The Third Force in the Vietnam Wars The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75 by Sophie Quinn-Judge (z-lib.org)

Sophie Quinn-Judge received her PhD from SOAS, University of
London and is the author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years. She has also
been a contributor to the Far Eastern Economic Review in Bangkok and
Moscow, and was Associate Professor of History at Temple University
from 2004 to 2015, while also working in the Center for Vietnamese
Philosophy, Culture and Society. She first visited Vietnam as a volunteer
in 1973– 5.

‘Sophie Quinn-Judge’s The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive
Search for Peace 1954– 75 is the most careful, thorough and persuasive
analysis of the often heartbreaking efforts of non-aligned Vietnamese
to help bring about peace. The crushing of those efforts is a largely
untold story – until now. Quinn-Judge’s brilliant book transforms our
understanding of South Vietnamese politics and thus of the war itself.’

Marilyn B. Young, Professor of Modern History, NYU

THE THIRD
FORCE IN THE
VIETNAM WAR

The Elusive Search for Peace 1954–75

SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE

The author would like to acknowledge the support of the British Academy and the American
Council of Learned Societies in the writing of this book. A version of Chapter 2, ‘Giving Peace a
Chance’, was published in the journal of the Peace History Society, Peace & Change, in October
2013, vol. 38, no. 4.

Published in 2017 by
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Copyright q 2017 Sophie Quinn-Judge
The right of Sophie Quinn-Judge to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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I would like to dedicate this book to all of the people of Vietnam, in the hope that
they will enjoy peace for 10,000 years to come.

Viet-Nam, Oh Viet-Nam!
Will you hear the last will
Of someone who loves Viet-Nam?
Who loves our revolutionary forefathers,
Our new, young revolutionaries,
Our orphans, our widows,
Who loves the mountains and rivers,
And every drop of blood,
Both of the meek and the fierce.

Viet-Nam, Oh Viet-Nam!
Why do we bear grudges forever?
How can we be happy with killing?
In victory, who are the vanquished?
Who bears both the honor and dishonor?
Throw away labels and slogans,
We are all children of Viet-Nam.

Nhaˆ´t Chı´ Mai, May 1967
translated by David Marr



CONTENTS

List of Figures viii
List of Abbreviations x

Introduction 1

1. The Vietnamese Response to Colonialism: 7
Early Twentieth-Century Transformations

2. Giving Peace a Chance: First Efforts to Build a Neutralist 31
Political Movement, 1954– 64

3. Hanoi: Between Mao and Khrushchev, 1956–65 61

4. The Buddhists and the Urban Anti-War Movement, 1964– 7 79

5. The Turning Point: The Te´ˆt Offensive 105

6. Vietnamization and Saigon’s Political Opposition 135

7. The End of the Republic of Vietnam and Reunification 165

Notes 193
Bibliography 215
Index 223

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Leˆ Duẩn. 44

Figure 2.2 Ngoˆ Ðı`nh Diệm. 47

Figure 2.3 Dương Va˘n Minh. 57
108
Figure 5.1 Martin Luther King and Th´ıch Nhaˆ´t Ha˙nh at a
press conference in June 1966. 112

Figure 5N.2LFA’suSthaiogrowni–thGiTaraЈ`ninBha˙czhonÐe,a˘`ning,hiins 1968 responsible
for the home in
Hoˆ` Chı´ Minh City, 2004. He˙ had recently had a stroke.

Photographer unknown.

Figure 5.3 A double amputee in the Quảng Nga˜i Physical 113
Rehabilitation Center. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

Figure 6.1 Father Chaˆn T´ın, at Ky Dong Church in Saigon, 138
1974. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

Figure 6.2 A demonstration with banner calling for Peace, 139
Food and Clothing, Saigon, 1974. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge. 140

1F9ig7u4r.eP6h.3otFoabthyePr aNulguQyue˜ˆinnnN-Jguo˙dcgLea.n at a demonstration in

Figure 6.4 Huy`nh Lieˆn, leader of the ‘Begging Nuns’, and

Mrs Ngoˆ Ba´ Tha`nh demonstrate against the Thiệu government,

1974. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge. 141

LIST OF FIGURES ix

Figure 6.5 Deputy Ho`ˆ Ngoc Nhuận, on right in 1974. 142
Photo by Paul Quinn-Judg˙e.

Figure 6.6 Mrs Ngoˆ Ba´ Tha`nh at her sentencing, being 143
held by her husband. AFSC collection.

Figure 7.1 Communist soldiers walking past the US Embassy 179
in Saigon, after 30 April. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

Figure 7.2 Monk collecting discarded weapons of ARVN at

Va˙n Ha˙nh University, 1 May 1975. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge. 180

Figure 7.3 Buddhist nuns, with Amerasian children left with

nuns by fearful mothers. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge. 181

Figure 7.4 A student-turned-guerilla returning from the NLF

zone on 1 May 1975. Photo by Sophie Quinn-Judge. 182

Figure 7.5 A foot soldier from the NVA, chatting with boys 183
in a Saigon park, May 1975. Photo by Paul Quinn-Judge.

Figure 7.6 Man on motorcycle: Looting of US post exchange 184
at Newport, outside Saigon, April 1975. Photo by 185
Paul Quinn-Judge.

Figure 7.7 Woman in Saigon (Ho`ˆ Chı´ Minh City) selling
photos of Hoˆ` Ch´ı Minh on the street, after 30 April 1975.
Photo by Sophie Quinn-Judge.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam
DRV
FOR Democratic Republic of Vietnam
FRUS
ICC Fellowship of Reconciliation
ICP
IVS Foreign Relations of the United States
LSNBKC
MAE International Control Commission
MRC
NLF Indochinese Communist Party
NXB
PAVN International Voluntary Service
PLAF
PRC ML_icihniSsửte`rNeadmesBAộ fKfahiar´ensg Chiến
PRO e´trange`res
PTT
RVN Military Revolutionary Council
USAID
VWP National Liberation Front

Nha` Xuất Bản [publishing house]

People’s Army of Vietnam

People’s Liberation Armed Forces

People’s Republic of China

Public Record Office

Phủ Tổng Thống

Republic of Vietnam

United States Agency for International Development

Vietnam Workers’ Party

INTRODUCTION

There was a real Third Force. It had everything – numbers,

wisdom and courage – except a force.

Jean Lacouture1

That the Vietnam War was a great tragedy, few people have any doubt.
But that it was a completely avoidable tragedy is an idea that arouses
more debate. Historian Fredrik Logevall has made a strong case that
Lyndon Johnson embarked on a ‘war of choice’ in 1964 – 5, and other
authors have written of the missed opportunities to make peace that
punctuated the following years.2 This book explores the terrain of
Vietnamese politics and society in a search for local forces that supported
these moves toward peace; forces that could have built consensus rather
than enmity, reconciliation rather than fear, had they been allowed to
flourish. It will tell the story of those Vietnamese who believed that war
was not inevitable, who believed that once it had begun, it did not need
to continue. It will look at the moments when they had most hope of
implementing their vision. It will also detail their failures.

The related concepts of a ‘Third Way’ and ‘Third Force’, often used
interchangeably, cover a great deal of territory and provoke strong
reactions. I have opted to use ‘Third Way’ or ‘Third Solution’ as the
terms to describe the middle ground during the Vietnam War, as they
imply a peaceful approach to conflict resolution as opposed to an
alternative military solution. In fact, within the context of the Vietnam
Wars, the idea that an armed ‘Third Force’ might emerge disappeared
fairly quickly.

