Before the Revolution (Long, Ngo Vinh) (z-lib.org)

EX UBRIS





BEFORE THE REVOLUTION: THE VIETNAMESE
PEASANTS UNDER THE FRENCH

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION: THE VIETNAMESE
PEASANTS UNDER THE FRENCH
Ngo Vinh Long

Columbia University Press Morningside Edition
Columbia University Press
New York Oxford
Copyright © 1973 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Morningside Edition with new preface
Copyright © 1991 Columbia University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ngo Vlnh Long,
Before the revolution / Ngo Vinh Long,
p. cm.
Reprint. Originally published: Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-231-07678-9; ISBN 0-231-07679-7 (pbk.)
1. Vietnam—Rural conditions. 2. Villages—Vietnam.
3. Peasantry—Vietnam. I. Title.
[HN700.5.A8N44 1991]

306'.09597—dc20 91-17043
CIP

@

Casebound edition of Columbia University Press books are Smyth-sewn and
printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of America
c 10 98765432 1
p 10 987654321

Da chang may giac Phap cam quyeh; lai cii mdc da man quen
thoi.

Toi, toi, toi, dat mam xuong, khoai chat lan rfin; kho, kho, kho,
\y

ritdng dua Ibn, cbm van khong muoi.

Ill fortune, indeed, for power has been seized by the French
invaders, who are bent on barbarous deeds, as is their wont.

It’s criminal, criminal, criminal to set out the food tray and
find that one has nothing but roots and greens to eat;

it’s misery, misery, misery to take up the chopsticks and have
one’s meal cry out beseechingly because of a lack of salt.

(From a popular chant in Sb tuyen van thb yeu nilbc va each
mang, tap II, tii dau the kj XX den 1930)

.

Preface to the Morningside Edition ix

Foreword xxi
Alexander Woodside

Preface xxv

I ANALYSIS

1 Land Expropriation and Land Concession 3

2 Tenant Farming and Sharecropping 43

3 Taxes and Tax Collection 61

4 Usury and Agrarian Credit 83

5 Industry and Foreign Trade 101

6 Hunger and Starvation 121

7 Conclusion 137

II TRANSLATIONS

1 The Peasants (Dan Que) 145
Phi Van
Chapters 2 and 4

2 When the Light’s Put Out (Tat Den) 161
Ngo Tat To
Chapters 12 and 13

CONTENTS

3 Dead End (Buoc Duong Cung) 177
Nguyen Cong Hoan
Chapters 4, 18, 19

4 Mud and Stagnant Water (Bun Lay Nuoc Cong) 205
Hoang Dao
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Part II

5 Who Committed This Crime? (Ai Gay Nen Toil) 219
Tran Van Mai
Chapters 1-10 and 12—19

Bibliography 277

Glossary of Weights and Measures 287
Index 289

viii CONTENTS

This book came into being partly as a result of interactions
with and reactions to many Cambridge academics who were
either contributing directly to the Vietnam War effort or
were helping to rationalize it to the American public. By and
large, these intellectuals constantly denied the Vietnamese any
social basis for their revolution. They totally disregarded the
impact of close to a century of brutal French domination over
the Vietnamese people, especially over the Vietnamese peas¬
ants who constituted over 90 percent of the population of the
whole country. Perhaps some of these intellectuals assumed
that the social and economic ills created and perpetuated by
the French had no relevance whatsoever to the American
presence in Vietnam. The majority, however, were ideologues
who wanted to distance the United States from the taint of
colonialism. As a result, they resorted to highly questionable
theories, such as the so-called power vacuum left behind by
the Japanese after World War II, and to “cultural analyses”
such as the Confucian “Mandate of Heaven,” to explain away
the Vietnamese people’s tremendous struggles against colo¬
nialism and imperialism and their deep-rooted reasons for
revolution. They sought to rationalize the American support
of French colonial reconquest and the subsequent direct
American effort at “nation-building” through the use of fire¬
power and high explosives.

In the spring of 1967, for example, a Harvard professor of
mine—who was at that time a consultant to both the State De¬
partment and the Defense Department, and who later became
National Security Adviser and Secretary of State—returned
from one of his “fact finding” tours of Vietnam and an¬
nounced cheerfully in a series of lectures that the United
States was winning the war as well as the minds and hearts of
the Vietnamese people. He said that this had come about as a
result of the massive military presence of the United States;

PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

and he explained that since most Vietnamese were Confu-
cianists they seldom remained neutral in a conflict to which
one side to the struggle was perceived to have superior force,
and that winning side always carried the “Mandate of
Heaven.” As far as the peasants were concerned, the profes¬
sor indicated that they were simple-minded and did not really
care which side was winning and which side was losing as
long as they were left alone. He joked that every time he
asked the peasants a simple question, they gave him epic
poems as answers. When I tried to explain to the professor
that his “Mandate of Heaven” was a curious blend of the
western concept of “might makes right” and the American
concept of the “bandwagon effect,” and that during election
time in the United States some jumped on the bandwagon
and others did not, the professor cutely dismissed me—to the
laughter and giggling of some of my classmates—for having
produced another epic poem.1 And so I wrote the professor a
twelve-page letter—later independently obtained by The Har¬
vard Crimson and published in its June 2, 1967 issue—in
which I again explained that the Confucian “Mandate of
Heaven” was not the same as the western concept of might
makes right since it stressed moral superiority and not over¬
whelming brute force as the key to political legitimacy; that
the Vietnamese operated according to their own sets of cul¬
tural values and principles, which were very different from
the Chinese, and historically included the defense of and
struggle for their national independence and sovereignty at
all costs; and that political legitimacy in Vietnam traditionally
required adherence to the kind of political and moral econ¬
omy acceptable to the majority of the national community,
the peasants included. In the last page of this letter I wrote
that, given all the things that I had described, it would be im¬
possible for the U.S. to win in Vietnam. No doubt that with

x PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

the use of force the U.S. might defeat its ‘enemies,’ but they
will not let it become the victor. Victory in Vietnam requires
more than force alone. ... If those people are defeated to¬
day, they . . . will fight again when they can recuperate their
strength.”

