Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–1960

Front matter

Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945—1960

Alec Holcombe i) UNIVERSITY of HAWAI'I PRESS

MASS MOBILIZATION IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM, 1945-1960

CHAPTER 9 Hunger, 1953 179 CHAPTER IO Điện Biên Phủ and Geneva, 1954. 200

CHAPTER II The Period of the 300 Days, 1954-1955 219

CHAPTER I2 Reinvigorating the Land Reform, 1955-1956 239

CHAPTER 13 Fallout, 1956 259

CHAPTER I4 Re-Stalinization and Collectivization, 1957—1960 281

Notes 309

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the support, in different forms, provided by Peter Zinoman and Nguyén Nguyét Cám at the University of California, Berkeley. Thanks go as well to Virginia Shih, the university's indefatigable Southeast Asia librarian, and to a stimulating cohort of Vietnam-focused graduate students whose paths crossed with mine. They include Jason Morris, Martina Nguyen, Jason Picard, Gerard Sasges, and Nu Anh Tran.

In Vietnam, countless regular people gave me patience, warmth, and encouragement as I learned to speak their language. I am also grateful to the many intellectuals, archival staff members, and librarians in Vietnam who supported my research in various ways. Over the past decade, Dó Kién has been an invaluable liaison with the Vietnam Studies Institute, my sponsoring institution and an affiliate of the Vietnam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities. For their insights, advice, and friendship, the literary scholars Lai Nguyén Án, Pham Xuán Nguyén, and Pham Toàn have my warmest thanks. In Hanoi, two Western friends and dedicated Vietnamese language learners—Shay MacKenzie and Thadeus Hostetler—have long been sources of inspiration, knowledge, and humor.

Across the field of Vietnam studies more broadly, Christopher Goscha, Tuong Vu, Keith Taylor, Shawn McHale, Charles Keith, Haydon Cherry, Liam Kelley, and Michael Montasano have provided feedback on various writings and ideas of mine over the years. I thank them for their time and insights. Thanks also go to the scholar Alex Thai Vo who, to my good fortune, overlapped with me for several fruitful months in Vietnam's National Archives III. At the University of Hawai'i Press, Masako Ikeda has my warmest gratitude for her help in the publication process.

I conducted much of the work for this book as part of Ohio University's history department, whose members I thank for their support and friendship. I am especially grateful to Ingo Trauschweizer, Robert Ingram, Josh Hill, Ziad Abu-Rish, and Katherine Jellison for their guidance and support. In the wider Ohio University community, Jeffrey Shane, Pittaya Paladroi, Jeff Ferrier, Taka Suzuki, and William Frederick have helped me in different ways.

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XII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Extending farther back in time, I am grateful for the support that I have received from the Gowan family over the course of my life. During elementary and secondary school, I was blessed to have many outstanding teachers, including Rachel D'Ambrosio, Leonard Gulotta, Bruce Adams, the late Robert Pratt, Edward Dunn, and the late O.B. Davis. Since my undergraduate years, my life has been enriched by the ideas and experiences of seven university friends: Brian Dickinson, Albert Hanser, Benjamin Holbrook, Ludovic Hood, Trevor Patzer, Scott Roop, and Professor David Josephson. In various indirect ways, they are a part of this book. So too are my fellow teachers at the Timbertop School in Australia, especially Barnaby Buntine, Rachel Dobson, Roger Herbert, David Hobbs, Sam Ridley, Charlie Scudamore, Russell Shem, and Sophie Stuart.

Most of all, I thank my family. Melissa and Wendy, my two older sisters, were a positive influence during my younger years and remain so for my family and me today. My brother-in-law, Carl Kawaja, with the exception of times playing tennis or ping-pong, has been a tremendous source of support and inspiration. As for my mother and father, Marty and Tom Holcombe, I thank them for the many hours spent reading drafts of my work and, of course, for the years of love and support. To my daughter, Asa, and to my son, Thomas, in the words of the late Joseph Levenson, “You added years to the writing, but joy to the years.” And finally, to my beloved Dieu—I am proud to be your husband and friend.