2 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

In general the term ‘Third Force’ is fraught with extreme, often
negative, connotations. This is especially true in the case of Vietnam.
Graham Greene’s telling of an early American adventure in nation-
building, the effort to build up a splinter group of the army of a
southern religious sect, the Cao Ða`i, into an anti-French, anti-
communist force, leaves a strong impression of idealism run amok.
The protagonist of The Quiet American, Alden Pyle, seems to be a
composite of several US government employees who displayed a
Yankee missionary zeal in their efforts to strengthen non-communist
nationalism in Vietnam. Among those suggested as models for
Greene’s character are Robert Blum, who went to Vietnam in 1950 to
head the US Economic Cooperation Mission; his deputy Leo
Hochstetter (both mentioned in Robert Shaplen’s The Lost Revolution)
and Edward Lansdale, San Francisco advertising man turned OSS
operative, and later a colonel in the US Air Force.3 Blum and
Hochstetter had the difficult challenge of promoting ‘authentic
nationalism’, at the same time as the USA furnished military aid
to the French army.4 Edward Lansdale is far better known than the
other two as the key factor in the successful elimination of communist
insurgency in the Philippines in the days of Ramon Magsaysay;
and later as the man who engineered Ngoˆ Ðı`nh Diệm’s victory over
his rivals in the early days of his leadership.

The Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was created in 1955, with a good
deal of help from Lansdale and other ‘Quiet Americans’, as a Third
Force of the type Greene so disparaged. It was designed to wage the
battle against communism more effectively than the colonial French or
the monarch Bảo Ðai, with the patriotic anti-communist Diệm at its
helm. But it soon e˙volved into one of the two main combatants or
forces. With US support, the Diệm government became a very much
aligned outpost of what used to be called the Free World, in a South
East Asia beset by ethnic and left-wing unrest. But this initial
American attempt to build up the nationalist middle ground was only
the first in a long series of attempts to find a ‘Third Way’ or a neutral
solution for the section of Vietnam below the 17th parallel. From 1956
to 1973, this idea evolved into the concept of a ‘Third Segment’, as it
was termed in the Paris Peace Agreement. By then the idea that the
buffer group mediating between the two warring sides would be an
armed force had long since been abandoned.

INTRODUCTION 3

Why Study the Third Way?

What sort of choices were the people of South Vietnam offered during
the Vietnam War? This is the question that forms the basis for this
inquiry. Both sides in the conflict like to claim that ‘there was no other
road to take’, that war was the only choice. Yet, given the number of
efforts to negotiate peace, one can see that plenty of people thought that
other options existed. In order to explore this issue thoroughly, one
needs to examine the evolution of the interconnected concepts of a
‘Third Force’/‘Third Segment’ and a ‘neutral solution’ to the US –
Vietnam conflict. There are now relatively few observers (historians,
journalists, Vietnamese at home or living abroad) who believe that the
victory of the communist forces in 1975 was the inevitable, culturally
appropriate solution for a poor peasant state. (That was an underlying
assumption of some of the histories of Vietnamese communism
written in the 1970s.) With the vastly increased understanding of Asian
communism that has developed in the 1980s and 1990s, historians of
the Vietnam conflict are now examining counterfactuals and looking at
some of the other actors – the losers, as well as the winners – the
nationalist parties, the dissident writers and those who came out on the
wrong side in communist party power struggles. There is also a growing
movement to ‘decentre’ the way we look at the American war in
Vietnam. Scholars are looking beyond the power centres of the Cold War
– Washington, Moscow and Beijing – back to the heart of the conflict:
Vietnam. Much of post-Cold War historical writing about the Vietnam
conflict has actually been about the role and attitudes of the superpowers
and China.5 Sometimes one got the impression that the Vietnamese were
regarded as bit players in the drama of the Indochina Wars. (We all know
that the Cambodians were part of the ‘sideshow’.)

I believe that we need to look at the Vietnamese and their politics
as something more complex than the story of communists versus
nationalists; or American puppets versus pawns of the communist
bloc. One old Vietnam hand, the BBC’s Judy Stowe, used to say that
the Cold War history of Vietnam tends to treat the Vietnamese as
‘gooks’ – by this she meant, I believe, that we are prone to view the
Vietnamese, North or South, as undifferentiated blocs of loyal
followers, a people whose often arcane internal politics can be of no
interest to the larger world. Yet it is impossible to analyse the fate of

4 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

the various peace missions and ‘missed opportunities’ in Vietnam
without understanding something more of Vietnamese politics,
communist and non-communist, than many writers on this period have
demonstrated. When one starts looking, it turns out that there are a
surprising number of signs that many Vietnamese wanted to talk to
their enemy rather than fight him.

Although in recent years there has been considerable discussion of
‘missed opportunities’ to find peace during the Vietnam War (among
them are the book by Robert McNamara and his co-authors, Argument
without End, and the edited volume, The Search for Peace in Vietnam,
1964–1968 by Lloyd C. Gardiner and Ted Gittinger, as well as
Marigold, by James Hershberg), there has been relatively little attention
paid to the issue of how the Vietnamese themselves would have managed
a peaceful resolution.6 Vietnamese actors began to put forward proposals
for a neutral South Vietnam as early as 1955, but at that time their ideas
were largely ignored by the international community. From 1962,
however, when agreement was reached on a neutral government for Laos,
until the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement on Vietnam in 1973,
there was a fairly constant stream of suggestions from different quarters
regarding a neutral or compromise solution to end hostilities in
South Vietnam. Former State Department official Chester Cooper has
said that within a short period in 1966 he handled offers of mediation
from ‘Mrs. Gandhi, Tito, Nasser, Wilson, U Thant, Eden and a host of
others’.7 These proposals would eventually have relied on neutral or
Third Segment Vietnamese for their implementation. Most of these
plans involved bringing respected, non-aligned personalities into a
coalition government. By 1965 these potential compromise leaders
were often Buddhists, as opposed to members of the Catholic minority
to which President Diệm belonged. By the time of the Paris Peace
Agreement in 1973, at least theoretically the concept of a ‘Third
Segment’ as a buffer between the two opposing parties had become an
important element in the architecture of peace.

To honestly examine the chances for success of such proposals, one has
to accept the premise that the communist side was an evolving entity,
whose capabilities and goals changed over the years. Hanoi’s attitude
towards a negotiated peace fluctuated over the course of the war,
depending on the views of their allies and their own evaluation of their
chances for rapid success. Thus one can posit that a war-weary DRV

INTRODUCTION 5

would not have intervened militarily in the South, if the communists
there had been allowed access to a democratic political process after
1954. The same might be said of 1973 – had the political provisions of
the Paris ‘Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in
Vietnam’ been implemented, the DRV might well have opted to put
more resources into its crippled economy and reduce its military role
in the South. Likewise, we need to recognize that it was the American
military intervention that pulled the Soviets into the War, leading
eventually to the creation of large and well-equipped armed forces in the
DRV.8 (The communists did not have tanks or jet fighters when the war
began.) Chinese scholars also point out that the aggressive US presence
in South Vietnam strengthened Mao Zedong’s hand in his struggle with
more moderate forces in China, which in turn reinforced the position of
radicals in the Vietnamese party.9 US escalation was always met by
escalation on the communist side, both militarily and ideologically.
As the southern politician Trần Ngoc Chaˆu put it, in explaining the
hard-line attitudes towards those (lik˙e himself) searching for a middle
path in Vietnamese politics, ‘My effort would be opposed by both the
North Vietnamese Communists and American-supported South
Vietnamese military dictatorship, because those two opposing sides
actually nurtured each other, despite being bitter enemies.’10

Rather than engaging in a counterfactual exercise, however, I would
like to record as objectively as possible the dilemmas of the leaders
in the middle ground. One of the basic tasks of this exercise is to
distinguish the different ideas of a Third Force or Third Segment that
existed in the minds of the French, the Americans and among the
southern Vietnamese intelligentsia. For the purposes of this study, I am
eliminating speculation about armed third forces. I am interested in
non-violent political and social forces that attempted to play the role of
intermediaries. There are several factors that complicate the definition of
who was and who was not a member of a ‘Third Segment’. One of these,
perhaps the most important, is the long-standing communist practice
of ‘entryism’, otherwise known as ‘infiltration’, into non-communist
political and social groups. Hồ Ch´ı Minh cut his political teeth when
this was the preferred tactic of colonial communist groups, during the
united front in southern China from 1923 to 1927. It was still a favoured
method of political organizing in South Vietnam in the 1970s, when
any group, from the Girl Scouts to an amateur dance troupe, could be

