The forgotten compromises

With Vũ Ngự Chiêu's path-breaking work, scholars of Vietnam's modern history have begun to question the assumption that the Việt Minh government represented a radical break with the Trần Trọng Kim (TTK) government that had existed before it for a short time (April to August 1945).Footnote ⁵ This assumption is due in part to the lack of records relating to the TTK government. More likely, observers may have (consciously or unconsciously) believed Việt Minh propaganda and communist historians (e.g. Trần Huy Liệu) that the TTK regime was only a puppet government that virtually collapsed in August 1945 as the communists swept to power on a popular mandate. Here is another case of the winners writing history that covered his own tracks. I intend to show that, in order to secure their ascendancy and survival in late 1945, the communists had to make compromises with supporters and members of the TTK government, with the colonial elites and colonial bureaucracy, and with local mass groups. Understanding these compromises will help us understand the significance of 1948, when these compromises fell apart and contributed to the subsequent civil war between North and South Vietnam.

The story of these compromises began with Japan entering French Indochina in 1940 through negotiation. Facing the Japanese threat, the Vichy government agreed to make Indochinese ports, roads, labour and materials available for Japanese wartime needs. In return, the French were allowed to maintain their rule over Indochina.Footnote ⁶ Only in March 1945, after the fall of Vichy in France and in anticipation of an imminent Allied landing in Indochina, did the Japanese decide to overthrow French rule. After interning French colonial administrators and soldiers in March 1945, the Japanese allowed the Vietnamese Emperor to declare an independent Empire of Vietnam (EVN) and set up a Vietnamese administration in the following month. Rather than selecting experienced anti-colonial nationalists (as they did in Java), the Japanese picked a group of successful but politically inexperienced professionals and intellectuals to form a new government in Vietnam.Footnote ⁷ The Prime Minister of this government, Trần Trọng Kim, had been trained in France and was known primarily as a school inspector and historian.Footnote ⁸

Although its leaders had limited political experience and this government lasted only four months, its historical role was by no means inconsequential.Footnote ⁹ Rallying to its side were many influential urban groups such as the nationalist Greater Viet PartyFootnote ¹⁰ and the Thanh nghị [Commentaries] group.Footnote ¹¹ Phan Anh and Vũ Văn Hiền, two French-trained lawyers from Thanh nghị served as Minister of Youth and Minister of Justice respectively. The Thanh nghị group set up the New Vietnam Party [Tân Việt Nam Hội] to mobilise mass support for the new government.Footnote ¹² The Central Committee of this Party included 33 prominent intellectuals and professionals who were part of a broad network of like-minded friends who founded or contributed to Thanh nghị.Footnote ¹³ In its brief tenure, the TTK government greatly expanded the opportunities for mass political action by removing press censorship, releasing thousands of political prisoners from colonial prisons and launching a vigorous youth movement in the cities. Without these moves, the massive spontaneous uprisings that resulted in the seizure of power when the Japanese surrendered in August 1945 would not have happened.

The Japanese coup of March 1945 catapulted the TTK government to power but this event was at the same time a gift from the Japanese to the underground communist movement.Footnote ¹⁴ The French colonial police and intelligence up till then had been effective in suppressing communists. In 1940, the colonial police and army crushed a rebellion led by the ICP in southern Vietnam and executed nearly all its leaders. In 1941, Hồ Chí Minh returned to the border area of Vietnam and China and sought to revive the movement. He and surviving leaders of the ICP's underground northern branch set up Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh (Independence League of Vietnam or Việt Minh), a front organisation controlled by communists but open to all.Footnote ¹⁵ Following the Chinese strategy, ICP leaders sought to build up a guerrilla force and succeeded to some degree in mobilising local support for their cause.Footnote ¹⁶ Under the sponsorship of Zhang Fakui, a Guomindang (GMD) general, Hồ reluctantly worked with Vietnamese nationalist groups in southern China to form a similar front, but this amounted to little.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet before March 1945, the Việt Minh had little formal organisation and maintained a precarious resistance in the face of fierce French repression.Footnote ¹⁸ This changed after the Japanese overthrew the French in March 1945. By that time, Japanese military commanders were concerned mainly about preparing for an invasion by Allied forces, not about preventing a domestic rebellion. The countryside was thus left open to agitation and the Việt Minh quickly filled this space.Footnote ¹⁹ While publicly the Việt Minh denounced the TTK government as a Japanese puppet,Footnote ²⁰ behind the scenes the communists sought to convert its officials to their cause.Footnote ²¹ This paved the way for later compromises.

The TTK government was only four months old when the Japanese surrendered. In the wake of massive unrest following this event and a Việt Minh challenge in the northern part of the country, this government resigned and agreed to transfer power to its rival without a fight. This compromise was significant because this government could have attempted to suppress the communists: in Hanoi, where the Việt Minh was strongest, pro-Việt Minh groups had fewer than 1,000 supporters with about 100 rifles, whereas the TTK government had at its disposal 1,500 armed civil guardsmen.Footnote ²² In return for their compromise, many EVN officials were subsequently offered positions in the Việt Minh government as ministers and deputy ministers. These included Phan Anh (Minister of Youth), Phan Kế Toại (Viceroy of North Vietnam), Nguyễn Văn Hưởng (Phan Kế Toại's Chief of Staff), Tạ Quang Bửu (Phan Anh's assistant), Vũ Trọng Khánh (Mayor of Hải Phòng), Nguyễn Mạnh Hà (economic chief of Hải Phòng), Hoàng Minh Giám (chief of the Japan-Vietnam Liaison Team in North Vietnam) and others. The colonial bureaucracy, including colonial laws, procedures and employees, was incorporated almost intact into the new state.Footnote ²³ Thousands of colonial troops would defect and join the Việt Minh military in late 1945.Footnote ²⁴ The birth of the Việt Minh state occurred through this important but overlooked compromise. When Hồ Chí Minh was sworn in as president of the DRV in early September 1945, nearly half of his cabinet positions were given to non-communists.Footnote ²⁵ Communists took control of Foreign Affairs, Defence, Interior and Information portfolios in the coalition government while yielding real authority to the non-communists in the ministries of Economy, Agriculture, Education and Justice.