Upon reading the above lines another Harvard professor
informed me that “every society, like every human being, has
a breaking point,” Vietnam included. For almost two years I
produced many pieces of work for this professor, the original
manuscript of this book included, to try to prove the deep-
seated support for and the resiliency of the Vietnamese revo¬
lution. In the end, the professor was convinced that the key
to success in Vietnam was his elaborate “force-draft urbaniza¬
tion” theory. Or, as an American general had put it more suc¬
cinctly, if the people were to the revolutionaries as the ocean
was to fish, then the United States was going to dry up that
ocean. By 1972, according to official U.S. sources, American
bombing and pacification efforts in the southern half of Viet¬
nam had been responsible for over 10 million refugees and
up to 2 million deaths out of a total estimated population of
less than 19 million.2 And yet, beginning in the spring of
1972, the Vietnamese revolutionaries staged a series of
nation-wide offensives that liberated many areas and forced
Nixon and Kissinger finally to sign the Paris Agreement that
spelled the beginning of the end of the Saigon regime and
the war.3

It was in the kind of atmosphere just described that this
book was first published by the MIT Press. Because of the
problem of space and because of my strong belief that it was
essential for a historian to be able to capture the emotions
and feelings of the periods under discussion, I gave priority
to translated materials and intentionally narrowed myself in
the introductory essay to a concise, but graphic and careful,

xi PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

discussion of the peasants’ living conditions during the high
noon of the French colonial period (1900—1945). I wanted to
direct the attention of readers, especially specialists, to these
translated materials in order to familiarize them with some of
the basic sources in the Vietnamese language on the plight of
the peasants as well as sources on the behaviors of their var¬
ious exploiters, both of colonial and local origin. I took spe¬
cial care in producing literal, but readable, translations so that
they could be used for language-training purposes. (This aim
is even more relevant today as there are now more than
800,000 ethnic Vietnamese in the United States who have the
increasing need to study either Vietnamese or English, or
both.) The introductory essay was meant principally as a gen¬
eral historical background for appreciating the translated ma¬
terials. To provide a sense of perspective I also referred
briefly, whenever necessary for comparative purposes, to the
situations under the worst regime in Vietnamese history—the
Nguyen court—as well as to a couple of extremely deprived
areas in southern China. In the original preface, I wrote: “In
this study I have also avoided discussing peasant rebellions
for the simple reason that I do not believe their living condi¬
tions were the only causes of rebellion.”

I wrote those lines because at that time I was already work¬
ing on a study that tried to identify many of the factors that
led the Vietnamese peasants to rebellion and finally to revolu¬
tion. I knew how complicated these factors were and how
peasant rebellions and peasant revolutionary struggles were
closely linked to national struggles, which in turn related to
the international situation. The Vietnamese peasants were no
longer living in their “small worlds” or isolated “communes”
as many French and American anthropologists were fond of
calling them, certainly not after the intrusions of colonialism
and imperialism. For example, beginning in late April 1930

Xli PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

thousands, and then tens of thousands, of peasants staged
large demonstrations to celebrate May Day as well as to de¬
mand the abolition of taxes, the return of stolen lands, social
justice, freedom, etc., and these demonstrations were quickly
transformed into full-fledged rebellions that took the French
more than a year to pacify. In the central provinces of
Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh the peasants, under the leadership of
the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), took over the two
provinces and formed the “Nghe Tinh Soviets,” which they
defended for over a year in spite of brutal French pacification
efforts.4 The French Special Commissioner of the Surete in
Nghe-An wrote in his summation of the situation that the
movement was definitely political and was essentially directed
against the French and that hundreds of these people who
had been arrested confessed that they wanted above all to
fight imperialism.5 Yet a noted American academic, who re¬
lied heavily on my work for his book, has called this a
Depression rebellion in spite of the fact that the impacts of
the Great Depression did not reach Vietnam until mid-1931.6
By which time, as I have shown in great detail in several stud¬
ies, the effects of the Depression as well as the arrest and im¬
prisonment of about 16,000 political activists actually led to
the demise of the movement. There were almost no peasant
struggles, revolutionary or otherwise, until after the economic
situation recovered in late 1935, and until thousands of politi¬
cal activists were released from jail in 1936, as a result of the
ascendancy of the Popular Front in France. From 1932 to
1935 the Vietnamese peasants suffered unprecedented ex¬
ploitation, repression, and oppression. Their social and eco¬
nomic conditions were improved as political struggles surged
in the later half of the 1930s, both in the countryside and in
most towns and cities. At times, tens of thousands of peasants
were brought into cities like Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon for mas-

xiii PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

sive demonstrations. As I have shown in these studies, the
peasants fully understood the linkage between the economic
and political spheres and had learned the importance of pro¬
tecting their leaders and of listening to their analyses and in¬
structions. These were key factors for the success and resil¬
iency of the Vietnamese struggles.7

I cited the above facts to indicate that by limiting myself to
a description of the peasants’ living conditions and by not
talking about their struggles or lack of struggles during cer¬
tain periods in this book, I have consequently understated
many of the problems confronted by the peasants and have
perhaps even given the impression that their situations pro¬
gressed—or deteriorated, to be more precise—on a steady
course. The expropriation of the peasants’ communal lands,
for example, was much worse during periods without strug¬
gle, and the systemic repression and oppression also in¬
creased.8 As a result, there developed a definite linkage be¬
tween the social and political sphere in the peasants’ world
view. In describing high rents and in not talking at the same
time about what types of landlords the peasants carried out
their struggles against, for example, I have left the impres¬
sion that all economic exactions were perceived as equally ex¬
ploitative and oppressive by the peasants. But as I have ex¬
plained in the studies just cited, the identities of the
exploiters and oppressors were of extreme importance to the
peasants. I have also shown that many landlords did become
supporters and leaders of the revolution. The question, there¬
fore, was not just economic but also political. And class link¬
age was a key to the success of the Vietnamese struggles.

This is not to deny the relevance of this study to the spe¬
cialists as well as the general readers who would like to un¬
derstand something about the driving forces behind the peas¬
ants’ participation in the Vietnamese revolution. In fact, there

xiv PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

is currently no study in English that is at the same time so
readily accessible to the general reader and useful to specialists
as this book. And this is the reason why some specialists have
suggested it to the Columbia University Press for this re¬
print—and I sincerely thank them both for this effort. Per¬
haps even worse than the lack of good sources on the Viet¬
namese peasants is the fact that there has been an incredible
rewriting of Vietnamese history since the end of the war and
this has served either to denigrate or mystify the roles of the
peasants in the Vietnamese revolution.9 Many other authors,
like their predecessors during the 1960s, have ignored the
plight of the peasants during the French colonial period alto¬
gether and have focused instead on iffy analyses of military
strategies in the quest to show that the United States could
have won in Vietnam. Therefore, there is an even greater
need to remind these authors, as well as the hundreds of
thousands of American readers they want to influence, that
the United States could never have achieved what it set out to
do in Vietnam because it violated every known cultural and
political value held dearly by the majority of the Vietnamese
people, the peasants.