6 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

secretly influenced by young communist activists. At the same time,
many non-communist Vietnamese were pushed into the arms of the
communists and the National Liberation Front (NLF) by the
polarization of southern politics in the 1960s. Thus you could find
founding members of the NLF and communist-backed Provisional
Revolutionary Government (PRG), such as the Justice Minister Trương
Như Tảng, who were non-communists, while a number of non-
communist southerners had opened a dialogue with the NLF by 1970.
But some of the presumed Third Segment student leaders such as Huỳnh
Tấn Mẫm were actually full members of the Vietnam Workers’ Party
(Đảng Lao Động) by 1973. Mẫm himself, who played the role of a Third
Segment student leader until 1975, joined the party in 1967. On the
other hand, early proponents of neutralism such as Nguyễn Manh Ha`,
accused of pro-communism by the Diệm government, simply b˙ elieved
that peace would bring about a convergence between the two parts of
Vietnam, beyond partisan politics.

It may in the end be more fruitful to look at Vietnamese politics as a
continuum, with figures on both the left and right of the spectrum at
times edging closer to the middle ground. One of the questions that this
study will raise is whether some followers of the communists were
actually closer in their ideological outlook to the Third Segment than to
the Stalinist Maoism of the 1960s and 1970s. Thus I will cover the
evolution of political attitudes and factions within the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam (DRV) as part of this study, and try to show how
changing constellations of power impinged on the search for peace.

There is now little doubt in my mind that the nationwide communist
infrastructure in Vietnam was often the source of peace initiatives that
took shape in the RVN among opposition groups. But such initiatives
depended on genuine members of a Third Segment to make them known
to world opinion, as well as to the citizens of the Republic. These
personalities were not pressured or blackmailed into playing this role –
in most cases they genuinely believed that the continuation of the US-
supported war would destroy their homeland. These intermittent peace
campaigns were often crushed by the weight of official US opposition,
but also at times by the disapproval of radical political forces in the DRV,
backed by China, who saw a total military victory as the only way to
make a revolution.

CHAPTER 1

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE
TO COLONIALISM:EARLY
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
TRANSFORMATIONS

The Vietnamese are people of feeling, who possess a strong
national pride, who are broad-minded, yet who still have a lot of
complexes about white people, as a result of almost a century of
French domination.

Tin Sa´ng – 25 February 1964

Before 1965, the people of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) were not
clamouring for US military intervention in their civil war. The US
leadership had to search hard for South Vietnamese leaders willing to
wage the sort of war against the insurgents that they believed to be
necessary, as the following chapters will show. Once the US troops
had entered the conflict, however, making peace became a very
complex proposition. But both before and after 1965 there were
moments when the United States might have pulled back from its
commitment to a military solution. If we could have foreseen the
huge price that our Vietnamese allies would pay, not to mention
the sacrifices of so many young Americans, the chances are that we
would have examined options for peace more carefully. And had we
stopped to consider the complicated attitudes of our allies, before
pressuring the South Vietnamese government to accept the arrival of

8 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

US combat troops on their soil in 1965, we might have proceeded
differently.

An August 1964 editorial from a weekly newspaper published by
young Buddhist intellectuals in Huế gives some idea of how we
misjudged the situation. The article compares the role of Chinese advisers
in North Vietnam and the growing number of American advisers in South
Vietnam. ‘We’ve just heard about another government decree, announcing
that in addition to military advisers (now here in formations up to
battalion strength) there will be more advisers: for culture, agriculture,
industry, and especially for political administration . . . This is an unusual
problem’, the writer says. This ‘is no different from Communist China
establishing a regime of advisers in North Vietnam’.1 These young
men were not voicing an extreme view within the political spectrum –
both President Ngoˆ Ðı`nh Diệm and his immediate successor, General
Dương Va˘n Minh, were leery of an excessive American presence in
South Vietnam.

This deep-rooted nationalism of the Vietnamese, both educated
classes and the peasantry, was not sufficiently understood by Americans,
who in their own narrative represented the friends of the oppressed and
the antithesis of European colonialism. US government policymakers
rejected any comparisons between the French and the US roles in
Indochina. McGeorge Bundy, for example, wrote in June 1965 that
‘France in 1945 was a colonial power seeking to impose its overseas rule
out of tune with Vietnamese nationalism . . . The US in 1965 is
responding to the call of a people under Communist assault, a people
undergoing a non-Communist revolution.’2 A close examination of
South Vietnamese politics in 1963– 5 leads to the conclusion that this
‘call’ was largely imagined by US strategists, who had unilaterally
chosen Vietnam as the place to hold the line against what they assumed
was monolithic world communism. As Frances Fitzgerald put it,
Vietnam ‘was still a very distant and foreign place, whose major interest
to Americans lay in its location to the south of China’.3 The tendency of
foreigners to see the Vietnamese as culturally backwards and childlike
was a product of ignorance and self-delusion, but it made the American
narrative more compelling. After a stint with the US marines as a young
intelligence officer in the early 1960s, historian David Marr observed
that the military leaders running the US counter-insurgency effort were
‘fundamentally bored by the political complexities of Vietnam’.4 They

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 9

appeared to be content to accept cliche´d assumptions about the
Vietnamese, as people who ‘found little meaning or value in political
ideology, except perhaps some archaic Confucian maxims’, ‘with neither
the desire nor capability for profound national identifications’.5

Yet Vietnamese culture had been in a rapid process of transformation
from the early days of French rule. Had US policymakers been better
informed on a few basic issues – the precolonial history of Vietnam,
the responses of the Vietnamese to French rule, the history of the
Vietnamese communist movement, as well as the sources of Vietnamese
national feeling – they might have had more respect for Vietnamese
public opinion. Traditional Vietnamese religious beliefs and the
transformations that Vietnamese ideologies underwent in the twentieth
century should have been part of the curriculum for would-be
interventionists. But most of the information that existed on this distant
country was in French or Vietnamese. By the late 1960s the United
States would be on the way to developing a corps of outstanding scholars
in Vietnamese studies (including David Marr), who produced some
classic books on Vietnamese intellectual and political history.6 But their
books mainly appeared just as the war was ending. Journalists also
wrote excellent books on Vietnam, but given the siege mentality that
developed within the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the more
critical efforts (from David Halberstam to Frances Fitzgerald and
Jonathan Schell) were looked on as the work of a whining elite, or worse,
unpatriotic betrayals.7

The main thing that we needed to know might be summed up
this way: the Vietnamese were not passive victims of a few aggressive
communists trained in Moscow and Beijing – on the contrary, they were
a sophisticated people who had lived in the global imperial world
for over 80 years by the time we became involved in their defence. Since
the end of the nineteenth century they had been examining their
position as a French possession and debating when and how to rid
themselves of their colonial masters. They had been seeking answers
around the world, in both the East and the West. They had arrived at a
variety of opinions on these questions, and these were debated at many
different levels of society.

Moreover, Vietnamese nationalists knew quite a bit about the United
States: they had experienced two previous disappointments with our
nation, at moments when they had had high hopes that the USA would

10 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

intervene with the French on their behalf. These moments came at the
close of the two World Wars, during which two different US presidents,
Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, had given explicit promises
to colonized peoples that they would receive the freedom to determine
their own fates, once the USA and their allies triumphed. But both times
in the past, in 1919 and 1945, Vietnam’s case for self-determination had
been ignored when the moment of truth came. The disappointment in
1919 had pushed many Vietnamese anti-colonialists to look to the
communist world for support. In 1945 the coalition government under
Hồ Chı´ Minh never succeeded in winning the support of the United
States, although they had hoped that a brief alliance with the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the CIA, would lead to American
backing for their independence.8

Given the amount of thought and energy the Vietnamese had devoted
to the issue of their future, it is clear that in 1954 and 1965 we should
have paid more attention to their political complexities, as opposed to
the categories that we imposed on them. (As the editorial noted above
indicates, in South Vietnam the intelligentsia made their opinions clear
in their lively and contentious press.) Had we looked a little bit more
deeply, we might have had more faith in the Vietnamese capacity to
settle their affairs.