The Việt Minh government is commonly thought of as a united front with the ICP at the centre leading non-communists and other ‘fellow travellers’ in the front. On a closer look, this is not quite true. Accepting political compromises while lacking their own qualified personnel, ICP leaders had to grant non-communist leaders, mostly former members of the Thanh nghị network, full sectional authority as provincial heads and ministers of certain ministries. Rather than simply occupying positions on one of the concentric circles surrounding the ICP as the theoretical model of a united front would describe,Footnote ²⁶ non-communist leaders formed the centres of certain loci of autonomous activities. Although these loci were not in the realms of foreign policy or defence, they involved key sections of socio-cultural-economic policy at both national and local levels. While communist domination could never be challenged, communists had little control over many key state apparatuses. As ICP leader and Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng would lament in early 1950, ‘Currently our Party controls only key government agencies but not most state apparatuses and technical departments. Even for an especially important agency such as police, we don't have full control from the top to the bottom. Our grip on the judicial system is weak. Educational institutions are beyond our direct supervision.’Footnote ²⁷ We will see below why Phạm Văn Đồng was upset; in late 1945, however, compromise seemed to be the only way for a weak ICP to rise to and stay in power.

In fact, without this initial compromise the ICP might not have survived the challenge from the right after having seized power in August 1945. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was about five weeks old when GMD troops marched into Hanoi to disarm Japanese forces under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement.Footnote ²⁸ Accompanying these troops from southern China were two prominent groups in exile, the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Việt Nam Quốc dân Đảng or VNP) and the Vietnamese Revolutionary League (Việt Nam Cách mạng Đồng minh Hội or VRL). The VNP, which went into exile in southern China after being crushed in its failed revolt in 1930, was led by Nguyễn Tường Tam, a prominent French-trained intellectual and novelist.Footnote ²⁹ In the 1930s Tam was the leader of the Self-Strength Literary Movement in Hanoi but went abroad during World War II to join the VNP. The VRL was led by Nguyễn Hải Thần, who had been active in anti-colonial organisations in southern China since 1905, and who once studied and taught at Whampoa Military Academy.Footnote ³⁰ The VNP and VRL seized power in many provinces with their own militias and demanded that the Việt Minh government step down. Việt Minh forces still controlled Hanoi but daily skirmishes occurred between the two rivals.

The Chinese generals were mainly interested in keeping order and disarming the Japanese. Unlike the Americans in South Korea or the British in Saigon, the Chinese in Hanoi recognised Hồ's government. As noted above, during 1943–44 these GMD generals had sponsored some collaborative efforts among various Vietnamese groups in exile, including Hồ Chí Minh as the representative of the Việt Minh. Now they simply continued this effort by pressuring him to share power with the VNP and VRL. Too weak to stand up to the Chinese, the communists offered their opponents the Vice-Presidency, several ministerial portfolios, and 70 seats in a newly elected National Assembly. Hồ Chí Minh was also forced to appoint ‘non-partisans’Footnote ³¹ as Interior and Defence Ministers. Because ICP leaders wanted to deny accusations from their enemies that the Việt Minh government was controlled by communists, they made a gesture of compromise by ordering the dissolution of the ICP in November 1945. The Party was in fact never dissolved; it only operated in secret from then on. At one point, Chinese pressure was so intense that Hồ Chí Minh even considered bringing the former Emperor back to lead the government while he would resign to be an ‘adviser’.Footnote ³² What the ICP offered the exiled groups was not a real compromise because the communists never really handed much power to their opponents or to the non-partisan ministers.Footnote ³³ As soon as the Chinese withdrew in mid-1946,Footnote ³⁴ Hồ Chí Minh's government purged most of VNP and VRL leaders; those who escaped fled to southern China and elsewhere.Footnote ³⁵

The rivalry between the ICP and the exiled groups strengthened the compromise between communists and non-communists within the Việt Minh government. With the VNP and VRL intensifying their mobilisation among the urban elites, the ICP came to rely more on prominent intellectuals and businessmen in the coalition government to reach out to urban constituencies. Former EVN officials played a critical but as yet unacknowledged role in generating support for the Việt Minh. These officials were influential in colonial elite circles; their family or business ties to former mandarins, local elites and colonial bureaucrats helped lure these to the side of the Việt Minh.Footnote ³⁶ In addition, the Việt Minh government carried out numerous arrests of VNP and VRL members on the pretext that these men and women had broken the laws. The participation of non-communists in the government, especially in the Ministry of Justice, helped deflect the charges that the arrests were a communist purge. The Chinese could have used these charges as an excuse to overthrow Việt Minh rule. Besides their political role, these non-communists who were knowledgeable in technical fields were useful to the ICP in numerous difficult administrative tasks, including drafting a new Constitution and new laws, selecting and appointing new officials, fighting illiteracy and a raging flood, and implementing agricultural policy to prevent famine.