ABBREVIATIONS, COMMON TERMS, AND ADMINISTRATIVE UNITS

CCP DRV

GF HCMTT

ICP

PRC TIU

VWP

VKDTT

Village Subdistrict

District Province

Party Congress

Party Plenum

Politburo

Chinese Communist Party

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Viét Nam Dan chit Công hòa) General File: Democratic Republic of Vietnam documents from 1945 and 1946 captured by French and held in Archives national d'outre-mer, Aix-en-Province.

Hồ Chi Minh toàn táp (The Complete Collection of Hồ Chí Minh's Writings)

Indochinese Communist Party (Dáng Cóng sán Dóng Duong): The name for Vietnam’s Communist Party from 1930 until 1945. People's Republic of China

Trung Tâm lưu trữ quốc gia số 5 (Nationial Archive Center

no. 3, Hanoi)

Vietnamese Workers’ Party (Dang lao dóng Viét Nam): The name for Vietnam's Communist Party from 1951 to 1976.

Van kién Dang toàn táp (The Complete Collection of Party

Documents)

Lang or thôn

Xá (a collection of roughly four to eight villages). I follow Benedict Kerkvliet's avoidance of the more common translation, “commune,” which could be confused with a collective farm.

Huyén: a group of several subdistricts.

Tinh

Dai bội Dang: Usually occurring once every five to eight years, it

is the Communist Party's most important event. Party congresses involve the election of new Central Committee members, retirements of current members, various changes in the administrative assignments, and the establishment of a new party agenda.

Hội nghi Ban chấp hanh trung uong Dang: A meeting of the party's Central Executive Committee that usually occurs twice a year. The plenums are numbered in sequence following the most recent Party Congress. For example, the 3rd Party Plenum means the third meeting of the Central Executive Committee since the last Party Congress.

Bộ Chính tri: The party's highest office, usually containing from ten to twenty members.

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Introduction

The English word “mobilize” has three Vietnamese equivalents: Puy déng, van dóng, and phát dóng. A popular Vietnamese dictionary defines huy dóng as “to call upon the majority to work at some essential task;” vån dóng as “to propagandize, to explain, to convince others to volunteer to do some sort of work;” and phat dóng as “to push something to action.” All three versions of “mobilize” reflect themes explored in this study.

When Hồ Chí Minh and other Indochinese Communist Party (ICP)? leaders seized power in August of 1945, they did so with little cash and few reliable means of generating it. During the previous four years, these revolutionaries had promoted their Vietminh front’ as an organization that would “abolish the head tax and other French and Japanese taxes." According to party propaganda, a Vietminh government would replace these taxes with a system that was "very light and fair." Yet, when the party leaders established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) on September 2, Hó concluded his inspiring Declaration of Independence with a line that suggested the opposite: “To guard freedom and independence, the Vietnamese people are determined to contribute all their physical and mental strength, and to sacrifice their lives and property?

The following day, September 3, Hồ chaired the first official meeting of the new DRV government and, in the spirit of the old Vietminh propaganda, requested that the government “immediately abolish” the head tax, market tax, and ferry tax as “inhumanely exploitative.” However, at the same meeting, he announced that every province should establish an Independence Fund. This would be aimed at “collecting money and goods that the people are happy to give to the government for the cause of national independence.” As a party newspaper explained, “before sacrificing our flesh and blood to preserve our freedom, we have a responsibility to sacrifice our personal wealth.””