The French Colonial Transformations

In the following pages I will review briefly some of the transformations
that occurred in Vietnam, after it fell under French domination in the
1880s, at the close of a 20-year period of piecemeal conquest.

Change came from every direction in those years around the turn of
the twentieth century, much of it unsought and unwanted. The early
revolts against French power, led by members of both the scholarly class
and the ranks of charismatic religious figures, made this rejection clear.
Logically, one might expect that direct French transmission of Western
ways and thinking would have been the immediate cause of Vietnam’s
cultural transformation; indeed, the elite resistance to French power is
sometimes portrayed as a resistance to modernization, as a struggle
between conservative nativists and the forces of change.

But the process of change was not so straightforward. It was
complicated by French ambivalence towards the people of their colony

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 11

and protectorates. The French drew back from initial thoughts of
assimilating the Vietnamese population, of turning them into French
men and women. For a start, a large outlay of funds would have been
needed to build the sort of educational system that assimilation would
have required. At the same time, the French quickly discovered that the
Vietnamese who became familiar with their society expected French
political ideals to be applied in the colony, something they were not
prepared to allow. So the colonial civil servants who constructed the
infrastructure of government opted for ‘association’ as the model of their
relationship with their subjects. This promised less, as it did not require
that the French provide universal education in the French language.
It also quelled ‘premature’ ideas about Vietnamese self-government. The
system of association was justified by the idea that the Vietnamese
needed to go through a period of tutelage before they would be ready to
fully partake of French civilization. It meant that separate legal systems
and restricted educational opportunities for the native Vietnamese
remained in place until 1945.

Vietnam’s traditional link with Chinese culture was broken by the
introduction of primary education in the Vietnamese language,
transcribed in the romanized script invented by early missionaries:
quoˆ´c ngữ. Yet secondary and higher education in French were available
only to the select few. The sort of education offered to the Vietnamese
elite was designed to make them useful to the French as interpreters,
clerks and managers. The views of a French doctor on the training of
medical personnel gives an idea of this approach: writing in 1895
on the ‘Diffusion of European medicine in Cochinchina’, he advised
against sending students to Europe to complete medical training, as
the Dutch were doing in Indonesia. A three-year course in Saigon,
followed by practical training in a French hospital in Indochina would
be sufficient for them to earn a ‘certificate’. A long stay in Paris would
cost the French too much, he reasoned, and besides, ‘the holders of
[French] diplomas would return with immense pride and impossible
pretensions’, he wrote.9

But by 1904 the Vietnamese were no longer just passive recipients of
what passed for the French gift of civilization. They were discovering
their own sources of information and making demands for reforms based
on their independent search for knowledge. Before the advent of French
power the Nguyễn rulers placed their faith in adherence to the

12 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Confucian ideals of government that they had absorbed from China. And
it would be via their links to the Chinese cultural world that inquiring
scholars would first come into contact with Western philosophical ideas,
after the turn of the century.10 The Vietnamese intelligentsia was forced
initially to go around French channels of information in their attempts
to make an independent judgment on the usefulness of Western culture
for their development. This was made possible by the burgeoning civil
society in Japan during the cultural revolution of the Meiji era.

The energizing of civil society in East Asian states can be directly
linked to the challenge from the West. Throughout the nineteenth
century the threat of Western domination, both political and
economic, grew into an inescapable reality. The nations in this region,
China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, were all bureaucratic states
modelled on the Chinese ideal of government by a just ruler. But by the
end of the century the educated elite in each country could see that
their model would require adjustments. The Japanese reacted most
speedily to the demonstration of their military inferiority to the West,
sending missions to Europe and the United States after Commander
Perry forced the opening of their commerce to American merchants.
During the Meiji Restoration the search for Western knowledge
expanded into two-year study tours to examine the industrial, scientific
and social achievements of Europe and North America. While the
Japanese built new government institutions and created a new
constitution, they also adopted new models of education, including
universities providing liberal arts and science curricula.

In its turn, by 1898 Japan would become a place of pilgrimage for
other Asians seeking knowledge and the means to free themselves from
Western control, or in the case of China, their own decaying empire.
A 1906 visit to a Japanese school modelled on Harvard, the Keio
Gijuku, inspired the Vietnamese reformer, Phan Chaˆu Trinh, to create
similar schools in Vietnam. For Phan Chaˆu Trinh and other Vietnamese
educated in the classical Chinese style, the main conduit for information
about Western political theory was the writing of a Chinese reformer
based in Japan, Liang Qichao (Luong Khai Sieu). Even before Trinh and
his fellow scholar Phan Bội Chaˆu had made their trip to Yokohama and
Tokyo, Liang’s writings had begun to stimulate discussion among
Vietnam’s scholarly elite. Some of them decided to join him in Japan.
Phan Bội Chaˆu formed a secret society in 1904 to raise money to send

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 13

students to Japan for study and military training. In 1905 a trickle of
students started to join him in Yokohama, the start of what became
known as the ‘Ðoˆng du’ or Eastern Travel movement. By 1908 there
were roughly 300 Vietnamese students in Japan.

Phan Chaˆu Trinh, his fellow reformer, had become disillusioned with
armed revolt. He had been a young witness to the failed military
uprising that broke out in Central Vietnam in 1885, when the Nguyễn
emperor Ha`m Nghi was persuaded to flee to the mountains by a group of
court mandarins. Trinh’s father was a military commander in their native
province of Quảng Nam and had taken his son with him to the hills, to
help defend a local fort. After his father’s death and the revolt’s collapse,
Trinh came down from the mountains in 1887, to find that his family
home and possessions had been burned to the ground by the French
army. An older brother supported his studies for the mandarinate, and in
1901 he passed his exams at the metropolitan level, as a second-rank
doctor ( pho´-bảng) – in the same year and with the same results that Hồ
Ch´ı Minh’s father achieved. This enabled him to take up a prestigious,
but by then largely ceremonial, post in the Huế bureaucracy, which the
French had emasculated by taking over many of the emperor’s powers.

In 1904 Trinh was starting his second year in the Ministry of Rites,
a typical entry post in the bureaucracy for new examination laureates,
when he withdrew from the mandarinate. This is when he made
what David Marr calls ‘a declaration of lifelong warfare’ with the
Nguyễn dynastic system.11 His basic complaint was that the French
partnership with the mandarinate tolerated corruption and abuse of
power. He began to advocate the wearing of Western dress and hair-
cutting. In addition to practical education in science and agriculture,
he advocated the development of Vietnamese manufacturing and
locally owned businesses. One of his early hopes was that the French
could be persuaded to aid the Vietnamese in bringing a more open and
just government to their nation, based on the ideals of the French
Revolution. Marr and other biographers have surmised that Trinh was
influenced by Liang Qichao’s writings, in particular his newspaper,
Xinmin Congbao (Renewing the People), published from 1902 – 5 in
Yokohama. A memoir by Trinh’s contemporary, Huỳnh Thu´ c Kha´ng,
confirms that by 1904 this periodical was being read by scholars in
Huế.12 It was an outgrowth of Liang’s rejection of Confucian tradition
and morality as a compass for reform; its articles reflected his eclectic

14 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

reading and passion for free thought.13 On first encountering these
ideas coming from Japan, ‘Phan Chaˆu Trinh got so excited about the
new books that he couldn’t sleep, he forgot to eat – from this point, he
had a complete change in his thinking.’14 As far as we know, all of
Trinh’s knowledge of Western political and philosophical ideas,
from Rousseau to Herbert Spencer, came from reading translations or
summaries in Chinese.