Another important compromise was made at the local level. While early research assumed the Việt Minh's centralised leadership of the revolution, recent works reveal a more complex situation. Before August 1945, Việt Minh leaders mistakenly expected a US-China invasion to expel the Japanese. They thus concentrated on building a militia to fight alongside the Allies.Footnote ³⁷ This invasion never occurred. When the Japanese suddenly surrendered and a power vacuum opened up in the cities, it was local groups that seized power spontaneously and bloodlessly. Many local groups were organised by local underground or recently released communist cadres, but many were also mobilised by local elites or bourgeois groups. In Hanoi, for example, the Democratic Party (Đảng Dân chủ or DP),Footnote ³⁸ not the local ICP branch, had the most guns.Footnote ³⁹ Non-Việt Minh groups there also raced to seize power but for one reason or another lost out to pro-Việt Minh ones such as the DP.Footnote ⁴⁰ Most local communists acted autonomously without the central ICP's instructions. In most of the provincial centres in central and southern Vietnam, it was Vanguard Youth groups organised earlier by Phan Anh, the Minister of Youth in the EVN government, which seized power.Footnote ⁴¹ Việt Minh central leaders and their militias arrived days or weeks later and took control of a few main cities; in most other places, these mass groups or militias claimed to be and were simply accepted as local Việt Minh governments.

In his detailed account of local mass uprisings throughout Vietnam in late 1945, historian David Marr describes how ‘The administration established by the Việt Minh in Hanoi became as much a prisoner of the thousands of revolutionary committees emerging from around the country as the directing authority.’Footnote ⁴² The central government incorporated most local groups that seized local power in late 1945 regardless of their revolutionary quality or political loyalty. Policies issued by local ‘revolutionary’ governments responded more to local interests and conditions than to central orders.Footnote ⁴³ The problem of ‘revolutionary mandarins’ was widespread after the birth of the Việt Minh state. Village-level People's Committees in particular gained notoriety for their arrogance, nepotism, collusion, arbitrary arrests and abuses of public property.Footnote ⁴⁴ Internal fighting among local militias was common. In most cases, local Việt Minh militias did not fight the Japanese. Instead, it was ‘old Việt Minh’ groups fighting ‘new Việt Minh’,Footnote ⁴⁵ Việt Minh militias exchanging fire with DP ones,Footnote ⁴⁶ and People's Committees challenging the authority of Việt Minh committees.Footnote ⁴⁷ We shall see that these insubordinate local authorities would become a main bone in the split between communist and non-communist leaders of the Việt Minh state in 1948.

In sum, Vietnamese communists rose to power with little bloodshed and established a new state in a short time. The price to pay was the accommodation of the colonial elites, the colonial bureaucracy and local mass groups. Communists did not accommodate everybody: Trotskyites and many VNP and VRL leaders who were archrivals of the ICP were brutally eliminated.Footnote ⁴⁸ At the same time, accommodation at the elite level in Vietnam was substantial and different from the token presence of non-communists in the communist government after 1949 on mainland China.Footnote ⁴⁹ These ‘patriotic personalities’ played no direct role in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) victory in the civil war and were brought into government afterwards primarily for propaganda purposes. By contrast, EVN officials and other urban intellectuals who collaborated with communists were crucial to the latter's ascendancy and retention of power from late 1945 to mid-1946. At the mass level, the Việt Minh state incorporated numerous local mass groups. We shall see that accommodation worked only briefly and serious cracks within the coalition were visible by 1948.

War and geopolitical contexts

The situation in Vietnam during 1947–48 was strongly influenced by the dynamics of the war between France and the Việt Minh government, which underwent a key turning point during 1947. After war broke out in December 1946 between the DRV and France, the French were able to seize control of most cities and towns within a short time. In northern Vietnam, the DRV government withdrew into the mountainous areas in the northeast and carried out the strategy of ‘empty fields and houses’ [vườn không nhà trống] to deny their enemy access to resources and populations.Footnote ⁵⁰ On 25 April 1947, barely four months after the war began, the DRV sent a letter to the French government proposing negotiations for a truce. It is unclear why Hồ Chí Minh's government sued for peace so soon, and it may have made the offer out of a sense of weakness. In an internal document, ICP leaders explained that they supported Vietnam being part of the French Union as long as it was guaranteed real independence and territorial unity. They appeared to put great hope in the possibility of the French Communist Party soon forming a new French government, and did not want ‘Vietnam to be separated from the French Union only to fall into the hands of Britain-United States’.Footnote ⁵¹

In response, in May 1947, French High Commissioner Émile Bollaert through a representative offered the DRV autonomy within the French Union without independence in defence and foreign relations.Footnote ⁵² Still hopeful, ICP leaders reshuffled the DRV government on 19 July 1947 to add several non-communist personalities whose number now grew to 15 out of 27 minister-level officials.Footnote ⁵³ This move was to signal their interest in negotiation and to counter French propaganda that the DRV was nothing but a communist gang. Among the additions were two Catholics and a former mandarin. Võ Nguyên Giáp remained the commander of the DRV military but Tạ Quang Bửu, a former EVN official, was promoted to Minister of Defence. Yet this symbolic effort brought nothing but disappointing results. In his public speech in Hà Đông on 10 September 1947, Bollaert reiterated the French position to offer Vietnam ‘freedom within the French Union’. He even refused to accept the DRV as the legitimate government of Vietnam while declaring that the union of Cochinchina with the rest was to be decided by a referendum.Footnote ⁵⁴