On September 7, DRV leaders released a directive clarifying that, although the head tax would be abolished, all other taxes would be "changed gradually,"

which was to say, preserved for the time being.Š Yet, the patchy nature of what the historian Christopher Goscha calls the DRV’s “archipelago state,"? combined with widespread conditions of revolutionary upheaval, severely limited tax collection. That same day, DRV leaders announced that "anywhere the Vietnamese Liberation Army stays or passes through, the people must provide all possible help." According to the announcement, "the Liberation Army has permission to seize needed things such as furniture, houses, cars, etc." Owners of these commandeered articles would be supplied with "receipts" guaranteeing "full reimbursement."? For the moment, at least, the new government could not afford to pay for these items.

The DRV’s precarious financial situation compelled the party leaders to adopt a similarly practical approach to the old colonial state's salt, alcohol, and opium monopolies. Instead of disbanding these French colonial revenue generators, Hồ and his comrades decided to preserve them for the new DRY state." In the near term, though, the ability of these monopolies to strengthen the new government's financial situation was limited. Five years of occupation by Japan, isolation from France, and, more recently, bombardment by Allied planes had crippled Vietnam's economy.

Another potential source of revenue was rice, the primary economic output of about 80 percent of Vietnam’s population. However, only six months earlier, during the winter of 1945, a famine had devastated northern Vietnam. According to a study conducted by Vietnam's provincial governors in July of 1945, the total number of famine-related fatalities in the northern half of the country was 401,316." Most scholars feel that the number was closer to one million. Exporting meaningful amounts of rice to raise cash would not be possible for the foreseeable future. With hunger still widespread, the Vietnamese population would need every grain of rice. And, even with the DRY state's efforts to fight the “enemy famine,” an estimated eleven to twelve thousand people starved to death in northern Vietnam during the first half of 1946."

H6 and other DRV leaders probably hoped to find some financial relief through control of potentially lucrative coal mines, textile factories, and agricultural plantations. But these also proved to be of little help to the DRV government. Four years of war, the accompanying shortages in fuel and spare parts, the lack of technical expertise, and the overall atmosphere of lawlessness left most of these economic assets in an unproductive state. Generally, as the historian David Marr demonstrates in his remarkable account of the early DRV’s “material dreams and realities," Hó and other party leaders realized by March of 1946 that government expenses “far outweighed” revenues. In the words of Judy Stowe, the DRV simply had “few financial or economic resources."

The challenges facing the DRV grew greater still in December of 1946. At that point, the official outbreak of war with France forced DRV leaders to abandon Vietnam’s cities and relocate to the countryside. As Hồ and his comrades moved their center of operations from Hanoi to a secure region north of the capital, the French reestablished control over the country’s major roads, railroads, factories, mines, and so on. Especially damaging was France’s seizure of Vietnam’s best ports, a reality that restricted the ability of the “Hô Chi Minh Government” (as party leaders sometimes called it) to engage in international trade.

Faced with these financial challenges, and placed in circumstances of international isolation, the DRV leaders in early 1947 relied almost completely on the countryside. As Goscha shows, the DRV regime was able to find plenty of cracks in the French wall, exploiting old trade networks with Southern China and especially with Thailand. But, despite many ingenious efforts and small successes, the DRV ultimately lacked the money needed to equip a modern army."

Vietnam’s rural population comprised about 85 percent of the country’s eighteen million people. But the ICP’s influence in the countryside was uneven, meaning that much less than the entire rural population could be targeted for mobilization campaigns. Generally, the DRV enjoyed a “far stronger position” in the country’s northern half (about ten million people). Even there, though, DRV influence was hardly complete. Large areas of the Red River delta to the east of Hanoi would remain under French influence throughout the coming war. To the west and south of Hanoi, heading toward Central Vietnam, several Catholic-dominated enclaves resisted DRV influence as local priests warned that the new government was led by “godless” Communists.”