Trinh invited two more recent graduates, Huỳnh Thu´ c Kha´ng and
Trần Quy´ Ca´p, to join him in a southern tour in order to popularize their
newfound opposition to the Chinese examination system. The three
posed as candidates at the regional exams in B`ınh Ðinh and composed
satirical examination poetry that became well known˙to many scholars.
When Trinh came down with a serious illness in Phan Thiết, his two
companions returned to their homes and he remained behind for a four-
month convalescence. He stayed in the home of a local scholar, Nguyễn
Trong Lội, where he held discussions with a group of reform-minded
loc˙al men. Nguyễn Trong Lội became the founder of the Duc Thanh
School, and of the Lieˆn˙ Tha`nh company, which produced fish˙ sauce, a
staple of the Vietnamese diet. Duc Thanh started as a youth association for
physical training before it becam˙ e a fully fledged modernist school.15

With the encouragement of the French Governor General, by late
1905 and early 1906 modernist schools were being formed in Quảng
Nam province, two of them organized by Phan Chaˆu Trinh’s relatives.
A cousin on his mother’s side, Leˆ Cơ, was instrumental in starting a
school in Phu´ Laˆm, a village in Tieˆn Phước district, where pupils could
learn quoˆ´c ngữ and French. It was the first modern school in Quảng Nam
to admit girls; Trinh’s daughter Leˆ Ấm was among them. Leˆ Cơ, an
activist village head, also started a cinnamon cooperative, to plant the
trees and market the spice, and introduced other innovations such as a
village forge and a village watch to protect against thieves.16 His out-
of-the-way village was often visited by Vietnamese interested in the
reforms being undertaken in Quảng Nam. By the time the school was
dismantled by the French in 1908, it had over 100 pupils. After the anti-
tax disturbances of 1908, Leˆ Cơ would be arrested and imprisoned for
three years. The school’s female teacher Leˆ Thi Mười, another maternal
cousin of Trinh’s, was also arrested but released˙in the province capital.17

In Cochinchina a similar reform movement grew up around 1906, the
Minh Taˆn or New Light society. Gilbert Chieˆu (Trần Cha´nh Chiếu),

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 15

a successful businessman well established in colonial society, picked up the

thread of modernist reform and began publishing a newspaper known as

Noˆng Cổ Minh Ða`m (Tribune of Old Agricultural People), which encouraged

the creation of businesses, as part of a national renaissance. He built two

hotels and a soap-making factory as a way of freeing himself from financial

dependence on Chinese and Indian moneylenders. He also used his
businesses to raise money to send young men to study in Japan.18

Phan Chaˆu Trinh travelled to Japan to meet Phan Bội Chaˆu in 1906,

where the two leaders conferred on strategies for winning independence.

They agreed to follow their separate paths, Phan Bội Chaˆu settling

for the creation of an illegal force to work towards a military uprising.

Phan Chaˆu Trinh was unconvinced of the wisdom of the violent

approach, and remained committed to educational and cultural change

as the foundation for political independence. But he was in no sense a

blind follower of France – he would spend the rest of his life trying

to convince the French (and failing) to offer the Vietnamese a real

partnership for change. The two Phans visited Fukuzawa Yukichi’s

famed Keio Gijuku school together, a visit that strengthened Trinh’s

interest in Westernizing reforms within Vietnam. On his return to

Vietnam he was instrumental in the formation of the Ðoˆng Kinh Nghı˜a

sTehxue˙sc,anadparivvaartiee,tynoonf -atgueist.ioInn academy that welcomed students of both
the narrow sense, David Marr explains, this

was a private school in Hanoi for four hundred to five hundred students.

But in the broadest sense it was ‘a popular educational and cultural
movement of real significance to subsequent Vietnamese history’.19 The

school quickly became a forum for discussion of political issues, as well

as a place where young men could be recruited for studies in Japan.

By January 1908 the French had forced it to close.

In the spring of 1908, widespread demonstrations in Central Vietnam

against high taxes and the extreme demands of corve´e labour caused the

French to seek out culprits among the modernist scholars. Their earlier

encouragement of the reformists turned to fear when they saw the

peasants marching to demand their rights. Trần Quy´ Ca´p, one of the

most gifted and beloved scholars in Central Vietnam, was beheaded on

the beach in Nhatrang. In Quảng Nam province both business

cooperatives and the modern schools were closed down, while the

principals and teachers were hauled off to jail. In Trinh’s native village a

French commander marched the local militia into the school grounds,

16 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

where he beat the two teachers as the pupils scattered.20 In the imperial
capital of Huế, the French fired on unarmed demonstrators marching on
the compound of their proconsul, the r´esident supe´rieur. Hồ Ch´ı Minh,
later to become the best-known leader of Vietnam’s anti-colonial
movement, witnessed these shootings as a young man and would often
refer to them in later years. The spring of 1908 was a politicizing
moment for a generation of Vietnamese – Phan Chaˆu Trinh was arrested
and packed off to the prison island of Poulo Condor (Coˆn Đảo) to serve an
indefinite sentence at hard labour, along with a group of other scholars
from the central Vietnamese provinces. Leaders of the Ðoˆng Kinh Nghı˜a
Thuc suffered a similar fate, joining those Central Vietnamese who had
bee˙n sentenced to hard labour.

The French had come to regard all brands of activism, whether aimed
at peaceful development or military revolt, as part of one anti-
government movement. While the r´esident sup´erieur in Central Vietnam,
M. Leveˆque, knew that the reformists had been teaching the peasants the
need for study, hard work and self-improvement, he feared that the
scholars’ real aim was to ‘sow . . . the seeds of revolt in the people’s
minds’.21 Essentially, this French view was correct. One of the things
that made the reformists dangerous was their direct contact with the
people and the reach of their propaganda. All of these scholars were
involved in a movement to retrieve the honour and autonomy of
Vietnam. Phan Chaˆu Trinh would be amnestied in 1911, with the help
of the French Socialist party, but he recalled the French crack-down of
1908 as a moment ‘that forces the students and scholars to flee the
country’.22 The other scholars on Coˆn Đảo Island remained there until
the end of World War I, in spite of Phan Chaˆu Trinh’s efforts to publicize
the injustice of their sentences.

World War I and After

From the time of these arrests until World War I, there was a pause in
the movement for modernization. Phan Bội Chaˆu’s partisans were forced
to leave Japan in 1908– 9, and many eventually settled in southern
China, where they took advantage of the coming war to organize plots
and uprisings against the French. These put the French on their guard,
and resulted in more arrests for the anti-colonial forces. A number of
Vietnamese sailed to Europe to study and learn about the West in the

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 17

pre-war period, including, in 1911, Phan Chaˆu Trinh, and the son of one
of his fellow mandarins, Nguyễn Tất Tha`nh. This young man in his late
teens would take the pseudonym ‘Nguyễn A´ i Quốc’ (Nguyễn the
Patriot) in Paris, and would be known after 1943 as ‘Hồ Ch´ı Minh’.
Later, as the Vietnamese e´migre´s, students and draftees in France
returned home, their political experience in Paris was transplanted to
Saigon, where by 1925 a Vietnamese public sphere, if not a completely
open civil society, began to take shape.

Expectations and energy were high on the Vietnamese side in those
years at the close of World War I. Around 100,000 Vietnamese had
volunteered or been drafted to serve France during the war, in
occupations ranging from the production of munitions to hospital
orderlies and drivers on the battlefield. Nineteen thousand of these
workers remained in France in mid-1920, as they waited to be
repatriated. They had been led to expect that they would be rewarded for
their loyal service once the war was over. The French promotion of the
idea of ‘Pha´p –Việt Đề Huề’ (French –Vietnamese Fraternity) during the
war was part of the reason that the Vietnamese were awaiting changes in
their relationship with France. Governor-General Albert Sarraut had
made emotional speeches promising self-rule at some time in the future,
and more immediately, greater access to education. Moreover, the
American President Woodrow Wilson had explicitly made freedom and
self-determination for subject peoples one of his country’s war aims.