While ICP leaders failed in their diplomatic manoeuvres, former Emperor Bảo Đại and his supporters in exile in Hong Kong and elsewhere scored some gains.Footnote ⁵⁵ After fleeing communist repression in late 1946, the VNP and VRL regrouped together with southern religious leaders and founded the Front for National Unity in May 1947. They presented themselves as the truly nationalist alternative to the Việt Minh government and were able to attract French attention. Soon the two sides started to negotiate with each other. In October, French troops parachuted into the base area of the Việt Minh government, beginning a major offensive. The French military campaign ended in two months without a clear victory for either side. French-controlled areas were expanded but the attack failed in its primary goal of destroying the DRV leadership and core Vietnamese forces. After initial losses, Việt Minh troops were able to fight back and score some small victories. By the end of 1947, the war had reached a military stalemate. While French forces still had the upper hand, both sides realised that it would be a long and drawn-out battle.

The French offensive and Bollaert's negotiations with exiled and other anti-communist groups signalled to ICP leaders that their pursuit of negotiation had reached a dead end. Another political setback for the ICP was the rising power of the Gaullists in French politics at the expense of the French communists in late October 1947.Footnote ⁵⁶ The hope that the ICP leaders had in French communists did not completely fade away but there were now fewer justifications for negotiation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Most importantly, the legitimacy of Hồ's regime was threatened by the success of its previously defeated Vietnamese enemies in regrouping and competing for international and popular support. On 2 December 1947, a major breakthrough occurred with the meeting between Bảo Đại and Bollaert in Ha Long Bay. Bảo Đại had earlier rejected French offers of limited independence for Vietnam in the French Union, but he now agreed to meet Bollaert. In May 1948, for the first time since 1945, there were two Vietnamese governments in Indochina: one led by Hồ Chí Minh in the jungles of northern Vietnam and the other by General Nguyễn Văn Xuân under French tutelage in Saigon.Footnote ⁵⁸

While French support for its Vietnamese nationalist rivals was a great concern for the ICP, developments in the emerging Soviet bloc in late 1947 offered many opportunities. In Warsaw in September 1947, the Cominform was founded with the participation of nine European communist parties. The CPSU chief in charge of ideology, Andrei Zhdanov, spoke at the meeting and denounced the Truman doctrine as a new American plot to dominate the world. Zhdanov observed the formation of the two opposing politico-military blocs led by the US and the Soviet Union and vowed that the imperialist camp would be defeated. Zhdanov also mentioned Indonesia and Indochina as members of the ‘anti-imperialist and anti-Fascist front’. He called on all communist parties to seize the leadership of anti-imperialist movements in their countries.

A second development that would increase in significance over time was the formation of a communist guerrilla base in southern China together with the victory of CCP forces in Manchuria. On 20 December 1947, Mao Zedong read an important report at the Central Committee Plenum of the CCP, announcing a new phase of the civil war in China in which the Chinese Red Army would take the offensive. In his speech, Mao reviewed the military situation since the war began, laid out the People's Liberation Army's strategy to fight an initially stronger enemy, and credited the CCP's land policy for the successes. Two months earlier, a CCP land conference had approved a new land law in which land redistribution policy was consolidated for the first time since the start of the civil war. Thanks to their superb contacts abroad, both Zhdanov's and Mao's reports reached ICP leaders in little time.Footnote ⁵⁹

As the next sections will demonstrate, these shifts in the Soviet bloc had considerable impact on the thinking of Vietnamese communists. The idea of two opposing ideological camps struggling for dominance was not new to them and they had long supported the Chinese communists since the 1930s.Footnote ⁶⁰ Zhdanov's report signalled for the first time that Soviet policy towards the DRV might have been reversed; up till then Stalin had ignored all the requests and appeals by Hồ Chí Minh for diplomatic recognition and assistance. The formation of the Cominform suggested a more unified communist bloc and a more determined Soviet Union confronting the imperialist camp. The CCP's victories in Manchuria and its new base in southern China brought up the still vague but exciting possibility of physically linking communist Chinese and Vietnamese forces. Furthermore, Mao preached that a winning strategy did not require the appeasement of the landed classes, a policy that the DRV had pursued up to then. In fact, Mao argued forcefully that to mobilise landless peasants was a precondition for victory.

The anti-French war, events in China, and the beginning of the Cold War in Europe thus combined to create conditions more conducive to the adoption of radical domestic policy in Vietnam. Just as Hồ's government had given up hope for a quick negotiated solution and prepared for a long-term fight, exciting opportunities emerged for radicalising domestic politics and for fighting the war on a larger scale. Yet, as I have shown elsewhere, ICP leaders were not nationalist lambs being turned into communist wolves due to the force of circumstances.Footnote ⁶¹ On the contrary, it was the force of circumstances in 1945 that made them put on nationalist fur; with the new developments of 1947, they had no qualms in shedding that cover. The next section will examine domestic politics inside the coalition that made up the Việt Minh government during 1948. Given the politics, it is possible to argue that a Vietnamese civil war would have occurred even in the absence of the above international events.

