Viet Nam by Ben Kiernan

Author:Ben Kiernan [Kiernan, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190627300
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

French rule also brought to Cochinchina a massive expansion of the cultivation and export of rice and, to a lesser extent, of its import of manufactured goods. The colony’s economy became increasingly tied to external markets. In the years 1860–77, Cochinchina’s annual rice exports rose from 57,000 to 319,000 tons. The number of European ships entering Saigon harbor each year rose from 272 in 1865 to 403 in 1877, while the number of junks and barges fell from 5,500 to 3,500.149

Exploitation of the international rice market brought major changes to the geography and ethnic makeup of Cochinchina. In the countryside, French officials and entrepreneurs began to supervise the draining of large swampy areas, especially those long inhabited by Khmers in the western Mekong delta, digging canals and opening up much new land to cultivation. The years between 1886 and 1930 saw the draining of 1,425,000 hectares (ha) of land in western Cochinchina, whose population increased from 391,000 to more than 1.45 million.150 This increase affected all three major ethnic groups of western Cochinchina.151 But Khmers lost ground to Vietnamese westward internal migration. From 1886 to 1928, in-migration plus natural increase in the western delta saw the number of Vietnamese there rise to 1.13 million, while the number of ethnic Cambodians grew more slowly to 224,000, and the ethnic Chinese population reached 44,000.152 Every year small numbers of ethnic Khmer families chose to move upriver into Cambodia.153

Throughout Cochinchina from 1873 to 1920, the area of cultivated riceland increased sixfold—from 275,000 to 1,752,000 ha. The population more than doubled to 3.8 million. Cochinchina’s rice production increased tenfold from 300,000 tons in 1870 to 3 million in 1930. Its rice exports continued to soar, quintupling from 295,000 tons in 1880 to about 1.5 million tons in 1920.154 The increases in Cochinchina’s cultivated area and labor force more than compensated for the local impact of the successive El Niño droughts during the period 1876–1902, and later when the years 1913 and 1914 fell among the forty driest years in southern Việt Nam’s entire climate record.155

But in social terms the fruits of the economic expansion were ever more unevenly distributed. A small number of absentee landlords with large estates, both French and Vietnamese, monopolized most of the new riceland in the west, and landlordism also became dominant in central and eastern Cochinchina. Trần Bá Lộc, for instance, became one of the south’s leading landowners. By 1930 only one-quarter of the rural families in Cochinchina owned any land. Tenants farmed four-fifths of the cultivated area.156

Rural society in Tonkin and Annam remained rather different from Cochinchina. From 1884 each of these Protectorates came under the authority of a French résident-supérieur, but unlike in Cochinchina, Vietnamese mandarins remained in place and Vietnamese law in force. At the village level, councils of notables retained much of their influence, and the proportion of communal land (công điền), which came under the village council’s authority, remained significant: 20 percent of the cultivated area in Tonkin and 26 percent in Annam (more than 50 percent in Quảng Trị and Quảng Bình provinces), compared with only 2.

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