Vietnam’s party leaders built their DRV state in the context of the First Indochina War, a conflict that claimed an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 lives. Ofthose killed, roughly three quarters were Vietnamese soldiers and civilians." Like the Second Indochina War (1954 to 1975), the First Indochina War defies easy categorization. Dependingon the time, place, and person, the conflict could be seen asa civil war, a war for national liberation, a regional war for control over Indochina, and a proxy war of the Cold War. In 1949, the French officially established a non-communist alternative Vietnamese government called the Associated State of Vietnam. The purpose was to draw support away from the DRV, whose regions of control comprised an estimated ten million of Vietnam’s eighteen million people.” The newly established State of Vietnam would eventually mobilize an army of 200,000 soldiers to oppose the DRV forces. From 1945 until 1950, the DRV side, lacking weapons, was forced to limit the scale of military engagements with their much better armed French enemy. After 1950, the weapons gap was significantly reduced as the DRV began to receive Soviet and Chinese military aid. This enabled the party leaders to transform troops from their People's Liberation Army into seven infantry divisions. The fighting took on a more conventional and lethal character as both sides put the latest Easternand Western-bloc weapons to use on each other.

This study looks at the party's mobilization efforts between 1945 and 1960 in the northern half of the country. It was in this region that today's Vietnamese state was first constructed, largely as a response to the reality that the country's "entire people" were not always “determined” and “happy” to sacrifice everything for "freedom and independence." No country's people ever are. At some point, as fatigue and suffering grow, political leaders need an increasingly autocratic power to mobilize that necessary sacrifice.

Northern Vietnam: Geography, History, Culture

Since this story takes place primarily in northern Vietnam, some basic description of that region's geography, history, and culture may help the reader better understand the narrative that follows. Today, Vietnamese think of their country in both halves and thirds. When thinking in halves, the terms *North" and “South” are often associated with the twenty-year (1954-1975) division of the country into the DRV (North Vietnam) and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). When thinking in thirds, North and South are reduced in size to make room for a third region, the Center. This way of viewing Vietnam dates back to the reign of the emperor Minh Mang (r. 1820-1841). From 1832 to 1834, he made South, North, and Center official administrative units of his kingdom of Dai Nam (the Great South).? When the French colonized Dai Nam over the course of about thirty years (1858 to 1887), they adopted Minh Mang's three-section schema as a tactic of divide and rule. Hoping to stanch the growth of Vietnamese nationalism, the French gave each region—now named Tonkin (North), Annam (Center), and Cochinchina (South)—its own set of laws and regulations to discourage Pan-Vietnamese solidarity.

Though Vietnamese patriots during the colonial period resented this division of their country, the terms "North," "Center," and "South" remain in general use today. Distanced from the stigma of colonial divide-and-rule tactics, the terms now seem to refer, in a matter-of-fact way, to Vietnam's obvious regional differences of climate, landscape, dialect, and custom. To avoid confusion, I will use the terms “northern Vietnam” or “the North” and “southern Vietnam” and "the South" to refer to the country’s two halves. When thinking in thirds, I will

» e use the terms “Tonkin,” "Central Vietnam,” and “Cochinchina.”

The northern half of Vietnam is roughly the size of England and Wales. Generally, its rivers originate in the mountainous regions of Laos to the west and China to the north, and flow in a southeasterly direction into the South China Sea. The largest of Vietnam's northern rivers is the Red, which cuts diagonally across Tonkin. Most of northern Vietnam has four seasons that show significant temperature variation. In Hanoi, for example, winter temperatures can drop into the 40s; summer heatwaves can push temperatures up over 100 degrees for days on end. Closer to Central Vietnam, the variation steadily declines as the climate shifts to a two-season pattern of rainy and dry.

Scholars estimate that people began to inhabit the Red River delta in about 3,000 BCE. The origin of these early inhabitants remains a mystery. Some may have come down from the “North” (i.e., the region that now comprises the modern nation of China); others may have moved northward from more southerly regions of Southeast Asia. By around 2,000 BCE, bronze drums and farming equipment had come into use in the region. Were the people who used these items "Vietnamese"?? If the term has a geographical meaning, referring simply to the ancient inhabitants of the territory now comprised by the borders of the Vietnamese nation, yes. If, however, the term also carries with it a strong cultural meaning, as DRV leaders insisted, the appropriateness of labeling them *Vietnamese" is more questionable.