Troubles inside the Việt Minh coalition government, 1945–47

Thus far I have shown how the ICP rose to power thanks to accommodation, but it had to make many concessions in its social revolutionary programmes. Even more important, it had to share power in many policy areas with non-communists who did not agree with its radical vision. It had to embrace colonial bureaucrats who as a group were conservative in their outlook. It was forced by circumstances to accept local authorities it did not trust. It had to open up party ranks to members of upper classes. These were the price to pay for its ascendancy to and retention of power during 1945–46. The communist strategy of using ‘fellow travellers’ to be discarded when no longer needed seems sound in theory,Footnote ⁶² but we can see below in the Việt Minh case that reality was a little messier than theory. Accommodation created many problems for the Việt Minh state and by 1948 these had become acute in three inter-related areas: land policy, leadership conflicts and the consolidation of state and party organisations.

When the Việt Minh front was founded in 1941, ICP leaders decided to put the issue of land redistribution on the back burner in order to foster a national coalition. At the same time, they also believed that national liberation did not need to delay social revolution; conducive international conditions could allow for both to take place at the same time.Footnote ⁶³ As they then reasoned, delay would not be necessary because once the Party, the vanguard of the proletariat, had seized the leadership of the nationalist revolution, the Party could easily direct this revolution to serve the socialist cause; in the nationalist revolution the Party would take control of the government and use it to carry out a social revolution; and once the Indochinese revolution succeeded, ‘the world would be like a boiling pot’. This situation would allow the Indochinese revolution to leap forward to launch a proletarian revolution and build socialism.

This thinking was expressed in land policy when the ICP established the Việt Minh state in late 1945. Although the communists did not call for land redistribution, they issued laws that required landlords to reduce rents by 25 per cent, to reschedule debts and to abolish certain rents for their tenants.Footnote ⁶⁴ These land laws suggested that, while the ICP was forced to accommodate landlords in the Việt Minh national front, it had not sacrificed its radical vision but was only biding its time.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet even this limited progressive agenda was not implemented.

Resistance to the land rent reduction policy was apparent as soon as the policy was issued. In response, ICP Secretary General Trường Chinh mounted public criticisms against separating the two revolutions as early as in September 1946:

Trường Chinh's criticisms reflected a certain division of opinion within the ICP, although we do not know who in the party leadership was criticised. Despite Trường Chinh's passionate appeal, things changed little for reasons having to do with the earlier compromise in 1945, to be explained below. In a comprehensive review of Party policies in the countryside in 1950, Trường Chinh would note that the rent reduction programme since 1945 was still unfinished business even in the areas under full Việt Minh control. The transfer of land confiscated from the French to peasants was either neglected or carried out too slowly.Footnote ⁶⁷ In extreme cases, tenants reportedly sent hundreds of letters to provincial and central governments to complain against cadres who were not fair or who refused to listen. Communal lands were not distributed as mandated by law. During the campaign to buy rice for the government, it was noted that the rich were often able to avoid having to sell, whereas the poor had to borrow rice at high interest to fulfil their obligations to the government. Where the rent reduction laws were implemented, they created great tension but were not remarkably effective in helping tenants.Footnote ⁶⁸

While land policy made little progress, a growing conflict was brewing between communists and non-communists at many levels of government by 1948.Footnote ⁶⁹ Now that the war was fought in the jungle and the ICP had trained a sufficient number of their own cadres to staff the government, urban intellectuals and French-trained professionals were far less useful to the Party than they had been in late 1945. The conflict between communists and non-communists and its outcome must be seen in this context. Non-communists resented the heavy-handed way communists, who were generally less educated, demanded and exercised authority in their professional spheres ranging from legal to economic to literary policies. With respect to rural policy, non-communists in the Việt Minh government supported land reform but were sympathetic to rich peasants.Footnote ⁷⁰ Because they sustained control of five state ministries, Justice, Education, Trade, Agriculture and Irrigation, their views were translated into moderate policies. Among these, the Justice portfolio was most important because it was part of the state coercive apparatus. It was also where the bitterest conflicts took place. When the Việt Minh state was established, non-communist Ministers of JusticeFootnote ⁷¹ appointed many French-trained professional lawyers as judges in provincial governments and in lower level judicial positions.Footnote ⁷² Where the rent reduction policy was carried out, these judges often, based on their own judgement and in the name of the law and judicial independence, sided with landlords against both tenants and local governments. Where they could, the judges ordered the release of people arrested illegally by local police. The judges also did not hesitate to order the arrest and prosecution of many corrupt local officials who were members of the clandestine ICP.Footnote ⁷³

