Vietnam: A New History by Christopher Goscha

Author:Christopher Goscha [Goscha, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465094370
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-09-12T18:30:00+00:00

RESETTING COMMUNIST VIETNAM AND THE REPUBLIC OF HO CHI MINH

Extending DRV Sovereignty above the Seventeenth Parallel

In October 1954, Ho’s government returned to Hanoi and began administering the previously Franco-ASV territories, towns, and public buildings. At the outset, the People’s Army of Vietnam was in charge. It tracked down and crushed armed minority groups that had worked with the French in the highlands. The security services went after real and imagined enemy spies and sleeper cells, worried in particular by those in the Greater Vietnam coalition who had dominated the Associated State of Vietnam bureaucracy. Despite their support of Ho Chi Minh in the early years, Catholics and ‘minority peoples’ were as suspect as the ‘sects’ were for Diem in the south. Meanwhile, the People’s Army of Vietnam troops received orders to slow down the massive exodus of people to the south via military force if necessary, as its officers carefully extended the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s highly militarized ‘resistance administration’ into their new territories in the north. These particular areas (mainly in the river delta valleys and the big cities) were new because they had not formerly been part of the DRV; they had been administered originally by the French, and thereafter by the French in partnership with the Associated State of Vietnam. General Vuong Thua Vu, the man who had led the Battle of Hanoi in late 1946, ruled the capital, until civilian authorities took over about a year later.

Although the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) had often been able to recruit communist cadres who had operated covertly in the ‘occupied zone’ of the Associated State of Vietnam during the conflict itself, after the war the new leadership found it had little choice but to maintain many of the former regime’s civil servants as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam opened police stations, schools, tax offices, census bureaus, and hospitals. The government nevertheless carefully collected information on people in the new zone, checked their family backgrounds, listed their occupations, ethnicities, and religions. Officials introduced the DRV’s laws, flags, currency, and stamps. Street names in Hanoi changed yet again as old monuments and statues gave way to new ones. Ho Chi Minh’s portrait went up on office walls and stamps everywhere (as did Diem’s in the south). The Democratic Republic of Vietnam extended its national project through new school manuals, history books, officer- and teacher-training schools, and a host of cultural activities.

From late 1954, the party also went to work communizing all of ‘North Vietnam’, carefully extending the rectification, emulation, propaganda, and mobilization campaigns to the areas which the French and the ASV had previously administered. Next to Uncle Ho’s portrait hung pictures of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. Of course, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam never abandoned nationalism and anticolonialism as its official ideologies. But as in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba, the Vietnamese leadership introduced communism as the new state religion and deployed class as the new category for defining social and political identity. Peasants, workers, and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.