But this present book of mine is not geared toward this
task. It was originally meant to be concise and to be only one
piece of the mosaic of the world of Vietnamese peasants that
I have tried to put together. Some of the other pieces in the
mosaic are my other studies—some of which I have cited in
the notes below—where I have shown, in considerable detail,
that the Vietnamese peasants were not simply animals react¬
ing angrily to hunger. Instead, they were patient human
beings who organized themselves cell by cell, block by block,
friendship association by friendship association, mutual aid
group by mutual aid group, village by village, district by dis¬
trict, and so on, in the hope of liberating themselves and their

xv PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

country. It was this hope for a better world—as well as the
knowledge of possible success in creating such a world—that
propelled them into action and made them so resilient in
their struggles. An example of this resiliency was the case of
the province of Long An, which was the key province for
American pacification and destruction partly because it was
situated strategically on the southern border of Saigon. Ac¬
cording to American figures, in 1968 it had a total population
of 350,000. By the end of the war, the province had lost
84,000 combatants in the struggle. Yet it was this province
that managed to successfully infiltrate its guerrilla forces into
Saigon and to fight bravely there during the first two phases
of the Tet Offensive in February-March and May-June 1968.
Long An was one of the first provinces to liberate itself well
before the surrender of the Saigon government on April 30,
1975.10

I would also like to reaffirm the relevance of the conclu¬
sions in my introductory essay to the present book, especially
the last couple of sentences (p. 141): “Under the French, the
convergence of all these factors did not just bring hunger,
misery, and starvation to the peasants. Because of the way
they were institutionalized, they dealt Vietnam’s economic
and social fabric a blow from which ... it has not yet re¬
covered.” The validity of this assertion has become even more
evident since the end of the war as postwar efforts at recon¬
struction and development have consistently been impeded
by structural obstacles created and perpetuated during the
French and American periods. And the leaders of the new
Marxist regime who are supposedly well-grounded in histori¬
cal dialectics have nevertheless compounded the problems
with their bureaucratic mobilizations, which are actually small-
scale versions of the ahistorical Chinese “Great Leap For¬
ward.”11 Some of these leaders are clearly displaced peas-

xvi PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

ants—elements declasses as the French have called them—who
need to have their feet firmly planted on the ground again.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere appreciation and
gratitude to the thousands of Vietnamese and Americans, as
well as hundreds of people from other countries, whom I
have met and who have given me tremendous support during
the last twenty-odd years since the first publication of this
book. Many of these people have become my very good
friends and have helped me achieve, at least on a personal
level, one of my most cherished wishes. In an address I gave
at the PAX Award Dinner on March 7, 1969 to honor former
Senator Ernest H. Gruening of Alaska, in which I analyzed
the Vietnam conflict, I concluded with the following sentence:
“I sincerely hope that we can bring to an end all this so that
today’s enemies might become tomorrow’s friends.”12 Today,
as I am writing these lines twenty-two years after I gave that
speech and sixteen years since the Vietnam War ended, I am
hoping fervently for reconciliation among all Vietnamese and
Americans and for friendship between the two peoples,
knowing full well that Washington is still a long time away
from normalizing relations with Vietnam. And I hope that
the Vietnamese peasants, who have suffered most of all just
because they have had the temerity to defend their rights to
life, will see a better future for themselves, for their children,
and for their children’s children, and that their simple aspira¬
tions will not be dashed again by great power politics.

Notes

1. This flawed “Mandate of Heaven” was later expounded on, with great
flourish, in Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and American
Vietnam (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, Little, Brown and Company, 1972)
The author received a Pulitzer and other prestigious awards for this book.

xvii PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

For two detailed reviews of this book, see my “Fizzle in the Lake” in the Jan¬
uary issue of Ramparts and my “Rewriting Vietnamese History” in Journal of
Contemporary Asia (1980), vol. 10, no. 3.
2. Relief and Rehabilitation of War Victims in Indochina, Part IV: South Vietnam
and Regional Problems, hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate Prob¬
lems Connected with Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judi¬
ciary, United States Senate, 93rd Congress (U.S. Government Printing Of¬
fice, 1973), p. 3.
3. For the most up-to-date analysis of this period see my article, “The NLF
Rebuilds: The Untold Story of the 1969-1972 Period” in Indochina Newsletter
(November-December 1989), no. 60, a publication of the Asia Resource Cen¬
ter, 2161 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02140.
4. For the most detailed study of this situation in English see my “The Indo¬
chinese Communist Party and Peasant Rebellion in Central Vietnam, 1930-
1931,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (October-December 1978), vol. 10,
no. 4. For my most recent study on how the struggles of the Vietnamese
peasants were closely entertwined with the national struggles from 1850 un¬
til 1989, see “Vietnam: The Real Enemy,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
(April-December 1989), vol. 21, nos. 2-4.
5. AOM:ICNF (Indochine Nouveau Fonds, Section d’outre-mer des Archives
nadonales), Carton 333, Dossier 2686.
6. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in
Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
7. Ngo Vinh Long, Peasant Revolutionary Struggles in Vietnam in the 1930’s
(Harvard Ph.D. thesis, 1978), 760 pages. Also see the following studies of
mine: “Rewriting Vietnamese History,” “The Indochinese Communist Party
and Peasant Rebellion . . . ,” and “The War and the Vietnamese” in Harri¬
son Salisbury, ed., Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War (New York: Har¬
per and Row, 1984), pp. 227-235.
8. Ngo Vinh Long, “Communal Property and Peasant Revolutionary Strug¬
gles in Vietnam,” Peasant Studies (Winter 1990), 17(2): 121-140. For details
of struggles and consequences in various periods during the 1930s see Peas¬
ant Revolutionary Struggles.
9. For examples of the rewriting see my “Rewriting Vietnamese History” as
well as my article, “The New Vietnam Scholarship” Journal of Asian Studies
(February 1985), 44(2): 337-341.
10. For details of the revolutionary control of this province and its roles in
the 1968 Tet Offensive see my study, “The Tet Offensive and its Aftermath:
4 he Revolutionary Fighters of Long An,” Indochina Newsletter (March-April
1988), no. 50. The casualty figures are given on p. 9 of this issue.
11. For some of my writings on this subject see "Vietnam’s Troubled Econ¬
omy: View from the Village,” Indochina Issues (December 1980), a publication

xviii PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

of the Center for International Policy, Washington D.C.; “Agrarian Differ¬
entiation in the Southern Region of Vietnam,” Journal of Contemporary Asia
(1984), vol. 14, no. 3; “Problems of Rural Transformation in Southern Viet¬
nam,” Indochina Newsletter (January-February 1986), no. 37; and “Some As¬
pects of Cooperativization in the Mekong Delta” in David G. Marr and
Christine P. White, eds., Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas in Socialist Development
(Cornell University, Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program, 1988),
pp. 163-173.
12. For full text of this address see The Harvard Crimson, March 27, 1969.

XIX PREFACE TO THE MORNINGSIDE EDITION

■

For English-speaking readers, this book is likely to serve as a
forceful, unpleasantly chilling introduction to some very repre¬
sentative Vietnamese views about what Vietnamese relations
with the industrial West have meant to Vietnamese society over
the past century. The actual subject under study is the social
result, in rural areas, of the policies of French colonial adminis¬
trators in Vietnam between the 1880s and 1945. But the impli¬
cations of Mr. Long’s translations, revealing as they do what was
on the minds of many Vietnamese, spread well beyond this
pivotal period of six or seven decades. The author would be the
last to claim that this book, or any other book, was the last word
on the subject.