Tension between communist and non-communist leaders was exacerbated by the Việt Minh state's inheritance of the colonial bureaucracy. Unlike in China, where the CCP got rid of most GMD bureaucrats in the first year, the Vietnamese state kept former colonial officials on its payrolls for years. There were early complaints about many ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ among those teachers inherited from the colonial regime. Party documents noted that colonial bureaucrats were unenthusiastic and even intentionally sabotaged government policies. Predictably, the marriage of a revolutionary party and a colonial bureaucracy did not go smoothly. As Trường Chinh wrote in 1946, the majority of political cadres were ‘loyal, enthusiastic, politically astute and resourceful but uneducated’, and perhaps illiterate.Footnote ⁷⁴ In contrast, state bureaucrats who were professionals, managers and intellectuals trained under the French were ‘educated but lacked interest in [revolutionary] politics’. Conflict was brewing by 1948: Việt Minh cadres looked down on and distrusted bureaucrats and professionals; the latter in turn argued that, because Vietnam had achieved independence, it was time for political cadres to be replaced by educated professionals who had the necessary skills to manage the state. The above conflict between executive and judicial officials in the government was known to ICP leaders as early as mid-1946.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1950, Trường Chinh would blame the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture and its local departments for this failure to carry out party policies. In hís words, these officials were leftovers from the colonial bureaucracy who did not come from peasant backgrounds, had little understanding of the rural situation, and did not care about peasant interests.Footnote ⁷⁶

Still, another area where problems emerged concerned the organisation of the ICP. A dilemma for ICP leaders was how to maintain accommodation while being selective in its membership policy. The ICP expanded rapidly from 1945 to 1950. From less than 5,000 members in late 1945, its membership exceeded 760,000 by 1950, an increase of more than 100 times.Footnote ⁷⁷ It turned out that accommodation trumped selectivity: in a count by Party leaders in 1952, more than 65 per cent of Party members came from petty bourgeois backgrounds.Footnote ⁷⁸ Vietnam's comparison with China is instructive. With a membership composed of mostly poor peasants, the Maoist state was more firmly rooted in the peasantry. The social character of this membership also made it suitable for implementing radical socio-economic programmes. With a party composed mostly of middle peasants and higher social classes, the radical dreams of ICP leaders were bound to meet internal opposition. The rent reduction policy noted above was not effectively implemented not only because it was stalled by non-communist bureaucrats and local judges, rather, the failure of the policy had its origins right within the ranks of the Party.

In sum, accommodation created many problems for communist leaders espousing a radical vision of social transformation, including difficulties in land policy implementation, the ‘contamination’ of the Party by bourgeois elements, and simmering conflicts with non-communists in the coalition government and with inherited colonial bureaucrats. These problems already existed in 1946 but became more acute by 1948. As I argue in the next section, these problems preoccupied the minds of ICP leaders when they decided to take their revolution down the radical road in 1948.

The radical turn of 1948

ICP policy was adjusted gradually over 1948 as its leaders reacted to new circumstances. Policy changes took place through key policy debates and two Central Committee plenums in January and August 1948. These changes included a more aggressive land policy (or peasant mobilisation, broadly understood) and a more proletarian party. Following the January Plenum, there were sharp public exchanges between non-communist and communist leaders in the government over the issues of judicial autonomy and the role of non-communists in the revolution. These exchanges would drag on until 1950 but had already by late 1948 revealed the deep and unbridgeable chasm between the two leading groups in the coalition government. Non-communists would not be removed totally from positions of authority until 1950 or so, but many of them started to ‘dinh tê’ (leave the maquis for French-controlled zones) in 1949 due primarily to resentment of the communists. While these events in Vietnam were by no means as drastic and violent as the civil wars in Malaya, Burma and Indonesia, 1948 in Vietnam was still the key turning point on a path that would be irreversible.

Let us begin by examining land policy. On 15–17 January 1948, the ICP held a plenum of the Central Committee to formulate policy in the new situation. The resolution of this plenum indicated Vietnamese communists’ excitement over recent international developments and announced key changes in their land policy, among other policies. The review of the international situation in the resolution noted the formation of the Cominform and highlighted key points in Zhdanov's speech. It began by saying that ‘The anti-democratic and democratic, imperialist and anti-imperialist forces have gradually aligned into two clear camps: “the anti-democratic imperialist” and the “anti-imperialist democratic” camps’, which was also a key sentence in Zhdanov's talk.Footnote ⁷⁹ The resolution observed that ‘the great offensive of the Chinese liberation army was fuelling a peasant rebellion [in the areas under GMD] and a land revolution [in the areas under the CCP] in China. The Chinese liberation army has [just] established a [new] base close to our Northern border.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Besides stressing that land rent reduction had to be more aggressively implemented, for the first time the Party ordered the confiscation of the land and property of Việt gian (traitors) either to redistribute to poor peasants or to let soldiers farm for self-reliance.Footnote ⁸¹ The Party also ordered the organisation of conferences for peasant mobilisation cadres at zone and provincial levels to escalate rural mobilisation.Footnote ⁸² Investigations of rural conditions [điều tra nông thôn] had been ordered previously but were not really implemented; now this became a priority, in part because the Party needed to know how much land traitors owned and could be confiscated from them.

The plenum also decided on a number of policies to consolidate the ICP as an organisation. The Party had expanded rapidly since 1945: in the last quarter of 1947, Party membership in the northern provinces alone increased by 10,000.Footnote ⁸³ Party leaders were not really happy with this increase, noting that workers still accounted for only 7 per cent and women 6.5 per cent of the total membership, while the majority of members came from the middle peasantry and the petty bourgeois. Party leaders decided to convene a national Party Congress in August 1948 because:

Besides a Congress (which eventually would be delayed several times until March 1951), the ICP Central Committee launched an ambitious membership campaign that set a target for party growth at the district level of 30 per cent in the following five months.Footnote ⁸⁵ Reflecting the Party's concerns about its membership being composed of too many upper-class people, recruitment was to be more selective: the targets were members of the army and local guerrilla forces, workers in state factories, and people in French-controlled zones and in ethnic minority regions. Not only were new members restricted to certain classes, but expansion also had to be accompanied by consolidation through increased training and planned activities. The goal was to have 20 per cent of all Party cells ‘consolidated’ in five months.Footnote ⁸⁶