The scholar Keith Taylor, wary of Vietnamese Communist identity politics, has argued that a Vietnamese "cultural core" cannot be disentangled from three thousand years of Chinese cultural influence.?* That influence, thought to have begun around 2,000 BCE, stemmed partly from the peaceful movement of Chinese people into the Red River delta and partly from northern Vietnam’s subsequent millennium (111 BCE to 978 CE) as the southernmost province of the various Chinese empires. As Taylor argues, attempts to connect Vietnamese culture of today with a pre-Chinese past are about “self-affirmation,” not “scholarly endeavor.””

Wet-Rice Agriculture

The bronze drums from northern Vietnam’s pre-Chinese past do, however, indicate one obvious connection between the ancient inhabitants of the Red River delta and the more modern citizens of Hó Chí Minh's DRV: an economic life focused on rice farming. Though methods of irrigation had changed, the basic realities of this crop had not. For centuries, northern Vietnam's climate and soil had enabled two rice harvests a year: usually one in October (vu muta) and another in May (vy chiém).?6

Because of wet rice’s sensitivity to temperature changes, the crop needs to grow in water, which provides an insulating effect. It is no accident, then, that the most densely populated regions in Vietnam are those flat lowland areas best suited to water management. Conversely, the most sparsely populated regions are areas to the north and west where flat rice fields would need to be carved laboriously into mountain slopes. Of the North’s lowland areas, the most notable is the triangular-shaped region of the Red River delta. It fans out eastward about 140 kilometers from the inland city of Hanoi toward the coastal city of Haiphong. As the earliest known location of Vietnamese speaking peoples, the Red River delta is considered by Vietnamese to be the “cradle” of their civilization.

The ancient Vietnamese, like most farmers around the world, appreciated the relationship between land and security. Survival usually required access to land, and, whether peasants were “moral” or “rational” economists, the most appealing means of assuring that access was through owning the land one tilled.” A far less appealing means was through renting land—that is, acting as a tenant farmer. According to the scholar Christine White, “landlordism,” the renting out of land to laborers, was common throughout Vietnam. French land statistics from 1938 suggest that more than 80 percent of the total farmland in Cochinchina was farmed by renters. In Central Vietnam, the figure was probably around 30 percent, and, in Tonkin, the figure was probably about so percent.?? Peasant desire for land was a force that Communists hoped to exploit. Yet, peasant land hunger also contradicted the ideals of the DRV’s party leaders. As Marxists, these revolutionaries considered private property to be the root of exploitation and dreamed of its elimination.

Most Vietnamese elites of the late colonial period appear to have recognized the problem of agricultural productivity. About 80 percent of Vietnam’s population still earned their living primarily by growing and selling rice, yet the productivity of Vietnamese agriculture was one of the lowest in Asia. In 1940, Vietnam’s average yield for one hectare of paddy (wet-rice field) was calculated to be 1,330 kilograms. At that time, Japan’s was calculated at 3,300 kg per hectare; China’s, 1,900 kg; Thailand’s, 1,800 kg; Burma’s, 1,700 kg; and Indonesia’s, 1,500 kg.” The productivity level of Vietnam’s rice fields was fundamental to the nation’s health. How could an independent Vietnam hope to compete in the world if its rice fields trailed far behind those of its neighbors?

In the North, agricultural productivity was complicated by overpopulation. Writing in 1936, the great French geographer Pierre Gourou began his study of the Tonkin Delta with the line: “The Tonkin delta is a plain of limited expanse: it covers only 15,000 square kilometers; but it is extremely populous because it must nourish. . . 6,500,000 peasants.” This, Gourou explained, gave the delta an "extremely high" population density of 430 people per square kilometer. As the northern population continued to grow, the Tonkin delta region lost the ability to comfortably feed itself.” Increasingly, rice surpluses from the South were needed to make up the deficit in the North. In 1937, Cochinchina had a population of about 4,600,000 while Tonkin's was nearly double at about 8,700,000. Yet Cochinchina’s total area of rice cultivation (2,300,000 hectares) was nearly double that of Tonkin's (1,200,000).*! To Vietnamese revolutionaries, the seriousness of this economic and demographic problem in the North justified radical solutions.