In the work that follows, Mr. Long introduces a very small
sample of the extremely rich legacy of writings on social change
bequeathed posterity by Vietnamese writers in the 1920s and
1930s. Many of these writers were men in a hurry—prolific,
tormented, and often short-lived. Hoang Dao, the lawyer, jour¬
nalist, and nationalist politician who portrays the “mud and
stagnant water” of decaying Vietnamese villages, also wrote
novels, short stories, satirical reminiscences, and books of
political theory; he died at the age of forty-one of a heart con¬
dition in Kwangtung. Another social novelist of the 1930s, one
who does not appear in Mr. Long’s book but with whom
Western scholars should become acquainted, Vu Trong Phung,
began his career as a secretary in a large French commercial
firm in Hanoi. He wrote candid, devastating novels like Ky
nghe lay Tay [The Industry of Marrying Frenchmen], Giong to
[The Hurricane], andLwc xi [roughly, Loaded Dice, an exam¬
ination of the relationship between colonialism and prostitu¬
tion] and then died of tuberculosis at the age of only twenty-
eight. Nguyen Cong Hoan, the former schoolmaster who looks
in the following pages at the “dead end” of Vietnamese rural
life, wrote at least eighty short stories in the first five years of his

FOREWORD

writing career (1930-1935), as well as a number of longer
efforts. The pages of the Hanoi-centered journals for which
these men wrote—Tien thuyet thu bay [Saturday Novels], Ngo
Bao [Midday Report], Ich Huu [Reliability and Friendship],
and hosts of others—were, as Mr. Long testifies, often indirect
but sophisticated platforms of opposition to French rule.

A very different Vietnamese periodical of the colonial period,
Thanh Nghi [Clear Counsel], is one of Mr. Long’s important
sources. Appearing in the first half of the 1940s (1939-1945) as
a monthly, a biweekly, and then a weekly, it was the organ of a
new group of intellectual youth, French-influenced, most of
whom had been to Paris and many of whom had had serious
legal training. Such men were uncommon, outside the ranks of
the civil service, before 1940—evidence of the sluggishness of
colonial education. Their journal, whose title referred to the
disinterested remonstrances given to the emperor by loyal,
incorruptible mandarin intellectuals (ching-i in Chinese) ,
covered politics, economics, history, and education with imag¬
ination, analytical dedication, and a more intensely indigenous
perspective than any found in French-language surveys. Once
again, Mr. Long points the way in showing Western scholars
the importance of a basic East Asian historical document, long
neglected in Vietnamese studies as well as in more general
Western theoretical discussions of such problems as the culture
of poverty and rural development.

Mr. Long himself is hardly a stranger to rural Vietnam. He
came to the United States in 1964, graduated with an A.B. de¬
gree from Harvard College in 1968, and is currently (1971) in
the History and Far Eastern Languages Ph.D. program at Har¬
vard University. But he was born in Vinh Long province in the
Mekong Delta and spent most of his boyhood in rural areas of
southern Vietnam. After receiving a middle school education in
Saigon, he reimmersed himself in the countryside, serving as a

XXII FOREWORD

mapmaker in the early 1960s. With such a background he is
qualified to be both a “chronicler of lowly and misery-stricken
categories of people”—the title given to Nguyen Cong Hoan
after the publication of his first collection of short stories in
Hanoi in the 1930s—and a new upholder of the great Viet¬
namese tradition of the “investigation of things,” economic and
cultural, in the manner of a Le Qui Don or a Nguyen Van Sieu.

It is the hope of the Vietnamese Studies Project at the Har¬
vard East Asian Research Center that this book will represent
only the beginning of the conscientious exploration of pre¬
viously unplumbed Vietnamese journals, newspapers, novels,
and other twentieth-century or pre-twentieth-century writings
by scholars in the West. To this end the project is directed.
Alexander Woodside
East Asian Research Center, Harvard University

xxiii FOREWORD

-

In the past thirty years or so the determination and the resil¬
iency of the Vietnamese peasantry in the struggle against the
French colonizers and their American successors have demon¬
strated the truth in the oft-quoted Vietnamese saying that “in
times of turmoil the peasants come first and the scholars
second.” But in spite of the crucial role they play in the recent
history of their country, the Vietnamese peasants are seldom
mentioned in English writings on Vietnam. Of the writers who
mention them at all, the great majority simply ignore the ques¬
tion of their living conditions during the French colonial
period. The assumption, oddly enough, seems to be that what
happened to the peasants at that time has no bearing whatsoever
on more recent events—a misconception of which the forces of
the National Liberation Front, at least, have never been guilty.
Nor is the treatment of those writers who do discuss living con¬
ditions under the French much more satisfactory. By and large
they approach the matter from the point of view of the col¬
onizers or the landlords. This is done either inadvertently,
through uncritical use of French sources (that were usually
written to justify French colonial policies), or intentionally,
because of the need to rationalize the present American inter¬
vention. Instead of looking from the peasants’ point of view at
how much of their crops they could keep, in general these
writers maintain that the French improved the rural situation
in Vietnam because of French achievements in lengthening the
mileage of canals, asphalt roads, and railroads, and in opening
up new areas for cultivation, and that French failure was a case
of not applying sufficient or appropriate technology to farming.
This, presumably, can now be done by the Americans with their
technological know-how and with their electric water pumps,
mechanical plows, chemical fertilizers, and so on. The implica¬
tion, of course, is that there is no need for social change, only
a need for technological improvements. Thus American aid can

PREFACE

be of more help to the Vietnamese peasantry than a social
revolution and its prophets.

These oversights have prompted this book. It is an attempt to
begin the restoration of the peasantry to its rightful place in
recent Vietnamese history.

Part One of the study briefly traces the peasants’ living con¬
ditions during the high noon of the French colonial period
(1900-1945). It details the impact upon the peasant of the
French policy of land expropriation and free land concession;
the resulting problems of tenant farming and sharecropping;
and the roles of taxes, tax collection, usury, government agrar¬
ian credit programs, and industry and commerce in determin¬
ing the peasants’ living standards. The essay’s aims are twofold.
First, the essay seeks to demonstrate that the usual picture of the
peasants’ condition depicted in the published works of French
and Vietnamese government officials, economists, agronomists,
and others—as well as in the official records of the colonial
administration—is contradicted by the very facts that these
sources marshal to support their case. Second, the essay attempts
to provide the reader with the historical background that forms
the context of the translations in Part Two of the study.

As for the complementary” translations, which comprise Part
Two, they are offered principally in the hope that they will help
the reader to get beyond the cold facts and statistics of Part One
and enable him to gain a feeling for what it meant to be a
peasant in colonial times.

Beyond this, the readings raise a historiographic issue of some
importance. Under the French, all books and newspapers were
censored. Most strictly censored of all were nonfictional essays
(perhaps because the essay is usually the preferred vehicle of
political commentary in Europe). Consequently, Vietnamese
writers were driven to use the style and form of the novel and
short story when they wanted to write about social, economic, or

xxvi PREFACE

political issues; and some of the best documentation of the
conditions of peasant life appeared in fictional disguise.* This
fact is widely recognized in Vietnam; after their subjection both
to the censorship of the colonial administration and to the
scrutiny of a generation of the reading public, many of the
“documentary fictions” (phong su tieu thuyet) and the essays in
“realist literature” (van chuong ta chan) have come to be con¬
sidered by Vietnamese the most informative and effective social
commentaries of their time. Future historians of the colonial
period will have to reckon with these Vietnamese sources that
hitherto have been completely overlooked.