But as we know, Wilson’s promises did not apply to Asian peoples
and Sarraut’s grand words faded away once France’s post-war financial
realities became evident. Perhaps it was these disappointed expectations
that injected energy into Vietnamese public life after the war. Certainly
the events of 1918–19 mobilized the Vietnamese activists living in
Paris. The remaining workers and soldiers became the target of
propaganda from an organization calling itself the Group of Vietnamese
Patriots. The leading members of this organization were Phan Chaˆu
Trinh, the French-educated lawyer Phan Va˘n Trường and the young man
known as Nguyễn A´ i Quốc. The failure of the Western powers to take
note of Vietnamese desires in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference is a
well-known story, thanks to the presence of Hồ Chı´ Minh on the fringes
of the conference. The Koreans, Chinese and Indians were all in the same
boat when it came to unfulfilled hopes for freedom. One could say that
the global civil society of resistance to imperialism that had flourished in

18 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

Japan at the turn of the century came back to life in Paris during the
Peace Conference.

Following the French repression of 1908, Hồ Ch´ı Minh had left
Vietnam in 1911 and worked his way around Europe and North
America, where he made contact with a variety of Asians, Caribbean and
African blacks, as well as Europeans, who had grievances with the
imperialist powers. Along with the other members of the Group of
Patriots, he became part of an unofficial lobby at the post-World War I
Peace Conference. As we know from one Korean source and the archives
of the French secret police, these anti-colonial activists shared ideas and
techniques to bring their messages to the world community.23 The
Vietnamese petition to the Peace Conference was submitted a little less
than a month after the Koreans made a petition for freedom from
Japanese rule. The list of Vietnamese demands submitted to the
conference by the ‘Group of Vietnamese Patriots’ was more than a
diplomatic de´marche – it was also a public statement printed in the
socialist press and passed out as a tract or leaflet at political meetings.
In this way the e´migre´s in Paris kept their campaign for freedom alive
after the Versailles Treaty had been signed.

After 1919, Hồ and his compatriots looked for new ways to publicize
the injustices of French rule in Indochina. They joined organizations
such as the Freemasons, took their complaints to the Ligue des Droits de
l’Homme (League for Human Rights) and attended Socialist Party
meetings. Eventually Hồ and two of his companions aligned themselves
with the radical socialists who joined the Communist International in
1920. Their options had been drastically narrowed by their failure to
gain attention at the peace conference, and this was one organization
that promised aid to Europe’s colonies for the fight against imperialism.
The Vietnamese expatriates also joined a group of Francophone anti-
colonialists to form the Intercolonial Union. For a time, Hồ Chı´ Minh
edited their newspaper, Le Paria, and ran their office. This association
included men from Madagascar, Martinique and Dahomey, as well as the
members of the Group of Vietnamese Patriots. Hồ’s existence as a low-
paid political activist sounds familiar to anyone who has worked for
social-change organizations. He was a typical subsistence-level worker
for a cause and his cause was self-government for Vietnam. But he also
became an internationalist in Paris and adopted the cause of the other
French colonies as his own. The French had a low tolerance, however, for

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 19

political activists from their colonies. They kept a close watch on Hồ and
his circle, using informers to report on his meetings and interests. Once
they had figured out the true identity of Nguyễn A´ i Quốc, the French
police refused to issue him a passport for his return home, unless he
admitted his real name. This he refused to do, so when he made up his
mind to return to the East, he travelled in secret via Berlin and Moscow.

By 1923 it was becoming clear to the expatriates in Paris that they
needed to return home with the political and journalistic experience
they had acquired in France. Nguyễn An Ninh, a law graduate of the
Sorbonne, returned to Saigon, where he began publishing La Cloche Feˆle´e
(The Cracked Bell) in 1923. He was joined by Phan Va˘n Trường, another
lawyer and close associate of Hồ Ch´ı Minh, a bit later. Both were
well educated in French and knew that they could take advantage of
the less stringent press censorship for French-language publications
available in the colony of Cochinchina, as compared to the protectorates
of Annam and Tonkin. La Cloche Feˆle´e covered a broad range of cultural
topics: it criticized government economic and educational policy, as well
as introducing its readers to modern European writers from Tolstoy to
Andre´ Gide. By 1925 it also began to discuss the thinking of communist
philosophers and even printed The Communist Manifesto.

But while a French-language paper could reach a circulation of
around 3,500, newspapers in romanized Vietnamese (quoˆ´c ngữ) could
reach many more readers, in some cases selling as many as 15,000
copies. So eventually these intellectuals would concentrate their efforts
on publishing in Vietnamese. They were not without competition
in the growing public sphere of colonial Saigon. The French colonial
authorities by the late nineteenth century were coming to the
conclusion that they must curtail Chinese influences within Vietnam.
They had observed the powerful influence of Chinese journalism on the
Confucian scholars in 1904 – 8, so they decided that the best way to
neutralize the traditional elite was to isolate Vietnam from its Chinese
heritage.24 They opted to concentrate on the teaching of quoˆ´c ngữ as the
vehicle for indigenous education and indoctrination. What grew out of
this choice surprised them, however. They did not foresee that radical
Vietnamese Francophones would join in the late 1920s with students
emerging from the Franco-Vietnamese schools, to seize the initiative in
quo´ˆc ngữ development and turn it toward different, often revolutionary
objectives.25

20 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The translator and neo-Confucian polemicist aP‘hha˙emalthQy’udỳinrehctiwonas.
selected by the French to steer quo´ˆc ngữ publishing in

The French goal was to turn the Vietnamese into willing colonial subjects

in a ‘moral conquest’ of the country. Pham Quỳnh embodied the
dependent relationship between French and˙Vietnamese, exhorting his

fellow compatriots to maintain their traditions of obedience to superiors

and filial piety. He promoted the opinions of French conservatives such as
Charles Maurras, echoing his criticisms of Rousseau and Victor Hugo.26

His French-sponsored journal Nam Phong (Southern Wind/Southern Ethos)

was continuously published from 1917 to 1934. This journal provided a

service by translating a large number of books into Vietnamese, but often

these were escapist adventure stories or romances.

By 1923, however, Nam Phong was no longer able to monopolize
the market for new writing and literature in quoˆ´c ngữ. The political

content of Nguyễn An Ninh and Phan Va˘n Trường’s paper was more

exciting to many readers. Phan Va˘n Trường’s approach to the spread

of quoˆ´c ngữ was the opposite of the French nagnữdaPnhda˙mto Quỳnh. He believed
that it was necessary to ‘translate to quo´ˆc publish writings on

every conceivable subject, so that “all of our people are able to study”’.

He wanted to make the Vietnamese national soul ‘more alert, more
intelligent and more courageous’.27 He encouraged a group of younger

journalists to start their own papers and between 1923 and 1929 this led

to a flood of publishing in the Vietnamese language, such as the
newspapers Ðoˆng Pha´p Thời Ba´o (The Indochina Times) and Trung Lập Ba´o

(The Neutral Paper).

The fact that the Vietnamese intelligentsia had already begun to find

ways to organize their own civil society before World War I gave them

the tools to refuse to accept the limited intellectual offerings of the

French. After World War I, the newspapers started by French-educated

individuals such as Phan Va˘n Trường, and Nguyễn An Ninh grew out

of an independent strain of debate and inquiry. These men may have

made use of French forms of communication and politics, but they

infused them with their own passions. They refused to be deflected from

their main interest, which was the creation of a modern, independent

Vietnam. Even the periodic closing of newspapers and the jailing of

journalists, which became a serious obstacle by 1928, had little effect on

the popular desire for independence, an idea that these men helped to

explain and popularize.