Vietnamese Communist Explanations: Class and Colonialism

Most of Vietnam’s Communist Party leaders also came from elite rural families, but, through study of Marxist-Leninist theory, had adopted a “proletarian viewpoint.” To these revolutionaries, Marx’s stress on class conflict applied all too well to village life in Vietnam. Wealthy families accumulated ever greater quantities of land, dominated village politics, and exploited the labor of the poor majority. As the father of Vietnamese communism, Nguyén Tat Thanh (later known as Hé Chi Minh), wrote in his 1927 book, The Road to Revolution:

The capitalists of the countryside are the landlords. They want to maintain the feudal system and hold onto the people’s land. In the countryside, all power lies in the hands of these elites. They treat the peasants like buffalos and pigs, forcing them to stay quietly in one place to till the landlord’s fields. In their dealings with traders, the landlords want a free hand to tax merchant goods, and they demand that traders ask permission to travel through local areas [. . .]. In many ways, the landlords inhibit the growth of new trade.”

The comment about inhibiting the “growth of new trade” added a national crime to the landlord class’s local ones against peasants. The landlords were backward, and they selfishly thwarted the development of Vietnam’s native bourgeoisie, which the nation needed to modernize and strengthen.

Vietnamese Communists also connected landlordism with colonialism. As the future party Politburo members Trường Chinh (1907-1988) and Võ Nguyên Giáp (1911-2012) argued in their 1938 study, The Peasant Question:

Since the French came to Indochina, land has become more and more concentrated in the hands of the great landlords, especially in the hands of priests and French colonialists.

The reason is that the French who came to Indochina brought capitalism with them, which transformed old Vietnam’s entire economic system.

To Indochina, they brought capitalists who opened trading firms, constructed factories, dug mines, and built plantations. Industry and trade began to develop. On the one hand, they produced some goods here; on the other hand, they brought French goods here to sell to people in the colonies. Industrial goods . . . flooded into this country. Native producers went bankrupt because they could not compete. This especially hurt peasants, the majority of whom had produced handicraft goods to supplement their income between harvests. No longer able to sell their wares, many peasants went bankrupt and were forced to sell their land to landlords. Peasants would have to go work for the landlords and rich peasants, or work as laborers in provincial towns, toiling in factories, in mines, and on plantations.

In their 1938 book, Chinh and Giáp pointed out the myriad ways in which the colonial economic system was rigged against the Vietnamese. The colonial government, usually through taxes or direct intervention, “can and usually does prevent colonial goods from flowing into the French market where they could compete with French-made products." This was done “to support industry and craftsmen in France.” Similarly, Chinh and Giáp noted how France's colonial and metropolitan governments "taxed only very lightly" raw materials sent from Indochina back to France. This was another way in which colonial economic policies promoted the development of French capitalism at the expense of Vietnam; development. In a similar vein, Chinh and Giáp described the exploitative nature of the colonial government's alcohol, salt, and opium monopolies. The French attempted to ensure that their Vietnamese subjects would have to purchase these items only from the colonial government and at prices higher than would have been the case in free-market conditions.** As the scholar Gerard Sasges describes in his study ofthe Indochina alcohol monopoly, the French used "fines and imprisonment" to suppress native competition.»