The materials chosen for translation comprise but a tiny
sample of the great bulk of literature on rural life that appeared
during the colonial period. Even so, because of the problem of
space, generally only a few short chapters are selected from each
work. While every attempt has been made to render the selec¬
tions into readable English, the original style and figures of
speech are maintained as much as possible. Perhaps students of
the Vietnamese language can benefit by using these literal trans¬
lations as a study aid in reading the original writings.

Finally, a word about my approach. It has become fashionable
in recent years for studies of national peasantries to seek to
defend or criticize some theory (or theories) about the peasants
in general. All too often, these efforts tend to obscure the facts
in the particular case. I have eschewed such theoretical exercises
and sought only to present a straightforward account of the

* The difference in the attitude of the censors toward “nonfiction” and
“fiction” was quite striking. While “Mud and Stagnant Water” (one of the
readings) is quite conservative by the standards of the late 1930s, it was
immediately banned upon publication because it was written in the essay
style. In contrast, two other readings (“When the Light’s Put Out” and
“Dead End”) that appeared as novels in the same year—and were much
more devastating critiques of rural life—were allowed to circulate with
the full blessing of the censor.

XXV11 PREFACE

living conditions of the Vietnamese peasants under the French.
I hope that the conclusions are clear for any who wish to draw
them. In this study I have also avoided discussing peasant re¬
bellions for the simple reason that I do not believe their living
conditions were the only causes of rebellion. The various factors
that led the Vietnamese peasants to rebellion and finally to
revolution will be discussed in a separate study that is under
way.

The writing of this book was accomplished mainly in the
period 1968-1969.1 am grateful to my father, Mr. Ngo Ngoc
Tung, for having sent me most of the sources used for the
writing of this book and hundreds more that are not cited here
but that I hope to utilize in a future study of the Vietnamese
peasantry. I also wish to express my sincere appreciation to
the Harvard-Yenching Institute for the generous scholarships it
has given me for my graduate studies at Harvard University, in
connection with which I wrote the shorter paper from which
this book grew.

Throughout the whole undertaking a number of scholars and
friends have given me extremely valuable advice and comments.
I am grateful to Mr. William R. Carter, an old friend and a
classmate, and Dr. John L. Gliedman, another very good friend,
for their warm encouragement and useful criticism. Mr. Carter
helped me type the manuscript twice to allow me the necessary
time for attending to my other projects. Sincere appreciation is
extended to Professors John K. Fairbank and Alexander B.
Woodside for their careful reading of the manuscript. Professor
Woodside and Mrs. Olive Holmes of the Harvard East Asian
Research Center Editorial Staff gave me extremely valuable
editorial help with the final draft of the manuscript. Needless
to say, no one but myself is responsible for the shortcomings.

Ngo Vinh Long

xxviii PREFACE

ANALYSIS



LAND EXPROPRIATION AND
LAND CONCESSION

Vietnam became a colony of France by stages during the second
half of the nineteenth century. Cochinchina—the six southern
provinces in the ambit of the city of Saigon—was seized by the
French navy from the control of the Vietnamese court during
the reign of the emperor Tu-duc in the period 1859-1867. Cen¬
tral and northern Vietnam succumbed to French military
aggression in the 1880s, and by 1885 Vietnam had lost its polit¬
ical independence. Politicians and militarists of the French
Third Republic spoke of fulfilling a “civilizing mission” (la
mission civilisatrice) in a society that was, in fact, older than
France itself, but they understood very little of the society they
sought to improve. Frenchmen in Vietnam itself began by
examining institutions, looking at them as if they were im¬
movable objects or timeless sources of influence and drawing
limited conclusions from them based on their own particular
fields. Ethnologist administrators like J. Silvestre described the
structure of the Vietnamese family, and novelists like Albert de
Pouvoirville explained that filial piety was more important in
Vietnam than romantic love. Little attention was paid to the
Vietnamese peasantry; in particular, little attention was paid to
the political and social processes of change among the peasants.

Indeed, at the time France conquered Vietnam, the peasantry
had already been serving as the spearhead of the social up¬
heavals that occurred repeatedly under the first four Nguyen
emperors: Gia-long (1802-1820), Minh-mang (1820-1841),
Thieu-tri (1841-1847), and Tu-duc (1847-1883).1 These up¬
heavals were precedents for the peasant politics of the colonial
period, yet the French invaders of Vietnam were ignorant of
them. Partly the upheavals were the result of the emperor Gia-
long’s cruel repression of his surviving adversaries from the
civil wars of the late 1700s, the supporters of the Tay-son
monarchy that had briefly unified Vietnam in the 1780s but
then disintegrated in the 1790s.2 Partly these social upheavals

4 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION

were the result of floods, droughts, crop failures,3 and “bandit”
invaders like the French,4 all of which reduced the livelihood of
the peasantry and created unmanageable political problems for
the dynasty.

In spite of all its troubles and shortcomings, the Nguyen
court’s land policy nevertheless made some responses to the
needs of the population. During the Nguyen as well as during
earlier dynasties, all the land in the country belonged in theory
to the king, and people paid him taxes for the privilege of work¬
ing it.5 Thus the king could grant to individuals a certain
amount of land to be used as “private land” (tu dien) and grant
to villages or groups certain areas to be used as “public land”
(cong dien). In theory, the grants were conditional. The king
had the right at any time to take back any land he wished with¬
out being obligated in any way to grant compensation.6 How¬
ever, in practice, whenever the king recovered lands, he
estimated their value and compensated the farmers accordingly.7

During the Ming Chinese invasion (1407-1427), because of
the social, economic, and political disruptions it brought about,
Vietnamese land distribution had become extremely lopsided.
Land tended to accumulate in the hands of collaborators and
opportunists, who profited from the disorder brought on by the
invasion. So some villagers had a lot of land to work, while
others had none.8

After the Ming armies were driven from the country, Emperor
Le Thai-to (1428-1433) adopted the quan dien (“equal field”)
land system in an attempt to put a limit on the amount of land
an individual could own and to distribute land to those who did
not have enough.9 This system, which had its origin in China,10
did not mean, however, that everybody would receive equal
amounts of land. It only meant that people of the same rank
and the same social status were supposed to receive equal
amounts of land. For example, a duke received more land than

5 ANALYSIS

a marquis, a marquis more than a count, a count more than a
baron, and so on down the hierarchical ladder. A civil official
received more than a military official of the same rank, court
officials received more than local officials, and officials in general
received more than common people. Among the common
people, males between the ages of eighteen and sixty were to
have more land than men over sixty; free men received more
than bondsmen. Nobody, however, might own more than his
legal share. In fact, the term for land granted to individuals was
“personal share land” (khau phan dien). This land was to
revert to the state for redistribution when the cultivator
reached the age of sixty or upon his death. In China, under a
similar system under the T’ang, this land was also supposed to be
redistributed annually by the country magistrates to provide
those who came of age their “personal shares.” In Vietnam,
under the Le, the “personal share land” was redistributed every
four years in proportion to the increase or decrease of paddy
laborers and the increase or decrease of the cultivated surface in
a given area.11

In 1804, several years after he had proclaimed himself em¬
peror, Gia-long again put into effect the Le land system, which
was now also known as the “personal share land system” (khau
phan dien che). Under this system, civil and military officials
above rank 1A (that is, bureaucrats who had been given the
noble titles of duke, marquis, and so forth) received eighteen
parts, or shares (the size of a share varied with the locality).12
Land was given in place of salary.