Thanks in part to this membership campaign, Indochina approached global standards by early 1949 in the per-capita proportion of communist Party members. As Hồ Chí Minh proudly cited in his closing speech at the Sixth Central Cadre Conference in January 1949, while there were 20 million communists among 2 billion people all over the world, or 1 per 100; the ratio in Indochina then was 1 in every 112 people.Footnote ⁸⁷ Party membership increased by 300 per cent in the first 9 months of 1948 and 450 per cent throughout the whole of 1948.Footnote ⁸⁸ From a mere 20,000 members in late 1946, the Party had 50,000 members a year later, and about 180,000 by the end of 1948.Footnote ⁸⁹

Both land policy and party organisational consolidation indicated more radical steps on the path to a violent class struggle that would become full-blown in 1953. In symbolic significance, however, these policy changes did not match the debate between communists and non-communists in the Việt Minh government over judicial independence and local law enforcement. Beginning in 1948 and lasting till early 1950, this public debate was generally civil and policy-oriented but this did not mean that the stakes were low.Footnote ⁹⁰ Non-communists had control of government apparatus in the social, economic, cultural and judicial policy realms; urban intellectuals also played prominent roles in all branches of the government and had many supporters in the colonial bureaucracy and even within the ranks of the ICP. The debate was a rare public show of the brewing conflict between communists and non-communists at the top level of the Việt Minh state. Publicly this debate involved only a few people but was in fact closely watched by the top echelons of the leadership, by local officials and by those in law enforcement.

The front man for the communists was Quang Đạm, a protégé of Trường Chinh, an editor of Sự thật and the translator of many of Mao's works into Vietnamese.Footnote ⁹¹ Quang Đạm wrote with authority as a veiled public spokesman for the Party. On their part, non-Communists delegated Vũ Trọng Khánh, a French-trained lawyer and the attorney general of Zone 10, to be their chief representative. Vũ Trọng Khánh had been the Mayor of Hải Phòng under the EVN government and the first Minister of Justice in the Việt Minh government in late 1945. On the same side with Vũ Trọng Khánh was Vũ Đình Hòe, the secretary of the New Vietnam Party that had organised to support the TTK government during April–August 1945. Vũ Đình Hòe was a French-trained lawyer and became Minister of Education in late 1945 and Minister of Justice from 1946. The debate exposed and exacerbated the depth of the ideological cleavage between communists and non-communists, and following it, the ICP gradually withdrew authority from most non-communist officials.

The debate started with communist criticisms directed against the principle of judicial independence. It was with this principle that local judges justified their actions to curb the abuses of power by local government and Party cadres. The judges refused to follow the instructions of local administrative or Party committees and released people illegally arrested for political reasons. In his first two articles that started the debates, Quang Đạm launched two lines of attack, one against the capitalist judicial system and the other against French-trained intellectuals.Footnote ⁹² First, he argued that law and justice, as part of the state, functioned to serve class interests. Nothing was above class struggle in societies with classes. Judicial independence [tư pháp độc lập] and the separation of powers [phân quyền] might have helped the European bourgeoisie initially to restrain royal arbitrary authority but had since served as a myth to cover up the oppressive nature of the capitalist system there. In colonial societies, the colonial government also touted this myth but its courts never granted any justice to the colonised people and meted out thousands of cruel verdicts against nationalist revolutionaries. Judicial independence and separation of powers were not sacred and neutral principles as their proponents asserted. Quang Đạm focused on attacking capitalist law but made no effort to articulate a Leninist conceptual framework for socialist law. He raised class struggle as a theoretical issue and attacked the colonial legal system, but it was the interests of ‘the people’ and ‘the masses’ which he claimed to defend, not class interests.

Quang Đạm's second line of attack was directed at non-communist leaders who had been trained in colonial schools. He denounced ‘many intellectual elements’ that stayed aloof from ‘the masses’ and ‘the people’. These ‘elements’ were trained by the French and poisoned by old bourgeois theories that had been designed to serve the interests of colonial rulers and exploiting classes. They were full of self-love and believed in excessive individual freedom. They were motivated by envy, ambition and desire for social status and political power. Their specialised knowledge of law was simply experience in implementing complicated legal procedures and did not guarantee the realisation of justice, but they expected that such specialised knowledge was sufficient to afford them unrestricted freedom from any political control. Advertently or inadvertently they were helping the counter-revolutionaries by their insistence on judicial independence and by their criticisms of local administrative committees. Clearly Quang Đạm was speaking for the uneducated Party cadres who were frustrated with the seemingly arrogant French-trained intellectuals.

In response to Quang Đạm, his opponents denied the relevance and legitimacy of class struggle even as a theory. In particular, Vũ Trọng Khánh argued that law was not only a tool of the ruling class but also a tool to protect the weak against the strong and the powerful.Footnote ⁹³ Law transcended class struggle. Civil law, for example, was for mediating conflicts among ordinary people and had nothing to do with politics. Law was built on and reflected not only the will of the ruling class but also social customs practised by the masses of ‘the people’. Similarly, judicial independence was to protect ‘the people’ who were above any classes, and to prevent officials from abusing power in any regime, democratic or not. Vũ Đình Hòe pointed out that Vietnam had never had an independent judiciary from the ancient ages to the colonial period.Footnote ⁹⁴ It was ‘thanks to the August Revolution’ that ‘the people’ now could enjoy this progressive legal system. In other words, Vũ Đình Hòe implied that he was with ‘the revolution’, not against it. Judicial independence was neither feudalistic nor a colonial fig leaf; it was revolutionary.