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 21

Modernization and Buddhism

Confucian scholars were the ruling elite in precolonial Vietnam and they
had the most to lose when the French made themselves masters of
Indochina. So it is not surprising that they were among the first to
question their own assumptions regarding the state, and to begin a
search for broader knowledge after the French conquest. The other
religious traditions of Vietnam, Buddhism and Taoism were less directly
impacted by colonialism, yet their practitioners were also drawn into
resistance movements, sometimes galvanizing peasant unrest with their
millenarian promises of salvation. While Taoism was a decentralized
religion of hermits and forest retreats, Buddhism, from the early days of
Vietnamese independence from China, was identified as a national
religion. Thus it is not surprising that sooner or later twentieth-century
Vietnamese nationalists would start to think of ways to modernize and
harness Buddhism as a force for change.

The Taoist philosophy of harmony with nature, inaction and yin–
yang balance is interwoven with Confucian and Buddhist practices in a
way that at times makes the traditional ‘three religions’ of Vietnam
impossible to separate. But in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, Zen
Buddhism played a distinct philosophical and political role. Under
the Ly´ and the Trần dynasties, well-educated Zen Buddhist monks
participated in state formation as advisers to the rulers. With the rise of
the Leˆ dynasty in the fifteenth century, however, Confucianism replaced
Buddhism as the state ideology and Zen Buddhism never regained its
place as the principal system of belief in the land.

Yet during the conquest and settling of the southern part of
Vietnam, Buddhism would once again play an important part in the
creation of a Vietnamese state. During the years from 1558 to 1789,
when Vietnam was governed by two competing families ruling in the
name of the weakened Leˆ, the Nguyễn lords invited Zen monks to settle
in the south. By constructing temples in newly acquired territory
around Saigon and in trading communities in the Mekong Delta, the
monks brought permanence and the comfort of a familiar religion to
new settlers in the formerly Cambodian lands. The political nature of
the monks’ role is evident from the history of their relationship with
the Nguyễn rulers, in the period before they established their
own dynasty.

22 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The Zen sect of Tru´ c Laˆm, closely associated with the Trần dynasty,

was re-established in the southern marches of Vietnam, known as Ða`ng

Trong or ‘the Inner Region’ under the Nguyễn lords. But between 1680

and 1682 their leader Minh Chaˆu was arrested on the suspicion that he

was collaborating with the Trinh lords in the northern part of the

country, what was then known as Ða`ng Ngoa`i (the Outer Region).

Because there was no real evidence of the monk’s betrayal, he was

released, but ordered to move farther south to Quảng Nam, to continue

his religious practice. But after Minh Chaˆu and around fifty disciples fled

by sea to the north in 1682, his sect was banned in Ða`ng Trong. All

monks of the Tru´ c Laˆm sect were obliged to join the Laˆm Tế sect of

Zen (Lin ji in Chinese), while Lord Nguyễn Phu´ c Tra˘n had to ask the

Laˆm Tế leader, Hoa` Thượng Nguyeˆn Thiều, to travel to China to find
monks from his sect willing to move to Ða`ng Trong.28 In 1695 the court

of Lord Nguyễn Phu´ c Chu made a mass conversion to the Laˆm Tế school
of Zen.29 These events occurred as the Nguyễn were encouraging Ming

loyalists from southern China to take refuge from the Manchu conquest

in Ða`ng Trong. A number of Chinese refugees sailed to Danang in 1679

and from there were sent south to settle near the Đồng Nai River, while

others moved farther south to Mỹ Tho in the Mekong Delta. We can see

that early Vietnamese-controlled settlements around Saigon and areas in

the Delta had a strong Chinese component; we can also assume that a

disproportionate number of the literate population was of Chinese

origin. The Buddhism that was implanted into southern Vietnam also

possessed a strong Chinese parentage and later would be strongly

influenced by Chinese trends in Buddhism, especially in the early years

of the Chinese republican revolution.

One of the oldest pagodas in Gia Ðinh province, now in Hồ Ch´ı Minh
City, was the Gia´c Laˆm temple. It wa˙s established in 1744 by Ly´ Thuy
Long, from a mixed Vietnamese –Chinese village. In 1772 a monk wa˙s

sent for from China – this brought Thı´ch Vieˆn Quang to Gia´c Laˆm

pagoda, which he turned into a centre for Buddhist learning. In these

years all of the Buddhist holy books came from China and were written

in Chinese. Gia´c Laˆm temple was severely damaged during the late

eighteenth-century uprising led by the Taˆy Sơn brothers, which was
marked by anti-Chinese pogroms in the south.30 In 1968, however, the

restored Gia´c Laˆm would play a role in the Tết Offensive, providing

shelter and meeting places for communist organizers.

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 23

After the unification of Vietnam by Nguyễn Anh (Gia Long) in 1802,

Buddhism lapsed into a ceremonial religion, decentralized and divorced

from government power. The monks received little formal training and

often served as something closer to shamans and traditional healers than

spiritual mentors. But Buddhism remained a strong force among the

ordinary people, in the frontier world of southern Vietnam, where

Confucianism had a less organized presence than in the north and centre.

Relatively few southerners bothered to prepare for the arduous

Confucian exams to join the bureaucracy in Huế.

When the French arrived on the scene, their scholars found little to

impress them in the practice of Buddhism in Cochinchina. A French

admirer of Khmer culture wrote in 1895 that even the educated

classes of Annam did not have a clear idea of Buddhist philosophy.

‘At this time in their evolution, the high ideas of Buddhism would not

seem to fit their childlike characters, incapable of any lasting or valuable
achievement’, he concluded.31 Of course, this critic fails to appreciate

that he is talking about a hybrid, frontier culture on the periphery of the

old centre of Vietnamese culture in the Red River Delta. Where he saw a

childlike culture, scholars now perceive a cultural crossroads, a place

where traditions of Cham religion, of Khmer Theravada Buddhism and

Vietnamese– Chinese Mahayana and Zen Buddhism intermingled;

which ‘opened itself more rapidly and intensely to exchanges during the

colonial period, to the point where it moved into the avant-garde of
modernity, be it western or Asian’.32

The growth of republicanism in China, and the first stirrings of a

movement to renovate the practice of Buddhism there, quickly spilled

over into Vietnam. A monk from the Mekong Delta province of Bến Tre,

Kha´nh Hoa`, was in 1907 the first in Vietnam to establish a school to

teach what would become known as ‘Restored Buddhism’, or ‘Renewed

Buddhism’ (cha´ˆn hưng phaˆ t gia´o). In 1923 he created an association of
monks (Hội Luc Hoa` Li˙eˆn Hieˆp) to promote the establishment of a
unified Buddhis˙t Association for˙all of Vietnam, one that could serve as a

foundation for the work of renewing Buddhist knowledge and practice
throughout the country.33 Part of this task was to study the authentic

Buddhist scriptures and holy books being printed in China and to
translate them into quo´ˆc ngữ. The other task faced by the Buddhist

renewal movement was to figure out what role it should play in society.

The Mahayana version of Buddhism requires believers to look beyond

24 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

the problem of individual salvation to the welfare of the greater
community. A number of nationalist Buddhists concluded that their
belief required them to take action on behalf of their countrymen,
suffering the ill effects of French colonialism.

Discussions on the relationship between Buddhist renovation and the
nation were carried on in several editions of the newspaper Ðoˆng Pha´p
Thời Ba´o, first published in 1923, and edited by a young man who would
become a top communist leader in 1945, Trần Huy Liệu. The young
Western-educated monk Thiện Chiếu, recruited into the renewal
movement by Kha´nh Hoa`, founded a Buddhist literary society in 1928
at Linh Sơn Pagoda in Saigon, and persuaded the Buddhist community
in Tra` Vinh to purchase a large set of sacred books from China for the
library. This was followed by the first publication of a Buddhist journal
in quo´ˆc ngữ, at a pagoda in Mỹ Tho in August 1929.