A bureaucrat with rank 1A received 15 parts (phan) of land, a
2A official received 14 parts, a 9B official, who was the lowest
ranked, received 8 parts, and the most land a vigorous, tax-
paying adult male peasant could expect to receive was 6i/2
parts.13

A peasant who was affected by long illnesses received 5i/2 parts;

6 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION

old men above sixty years of age who were exempted from tax
received 4y2 parts each; old men who were seventy years of age
or older received 5i/2 parts; tax-exempted young boys (that is,
between sixteen and eighteen) and tax-exempt patients
received 4 parts; orphans and widows received 3 parts.14 Exactly
how much land a part was equal to depended on the specific
locality and period. In general, however, the most a vigorous
peasant could receive was five mau* and the least the lowest
grade of commoner received was several sao (one-tenth of a
mau).15

To make more land available to the commoners, the court
switched policies in 1814 and began to pay its bureaucrats
regular salaries:

In 1814 Gia-long granted all district magistrates serving in
provinces from Quang Binh south a monthly salary of money
and rice and a yearly sum of money for “spring clothes.” In
1825 Minh-mang began to award exiguous stipends to sub¬
officials. The real turning point probably did not come until
1839, when a graduated salary system was devised which paid
fixed salaries in money and rice to officials from 1A to 3B in
bureaucratic rank twice a year, to those from 4A to 7B four
times a year, and to those from 8A to 9B once a month. The
yearly sum of money a 1A official received (400 quart) was more
than 21 times the yearly salary of a ninth grade official (18
quart). It was only in 1839^0, significantly, that the court
attempted to deny participation in the communal profits of the
“public lands” in their neighborhoods to salaried bureaucrats
and to reserve these profits exclusively for peasants and un¬
salaried sub-bureaucrats.16

From that time on, the only land that could be held by senior
bureaucrats was “sacrificial land” (te diert or tu diert), land that
was used for the purpose of maintaining ancestral graveyards
and paying for the expenses of the ceremonies conducted in

* A mau of land was equal to 3,600 square meters (roughly nine-tenths of
an acre).

7 ANALYSIS

honor of the ancestors. The maximum amount of land that
could be held by a member of the royal family or by a court
official bearing the noble title of cong (duke) was only ten mau.
A hau (marquis) might own eight mau; a ba (count) six mau;
a tu (baron) four mau; and a nam (earl) three mau.17 Begin¬
ning in 1883, by the order of the court in Annam, meritorious
officials who were given land for ancestor worship or for old age
now had to return all their land to the state for distribution
among the population. In place of the land they were paid forty
quart per mau per year, which was equal to the price of the
productivity of the average piece of land minus tax and produc¬
tion costs.18

Besides the khau phan dien, which was redistributed every
three years in proportion to the increase or decrease of grantees
and the increase or decrease of the cultivated surface in a given
area,19 land was given to the villages for various kinds of com¬
munal uses. The division of these lands followed a pattern
traditional under the dynasties. The terminology varied from
village to village and from period to period, but in general these
lands consisted of: luong dien (or “salary land”), given to
soldiers as part of their salaries; tro suu dien (or “tax assistance
land”), used to help the poor pay their taxes; hoc dien (or
“study land”), used for paying teachers and supplying students
with educational materials; and co nhi and qua phu dien (“01-
phans and widows land ’), which was for helping orphans and
widows. The sale of these “public lands” (cong dien) was for¬
bidden.20 They could be rented to private cultivators, however,
for a maximum of three years, if the rent money was devoted to
village business. Before 1844 village chiefs (xa truong) had the
power to decide whether such land could be rented for three
years. After 1844 a law specified that written rental documents
had to be signed by ten members of the village as well as by the
village chief. In these documents the villagers had to explain the

8 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION

emergency that made it necessary for them to rent the lands and
also which lands were being rented and what their values
were.21

As in the case of the “personal share lands,” the availability
of the “public lands” differed from one region to another. The
one exception to this was the “salary land” for soldiers. In 1809
the Nguyen court had measured out the available amount of the
luong dien (“salary land”) in the whole country and decided that
soldiers would receive from eight sao to a mau of this land,
depending on the individual’s various military service. Besides
the “salary land,” all soldiers received equal parts of the “per¬
sonal share land.”22 Beginning in 1820, the first year of Emperor
Minh-mang’s reign, guards of various types were given a mau of
“salary land” each, as well as nine parts of “personal share
land.”23 Beginning in 1833, soldiers were given land according
to the different duties they performed. The most prestigious of
the soldiers, the personal guards for the officials and the grade
A military guards of palaces, received one mau of “salary land”
and nine parts of “personal share land” each. The lowest-paid
soldier, the road guard, received seven sao of “salary land” and
seven parts of “personal share land.” 24

In China the “equal-field” land system had begun to break
down in the first half of the eighth century because of popula¬
tion increases, corrupt officials, multiple grants to the same
individuals (as rewards for meritorious services), and the
registration of most of the holdings as permanent possessions.25
Vietnam did not escape some of the same problems. They were
most acute in the province of Binh Dinh.26 There—owing to
land usurpation and multiple grants—some landlords possessed
estates from 100 to 200 mau before the land reform of 1839. The
amount of private land comprised more than 70,000 mau,
whereas public lands in the province totaled no more than 7,000
mau. Official corruption was yet another problem. In 1828, for

9 ANALYSIS

example, Nguyen Cong Tru, a high official with extensive ex¬
perience in the provinces, sent a memorial to Emperor Minh-
mang saying that in many villages local officials were getting
together to rent communal lands for private profit and, in order
to pocket some of the land tax and head tax money, were send¬
ing in false reports on the amount of cultivated land and the
number of males coming of age.27

Nonetheless, these problems generally did not get out of hand
because the country was small enough for effective governmen¬
tal enforcement and control. The 1839 land reforms, for ex¬
ample, not only were draconian on paper, but were actually
enforced. As a result, in a single blow half of the private lands
in Binh Dinh were converted back into village communal lands.
All that one landowner was allowed to keep was five mau,2S and
the landlords were not compensated for the land confiscated by
the government.29 Also, officials, no matter how highly placed,
who usurped the land of the people or rented communal land
for private profit or beyond a certain authorized date were
severely punished and dismissed from their posts.30 (Any person
who exposed such official misdemeanors would be given a mau
of first-grade land as a reward for a three-year duration.31)

The court’s land system was not really as equitable as the
term “equal-field” might suggest, but it at least had helped to
keep land from becoming overly concentrated in the hands of a
few.32 The village communal land had also helped in the solving
of various welfare problems. In fact, except for the difference in
scale, the personal share land could be compared to the “private
plot” or “5 percent land” and the village communal land to the
“cooperatives” practiced today in North Vietnam.33 In spite of
its problems, the Nguyen land system worked reasonably well.34

The French take-over of Vietnam affected the ruler’s supreme
ownership of the land and the land policy of traditional Viet-

10 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION

namese courts. The changes introduced were not uniform, dif¬
fering according to region.