Vũ Đình Hòe claimed that the judicial system he oversaw since the beginning of the revolution was entirely with ‘the people’. In principle, all judges were appointed by people's representative institutions such as the National Assembly and local People's Councils. At local levels, he noted that his ministry had already implemented a jury system by which ‘the people’ could participate directly in trying specific cases. Vũ Đình Hòe indirectly reminded the communists that according to the Constitution drafted in 1946 that was still in force, popularly elected bodies, not the communist party or the government, held supreme power. Judges were accountable only to these bodies. In other words, the message to the communists was, you are not identical with ‘the people’ and you ought to be held accountable to ‘the people’ too. In Vũ Đình Hòe's arguments, ‘the people’ as a collective were clearly presented as the sole basis of legitimacy, not social classes. He forced communist leaders to confront their own rhetoric and the still legitimate institutions created by their earlier accommodation with non-communists.

Vũ Trọng Khánh and Vũ Đình Hòe put Quang Đạm on the defensive: the latter had to justify that his side was with ‘the people’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Quang Đạm argued that the government and ‘the people’ were one because the former was made up of the best representatives of the people. To honour ‘the people’ meant to follow the government, especially local governments. Local committees were closest to ‘the people’; they knew the ‘desire of the people’ even better than the central government. It was not these committees but ‘the people’ who arrested Việt gian because they hated them. The arrests did not conform to due process because of special circumstances, but how could legal procedures be more important than ‘the desire of the people’? Local committees did not abuse their power; they were only acting in the interests of the people by helping with the arrests. Judicial officials should support rather than oppose those committees.

Although he launched the debate with class struggle theory, Quang Đạm was now forced to cling to a fuzzy concept of ‘the people’, which took him further away from class struggle. ‘The people’ [nhân dân] was imagined by Quang Đạm as a collective [tập đoàn], indivisible and resolutely committed to the struggle. The people had a ‘collective will’ that represented the supreme form of justice; and ‘the interests of the people’ should serve as the supreme principle of law. The people had a ‘collective desire’, which was that judicial cadres be loyal to them.Footnote ⁹⁶ Unable to match his opponents’ theoretical arguments, Quang Đạm turned to threats: ‘Under the Supreme Court which was the People's Court, under the Supreme Law which was the People's Collective Will, those who advertently or inadvertently used legal formalities to oppose the spirit of the law will be punished by the people.’

The debate lasted beyond 1948 but after the first round of articles by Quang Đạm and rejoinders by Vũ Trọng Khánh and Vũ Đình Hòe in 1948, it was clear where the differences lay and that they were unbridgeable. Although it was not fully clear that non-communists would soon be removed from power, it seemed only a matter of time before this would happen. Indeed, many French-trained judicial officials such as Vũ Văn Huyền and Trần Chánh Thành who were involved in disputes with local authorities began to flee the ‘liberated zone’ in 1949.Footnote ⁹⁷

Even though the ICP could not convene a national Party congress in August 1948 for practical reasons, by then it had firmly formulated a new and clear policy that would guide the revolution until 1953. At the Fifth Cadre Conference in August 1948, Trường Chinh read a lengthy report that, for the first time since 1941, formally placed the task of land redistribution back on par with that of national liberation. The end goal of the revolution was now being formally declared as socialism. The report was entitled, ‘We Fight for Independence and Democracy’, with ‘democracy’ understood as a ‘new kind of democracy’ [chế độ dân chủ mới] similar to that established in eastern Europe, North Korea and ‘liberated zones’ in China. Citing Zhdanov, E. Varga (French Communist Party), Gottwald (Czechoslovak President) and Dimitrov (Bulgarian leader and former top Comintern official), Trường Chinh argued that this ‘new democracy’ was a new invention of the world proletariat in applying Marxist-Leninist theory.Footnote ⁹⁸ ‘New democratic revolution’ was similar to the (old) bourgeois democratic revolution in the sense that both aimed at eliminating feudalism as represented by the landlord class. Yet ‘new democratic revolution’ was led by the proletariat, not by the bourgeoisie. ‘New democracy’ did not sound as advanced as the dictatorship of the proletariat as practised in the Soviet Union, but it still aimed at building socialism and communism. Thanks to favourable world conditions (available help from the Soviet Union and a capitalist camp in crisis), new democracies could develop socialism with less bloody class struggles.Footnote ⁹⁹ Trường Chinh concluded that ‘it is now time for the Indochinese revolution to show its true colours [hiện nguyên hình] … to be a new democratic revolution’ even though ‘[the DRV's] anti-French war could still be called a war of national liberation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In other words, wolves could now be wolves again. While Trường Chinh and the ICP still wanted to preserve the national unity front as much as possible,Footnote ¹⁰¹ we can see in this speech and its title that they were looking beyond national independence. They were looking forward to a day in the near future when they could achieve the second goal of ‘new democracy’, and they were actively preparing for that day to come through their land and other policies.