the internecine struggles which preceded it were regarded by the French colonial experts in Paris and Saigon as proof that the Vietnamese did not really want, nor were they capable of, self-government; and that the whole Republic of Vietnam was nothing but the scheming of unprincipled Communists. It was with a considerable sense of righteousness, therefore, that they set about destroying it, in spite of the treaties and recognition of a few months before.

A French puppet regime for Cochin China was put on a permanent basis. The French army sent more troops to Tonkin, where tension rose daily between the inept General Morliere and the leaders of the Vietnamese Republic. On December 19, 1946, the fight which both sides had come to regard as not only inevitable but desirable broke out. The Vietnamese felt that the independence could only be wrested from the French by driving them into the sea; the French that their moral and financial investment could be salvaged only by crushing this little gang of Moscow-trained agitators.

During the year that followed, French military leaders were sure that they could easily defeat the lightly armed and economically feeble forces of the Ho Chi Minh government. As one brilliantly planned and skillfully executed operation of encirclement after another failed to produce any decisive result, the heads of French colonels and generals rolled. But the premise remained in Saigon and Paris that an ultimate and final military victory could be achieved.

American aid

By mid-1948, however, Indo-Chinese military expenditures were becoming increasingly burdensome, and American matériel was badly needed. So the Bao Dai formula was devised. As a start, the handful of docile Vietnamese who had been called the Republic of Cochin China were now called a National Government. Spontaneous demonstrations were arranged in all of the French-occupied towns of Indo-China, calling for the return of Bao Dai. The ex-Emperor of Annum was recalled from the obscurity and poverty of a Hong Kong hotel room, given plenty of spending money, and told to lead a crusade. With the help of the French army he was to save his people from Ho Chi Minh and his fellow Stalinists. To help his standing with the Vietnamese and the outside world, various treaties were signed promising a limited independence to his government.

The Bao Dai government was readily recognized by America and a few other Western powers. Military credits and ECA funds were forthcoming. A United States military mission, headed by a major general of Marines, was flown to Saigon to give Bao Dai advice and prestige. Both the United Stales and France made every effort to persuade Vietnamese of good will to jump on the Bao Dai bandwagon.

To the shocked surprise of the wellmeaning artisans of the Bao Dai formula, nobody jumped. There were no important defections from the Vict Minh-dominated forces of Ho Chi Minh. The important Catholic leader Ngo Dinh Dziem steadfastly refused to assume the premiership. Nor would the native Catholic clergy join the crusade, in spite of urgent French representations to the Vatican. Led by India, the non-Communist governments of Asia withheld recognition.

Bao Dai himself was more than a disappointment. Instead of being grateful for his yacht and his château on the Riviera, his private plane and ample spending money, he became intransigent. Far from leading a docile native government, he consistently demanded more and better jobs for Vietnamese and a larger till for them to loot. Worst of all, French intelligence soon learned that his closest advisers were staunch admirers of Ho Chi Minh.

The Bao Dai formula has not worked. A shift in December giving the high command to General de Lattre de Tassigny cannot change the basic military situation, for there has never been any lack of brains or leadership in the French army in IndoChina, nor any lack of persistence and courage among the troops.

The plain fact is that the Viet Minh forces, although they have lost battles, and will lose many more, still hold the initiative. This initiative is retained because they can move at will, having the support of the people, through a terrain so rugged as to be virlually impassable to a modern army. The Viet Minh forces are led by men with close ties with Moscow. And a decisive proportion of their arms are coming from Communist China. A victory for these forces will owe nothing to the free world, but will be deeply indebted to Mao Tse-tung. Peking, if not Moscow, will have a first mortgage on any Viet Minh government established by the force of these arms, even though more than 90 per cent of the people of Vietnam are as anti-Communist as they are anti-Chinese.

A case for the UN

It must be evident that neither we nor the French can spare the vast number of troops or endless equipment needed to subdue 20 million Vietnamese, backed by limitless Chinese arms, fighting on their soil for a cause that they believe in. Furthermore, four years of savage warfare capping eighty years of antagonism and mistrust make it impossible for the French and Vietnamese peoples to find any formula, unaided, for bringing peace to Indo-China.

The only hope of saving Southeast Asia from Communism lies in an enduring peace for Indo-China. There is a price for that peace that will have to be paid. Happily, France has recently indicated that she may be nearly ready to pay that price, which is the relinquishment of her claim to sovereignty over Indo-China.

When this question comes before the United Nations, it will be the task of American statesmanship to see that the impact of such a courageous move on the part of France is not wasted. We must be as ready to urge swift and dramatic action to restore peace to Indo-China as we were to counter aggression with force in Korea.

No one who knows Indo-China would minimize the grave responsibilities that this would lay at the doorstep of the United Nations. The holding of free elections and the creation of a stable government in a country where passions run so high and where political experience is so lacking will be difficult indeed.

But the United Nations, which helped to work out a successful solution for Indonesia and also for Palestine, and which is now engaged in sensitive negotiations with India and Pakistan on the Kashmir question, should be given the opportunity to help break the stalemate in IndoChina.