In Cochinchina (Nam Ky), as a result of the occupation and
of the treaties of June 5, 1862 (clause 3), and of March 15, 1874
(clause 5), the Vietnamese court ceded complete sovereignty to
the French. The French colonizers in turn issued the decrees of
January 20, 1862, of May 16, 1863, and of June 22, 1863, which
attempted to rearrange the pattern of landownership in the
Mekong Delta. The decree of January 1862 proclaimed that all
land that did not belong to, or was not occupied by, the indig¬
enous people would be confiscated.35 The May 1863 decree set
up statutes to protect and guarantee rights of ownership, par¬
ticularly the “rights” of the French colonizers. The decree of
June 1863 ordered that all Vietnamese peasants who had aban¬
doned their native villages were to return to them before the
middle of September of that year in order to claim their land
and to continue working on it. Otherwise, after that date all
lands not claimed in such a manner would be confiscated by the
colonial administration.36

Behind this clinically precise decree lurked the vast ambitions
of the activist naval officer who served as governor of Cochin-
china from 1863 to 1868, Admiral De la Grandiere. De la Gran-
diere was determined to crush the various resistance movements
that plagued the French rulers in southern Vietnam in the early
1860s and to govern the Vietnamese population in the south
directly through the famous corps of French military officers, the
“inspectors of native affairs,” that he created. He was the pug¬
nacious prophet of a Cochinchina that would be forever
French.” To fulfill his own prophecy, he granted all the land in
the Ky Hoa area in southern Cochinchina to French citizens
(and at no cost to them). The French recipients of the admiral’s
largesse subdivided the land grants into lots of twenty to thirty

11 ANALYSIS

hectares, which they then rented to Vietnamese. The fee was ten
francs per hectare for the first five years and twenty francs per
hectare annually for the following twenty years. Vietnamese
could, in fact, buy certain of the lots outright, it is true, but
only if they could meet the price set by the French: two hun¬
dred francs per hectare.37 Many of the concessions the admiral’s
Saigon regime made to French citizens were larger than 30
hectares; some exceeded 4,000 hectares.38 One Frenchman
amassed an estate of more than 12,000 hectares, according to one
report.39

But De la Grandiere’s aggressive vision of a “forever French”
Mekong Delta did not rest entirely upon the artificial creation
of an instant French landed gentry in Cochinchina. Vietnamese
were part of the vision, too—Vietnamese who have been re¬
garded by the Vietnamese nationalist tradition as “collab¬
orators for having allowed the French to win, or purchase,
their loyalties. These persons—often Catholics, sometimes mem¬
bers of the new colonial militia, occasionally mandarins
alienated from the Vietnamese court—also received hundreds of
hectares of paddy lands free, by fiat of the French admiral in
Saigon. Most of these lands belonged to people who had left
their native villages when the French began to invade and
occupy the country.40 With the help of the French, the col¬
laborators legalized their new ownership claims. The result was
that when the original owners of these lands came back as
ordered by the decree of June 1863—even if they managed to
come back before the set deadline—they were often forced to
become tenant farmers or sharecroppers on their own land.41

Tonkin (Bac Ky) and Annam (Trung Ky) were established
as “protectorates” according to the treaty of June 6, 1884. The
emperor, formally at least, retained his rights over administra¬
tion and landownership in these two regions; yet, informally,
the French gradually forced the court to give up most of its

12 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION

remaining powers. Thus, under the reign of Thanh-thai, an
imperial decree was issued on October 3, 1888, which allowed
French citizens and Vietnamese living under the French pro¬
tectorate system to have rights of landownership in Tonkin
and in the port areas of Annam, but only in accordance with
French-made laws. In another imperial decree issued on Septem¬
ber 27, 1897, however, the emperor wholly renounced his
residual rights over the land, even in Annam (where the im¬
perial capital of Hue was located). The decree allowed direct
landownership by French citizens, as well as by Vietnamese
under the French protectorate system, according to the reg¬
ulations set up by the French Governor-General of Indochina.

Having obtained these imperial decrees, the French themselves
issued the two decrees of August 18, 1896, and April 28, 1899,
that readjusted the free land concessions to the further advan¬
tage of French citizens. The first decree canceled the 100-hectare
limitation on French holdings that had been imposed by an
earlier decree in 1888. Thus, all sorts of Frenchmen, engaged in
a wide variety of occupations, were easily able to obtain paddy
lands as large as 1,000 or even up to 30,000 hectares.42 Perhaps
owing in part to a certain degree of contempt in which some of
these parvenu low'er- and middle-class French landholders were
held by the aristocratic French administrators, the second de¬
cree, three years later, limited the maximum amount of each
free land concession to 500 hectares. All the same, this new
limit was still nearly 150 times larger than the largest land-
holdings permitted by Vietnamese law after the Nguyen land
reform of 1839—and more than six times larger than the largest
landholdings before the land reform. Moreover, if a Frenchman
wanted land for a specific purpose, or if he had already obtained
one concession and had already cultivated four-fifths of it, the
amount allowed him could be made higher. The same 500-hec¬
tare limitation for each concession was repeated in the decree

13 ANALYSIS

of December 27, 1913; but fifteen years later, article 2 of the
November 4, 1928, decree lowered the limitation to 300 hec¬
tares per concession.43

As a result of these policies, by 1930 the area of land con¬
cessions obtained by the French was 104,000 hectares in Ton¬
kin, 168,400 hectares in Annam, and the still larger figure of
606,500 hectares in Cochinchina.44 The statistics did not change
appreciably afterward. For example, the area owned by French
nationals in Tonkin in 1939 was 110,000 hectares.45 As noted
earlier, these concessions in Tonkin and Annam were drawn
from land expropriated largely from farmers who had left their
homes because of the insecurity brought about by banditry and
by the French invasion.46 A common technique used by the
French was to exploit traditional Vietnamese court law in
depriving the peasants of their rights of landownership and
then to apply French laws to assert the rights of ownership of
the colonists to the same lands.47

But a dry, complicated recitation of statistics and legislation
does not really bring the reader close enough to the human
realities and social tensions of colonial landholding manipula¬
tions. Nhat Linh, one of modern Vietnam’s most famous
writers, published a short story in 1927 entitled “Slavery”
[No le\. In it he depicts one of the multitude of techniques by
which Vietnamese supporters of the colonial government took
lands from the peasantry.48 A Vietnamese plantation owner,
given permission to develop a coffee plantation in a certain loca¬
tion, had his agents fence off the desired concession area. Inside
the fence lay plots of land belonging to the peasants of a nearby
village. The peasants protested their threatened expropriation,
but the plantation owner bribed the local village council of
notables, offered employment to unemployed villagers, and con¬
vinced the peasant plot owners themselves that expropriation
was not really expropriation: they could enter his plantation