Collectivization

Nguyễn Tat Thành, Trường Chinh, Võ Nguyên Giáp, Pham Van Đồng (1906-2000), and other DRY leaders apparently believed that Vietnam rural population, if pushed (or forced) to try a collectivized system, would ultimately “awaken” (giác ngô) to its superiority over the old private property system. Initial peasant anger at losing their land to the state eventually would turn to gratitude as they saw the greater security and superior productive capacity of a collective farm. The Communists took it on faith that this revolutionary change was both desirable and inevitable. As Shawn McHale points out, the DRV leaders were “didactic” and “elitist” in their approach to the people. Like other educated Vietnamese, they "assumed that they had the right and the duty to tell the masses how to act and think."?

Some Vietnamese doubted whether a collectivized system would work with wet-rice farming. One such person was the scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988). He had served the DRV cause until 195.4 when the party's radical land reform campaign turned him into a strong anticommunist. Chi came from an elite rural family in the Northern province of Thanh Hóa, about 160 kilometers south of Hanoi. The irrigation aspect of wet-rice farming struck Chí as something that would challenge a collectivized system. Because northern Vietnam’s rice fields required the maintenance of set water levels, farmers had to construct dikes around their fields to hold water in place during the long periods of little rain. As Chí explained, "The rice grower's greatest worry, which is always with him, is the possibility of a break or hole in one of the dikes which could permit the water to flow away." Such a circumstance could mean the loss of the entire crop:

During the period of private ownership of land in North Vietnam, it was common to see the peasant farmer strolling about his land for hours on end, inspecting the dikes, while his wife and children ceaselessly hunted the small crabs which burrow into, and sometimes through, the dikes of rice field. Whenever it began to rain, he would abandon whatever task he might be engaged upon and run to his rice fields with all speed. There he would watch his dikes to ensure that they were equal to the strain of the increased weight of water, strengthening them in the weakest places, and seeing to it that his neighbor did not break them so as to steal water from his fields. So great was the peasant's solicitude for water in pre-Communist Vietnam that noisy disputes about water stealing, which frequently degenerated into

IO INTRODUCTION noisy scuflles, were part of daily life in villages. So essential is water for rice growing that negligence on the part ofthe farmer might easily result in the loss of the whole crop and the consequent ruin of his family."

Chi doubted that dike maintenance and other labor-intensive tasks of rice farming, which tended to ruthlessly punish carelessness, would receive adequate attention if responsibility for them were spread collectively.

He also questioned the potential benefits of applying Soviet-made farming machines to rice farms in the DRV. Agricultural mechanization was an important part of the party leadership’s rationale for combining small, individually farmed fields into large, collective ones. How would a farm machine such as a tractor operate in the watery environment of northern Vietnam’s rice fields? How could a machine replace human hands for the process of planting rice, which required placing partially grown rice seedlings delicately back into the underwater soil, one by one??? At the time of Chí's writing (1962), Japan was only just starting to develop a “rice transplanter” machine that could seed a wet-rice field.”

The Nationalism of the DRV’s Party Leaders

Vietnam’s Communist Party leaders were militant nationalists in the broad sense of that term: they loved their country, fought with tireless courage for its independence, and yearned to restore dignity to the Vietnamese people after decades of French domination. Upon seizing power in the “August Revolution,” the party fed the Vietnamese people a steady diet of inspiring nationalist propaganda, none better than that produced by Nguyén Tat Thanh himself. Thanh— frequently using his constructed character, H6 Chi Minh—assured Vietnamese from all walks of life that their lives and actions mattered. He exhorted young and old to look beyond family and village, to see that their nation, Vietnam, the “fatherland,” needed them. Especially in the revolutionary atmosphere of 1945 and 1946, this nationalist message was a potent component of the DRV regime.

But Thanh and his comrades were also true Leninists, and this shaped their way of using nationalism. First, they followed Lenin’s two-stage revolutionary strategy for seizing power in colonized countries. During the first, “bourgeois democratic” stage of the revolution, the party would aim at mobilizing all classes for the nationalist goal of expelling the foreign power. After this initial “anti-imperialist” stage, the party would shift to the second, “socialist” stage of the revolution. At that point, the native bourgeoisie and the landowning class in