14 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION

freely and continue to till their lands. In this way he skillfully
muted local protest. Government land concession regulations
stipulated that if local protest had not manifested itself within
three months of the announcement of a concession, the land
would become the permanent property of the grantee. But a few
years later, when the coffee trees of the new plantation had
matured, the plantation owner sternly reversed himself, for¬
bidding the peasants to enter his plantation on the ground that
their cattle would damage his coffee trees. If the colonial Land
Concession Committee later sent one of its members to investi¬
gate, the owner showed him the plantation, wined him and
dined him, and obtained legitimization for his now obscure act
of theft. The expropriated peasants themselves ultimately be¬
came rootless workers on the owner’s estate, on his terms. The
importance of Nhat Linh’s stinging sociological portrait of the
disingenuous coffee plantation owner may be debated, but it
suggests that colonial laws permitted greater polarization of
Vietnamese rural society in practice than colonial lawmakers
themselves intended.

The French tried to appropriate not only lands that had been
worked on by individual families of peasants, who had therefore
considered the land as their own, but also the communal lands
that had been given to the villages by the court for welfare
purposes and for meeting various village expenses, as mentioned
earlier. In fact, the French colonial administration actively
sought to reduce the area of communal land by permitting
village officials to sell it.49 According to one author, the total
area of communal land plummeted as a result.50

According to Gourou, the total area of communal land in
Tonkin represented 20 percent of the cultivated surface there.
It was 26 percent in Annam, but not even as high as 2.5 percent
in Cochinchina.51 Official French sources in 1931 give the statis¬
tics of 20 percent, 25 percent, and 3 percent, respectively.52 One

15 ANALYSIS

of the reasons for the low level of communal land in Cochin-
china, as given by Gourou, was usurpation of such land by rich
landlords.53 In some provinces in Tonkin, because of land usur¬
pation and because of auction sale by village officials, communal
land became almost nonexistent. But patterns in Tonkin were
diverse. In provinces like Thai Binh and Nam Dinh, where
usurpation and auctioning of the land were not yet extensive,
the amount of communal land in many villages amounted to
two-thirds and sometimes nine-tenths of the total cultivated
area.54 The relatively higher percentage of communal land in
Annam, according to Gourou, was due to the determination
and the wisdom of the “Annamite government” (meaning the
Vietnamese court) in trying to maintain the communal lands.
As a result, in certain areas in this region the total amount of
cultivated surface was communal land. Registered inhabitants
(that is, males from eighteen to sixty) in those areas could
receive about one and one-fifth hectares each.55

Nguyen Van Vinh, in an important study, noted that in the
villages on the borders of the Red River there still existed a
remarkable predominance of communal land. For example,
59 percent of the total cultivated surface in the prefecture of
True Ninh, and 77.5 percent of the cultivated area in the pre¬
fecture of Xuan-Truong in Nam Dinh province, was communal
land. Vinh also stated that in Annam, in certain provinces like
Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, Ha Tinh, Ninh Thuan, and Binh
Thuan, there was very little communal land; in other provinces
like Quang Tri, communal land represented the entire cul¬
tivated surface.56 In other words, communal land tended to
decrease in provinces more distant from the court in Hue. Also,
if the amount of communal land in the provinces of Thai Binh
and Nam Dinh in Tonkin and in certain areas in Annam was
any indication of what the percentage of communal land had

16 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION

been before the arrival of the French, the area of communal
land in the country as a whole had indeed been reduced sub¬
stantially.

Besides the appropriation of lands that were already under
cultivation when the French arrived, there was also widespread
usurpation of virgin lands that the rural population was in the
process of opening up for new settlement. A typical case, de¬
scribed by Gourou, was that of a farmer who went to open up a
piece of virgin land and, while working on it, had to borrow
money at high interest. After a while, so much interest on his
debt had piled up that in the end he had to turn his land over
to the usurer.57 Another typical case, described by Nguyen Van
Vinh, was that of the peasant who went to work on a piece of
virgin land, hoping to become its owner. But when the first
harvest came around, the land was confiscated because it hap¬
pened to fall into a large land concession belonging to a “Euro¬
pean” (meaning a Frenchman) or to a certain rich Vietnamese
proprietor, who, of course, had the support of the French
colonial administration.58

Yet another typical case is described by Phi Van in a book
entitled Dan Que [The Peasantry], French colonial authorities
sent out notices stating that peasant families could clear up to
ten hectares of virgin land each, with the stipulation that after
the land was turned into paddy fields their names would be put
down in the land registers as permanent owners. Ffowever, when
the land at last was made into paddy fields, powerful village
officials or landlords put in applications for free land conces¬
sions, claiming that those peasants who had been working on the
land were merely their hired hands. The peasants then realized
that they had been wasting their energy and resources for
nothing, although there was not a thing that they could do to
get their paddy fields back. Many did, in fact, make an effort to

17 ANALYSIS

sue the usurper but lost their lawsuits, depleting their re¬
sources in legal fees. Finally they were forced to give up; they
had to become tenants to the new owners.59

As a result of this land appropriation and free land con¬
cession, official French colonial sources listed the area of land
concessions in the hands of “European” individuals and com¬
panies as amounting to 872,000 hectares in 1932, 867,300 hec¬
tares in 1938, and 884,299 hectares in 1948; while the total
amount of land concessions held by Vietnamese landowners was
1,081,400 hectares in 1932, 1,227,500 hectares in 1938, and
1,403,863 hectares in 1948.60 Thus, in round numbers, the total
area of land concessions held by both French and Vietnamese
amounted to 1,950,000 hectares in 1932; 2,100,000 hectares in
1938; and 2,300,000 hectares in 1948.

In 1931 the total surface of rice paddy for the country as a
whole was 4,300,000 hectares;61 the total cultivated surface of
maize was from 130,000 to 145,000 hectares; while the culti¬
vated surface of all other produce (including coffee and tea)
was less than 200,000 hectares.62 These figures do not include
100,000 hectares in rubber plantations.63 Even if one were to
include in the computation the cultivated area of all the indus¬
trial crops, the area of the land concessions still amounted to more
than two-fifths of the total cultivated surface. The statistics just
given concerning the total cultivated surface in Vietnam did not
change very, much after 1931, since the official French statistics
for 1937 and also an updated and modified version by Gourou
in 1940 gave the figure of 6,000,000 hectares for the whole of
Indochina for all crops, including both agricultural produce
(that is, rice, maize, coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar cane, vegetables,
fruit, and greens) and industrial crops (rubber trees, jute,
ricinus, lacquer, rush, cotton, and so forth).64 If one deducts the
1,000,000 hectares of cultivated surface in Cambodia alone from
the total area given for “Indochina,” 65 then one can see that the

18 LAND EXPROPRIATION AND LAND CONCESSION