By this time, new radical polit˙ical currents were sweeping through
East Asia, as armed uprisings led by the communist party were erupting
in China and were on the point of spreading to Vietnam. The political
unrest in Vietnam during 1930– 1 was mostly unarmed, provoked by
bad harvests and punishing taxes. But it dramatically announced the
surfacing of a local communist party, with links to both Moscow and
Shanghai, capable of organizing coordinated province-wide demon-
strations in central Vietnam. In the following years the French became
far more cautious with regard to new societies and newspapers that they
did not control. The quoˆ´c ngữ journal Pha´p Aˆ m was closed after one
edition in 1929; in 1931– 2 attempts to start a South Vietnamese
Association to Research Buddhist Studies at a pagoda in Chợ Lớn were
hampered by the presence of laypeople in the governing committee who
did not agree with the aims of the reformist monks. They invited the
French Governor of Cochinchina to be the honorary chairman of the
association, with the French Mayor of Saigon as his deputy.34 French
involvement discredited the reformist movement in the eyes of many
intellectuals, and some critics began to refer to it sarcastically as
‘Buddhism of the administrative vehicle’.35

The Cao Ða`i: Religion and Nationalism

The Cao Ða`i religious sect was another manifestation of changing times
in colonial Vietnam. Many experts speculate that this movement grew as

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 25

rapidly as it did due to the weakness of mainstream Buddhism after the
French conquest. It developed into a temporal force that offered
protection and community for peasants in a period of rapid economic
change and political instability. A curious synthesis of Taoist, Buddhist
and Confucian elements, with a leadership hierarchy patterned on the
Catholic Church, Caodaism appealed to a broad cross-section of the
southern population. Started in 1925 by a civil servant who engaged in
Taoist divination and communication with spirits, by the outbreak of
World War II the Cao Ða`i had become a major temporal power in the
western part of Cochinchina. Five hundred thousand to one million
South Vietnamese are said to have converted by 1930, and by the time
the Japanese were defeated this number had increased.

The rapid growth of this religion in the late 1920s is a puzzling
phenomenon. The sect’s main deity is the Sino –Vietnamese supreme
being, often referred to as Cao Ða`i or ‘the High Palace’. Cao Ða`i and
other spirits worshipped by the cult, including Buddha, Lao Tzu,
Confucius, Jesus Christ and Victor Hugo, reveal their message to
believers through the intervention of mediums. Thus the religion
appears on one level to be little more than a vehicle for mystical and
superstitious practices popular among the common people. Yet it
attracted members from the urban intelligentsia as well as the hard-
pressed peasants, in particular three leaders of the reformist
Constitutionalist Party, Bu` i Quang Chieˆu, Nguyẽn Phan Long and
Dương Va˘n Giao. One of the aspects of the religion that seems to have
attracted these three was its claim to universalism, as a force that could
unite East and West, Christianity and the philosophical wisdom of the
Orient. ‘Devotees were told that Caodaism had come on earth to unite
the world’s races, save humanity and regenerate mankind’, as Jayne
Werner explains.36

In the 1920s ideas linked to theosophy and its concepts of a mystical
union of East and West cropped up from England to Russia and Japan.
Western experiments with se´ances to call up the spirits of the deceased
were transmitted to Asia by practitioners such as the transplanted Irish
Fabian and Congress Party activist, Annie Besant. Gandhi himself was
influenced by the universalist appeal of theosophical thinking. Another
sign of Western influence, the Cao Ða`i symbol of their supreme deity,
the all-seeing eye surrounded by the rays of the sun, resembles the motif
of the Masons, a group which, after World War I, became influential

26 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

among anti-clerical French liberals. Thus, although at first glance Cao

Ða`iism appears to be an obscurantist religion, on closer examination it

begins to look like a product of the modern utopian, peace-oriented

socialist movement.

There was without doubt a something-for-everyone appeal to early

Cao Ða`i beliefs. Another aspect that contributed to the Cao Ða`i popular

base was their links to religious millenarianism, the main source of

resistance to French power in the south of Vietnam. Their full name, Ðai
of God), expresse˙s
tÐha˙eocTonamvicktỳioPnhtổhaĐtộth(Te hreirvdelGatrieoantsUgnraivnetresdaltoAtmhneeCstayo Ða`i founders will

bring about a new age of love and truth. This belief in the coming of a

new age was present in Buddhist sects such as the Bửu Sơn Kỳ Hương

(Strange Scent from the Perfumed Mountain) and the Thieˆn Ðia Hội
(The Heaven and Earth Society), an association linked to the C˙hinese

Triads. The new era would witness the restoration of a good king, which

might have been linked in the popular imagination with the restoration

of power to the ‘rightful’ Nguyễn monarch, and the end of French power.

Interestingly, in 1911 the Thieˆn Ðia Hội broke its links with the
Triads and merged with the Quang Phu˙c Hội (Restoration Association)
of Phan Bội Chaˆu.37 Since 1904 Phan B˙ội Chaˆu had been supporting the

restoration of a rival to the ruling branch of the Nguyễn clan, the exiled

Prince Cường Để, who was a direct descendant of the first Nguyễn ruler.

As World War II approached, the Cao Ða`i became more openly

supportive of Cường Để, leading to increasing French suspicion.

The year after the Cao Ða`i faith was established, 1926, saw a

proliferation of political parties within Vietnam. It was also a time when

southern China was being transformed by the United Front between

Chiang Kaishek’s National Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese

Communist Party. This was the context for Hồ Ch´ı Minh’s arrival in

Canton, where he travelled late in 1924 from Moscow to begin training

Vietnamese e´migre´s in the techniques and ideology of communist

revolution. At this stage he and his colleagues were still collaborating

with Phan Bội Chaˆu’s group, as well as Cường Để. Hồ’s aim was to build

a united nationalist movement to rid Vietnam of the French, a

movement that would have a secret inner corps of communists. It is

fairly clear that the upsurge in political activity within Vietnam at this

time was influenced by the political ferment in Guangzhou. In 1926 the

arrest and repatriation to Vietnam of Phan Bội Chaˆu, followed by a

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 27

public trial, brought the news of Vietnamese activism in China directly
to the Vietnamese public.

To summarize, although the spiritual message on which Cao Ða`iism
is based may not appear to be a modernizing one, the involvement of the
Constitutionalist leaders in promoting the Cao Ða`i faith and helping
to turn it into a mass movement makes the political nature of this
phenomenon clear. The fact that Cao Ða`iism spread far more rapidly
than communism in the early years is a testament to the strong cultural
roots of the movement. During the first peasant demonstrations marking
the appearance of an organized communist party in Vietnam, in the
Mekong Delta town of Cao La˜nh in 1930, Cao Ða`i believers were visible
participants.

The ambiguous and overlapping nature of political and religious
influences would reappear in southern Vietnam during the presidency of
Ngoˆ Ðı`nh Diệm. During World War II, however, the Cao Ða`i were
unambiguously in the Japanese camp. From 1941 to 1945 they placed
themselves under the protection of the Japanese, who they believed
would bring back Cường Để to rule a free Vietnam. The Hoa` Hảo
Buddhists, a reformist movement founded in the Mekong Delta in 1939,
also had strong links with the Japanese occupiers until 1945.

The Popular Front and World War II

When in 1936 the Popular Front government was established in France,
legal political activities once again began to flourish in Vietnam. For
communist activists, this was the moment when they could re-establish
their networks throughout the country, as party members imprisoned
in 1930– 1 were amnestied. Demands for workers’ rights and the
formation of unions were looked on favourably by the radicalized French
coalition government in Paris. Left-wing newspapers popped up like
mushrooms after the rain, while electoral politics became a focus of
political organizing. Trotskyists and communists linked to Moscow
both won seats on the Saigon City Council. Overall, Vietnamese civil
society in the late 1930s was marked by a strong leftist presence,
encouraged by the participation of both socialists and communists in the
French government until 1938. This period exposed intellectuals to a
style of political life that may have been a model for some in the days of
the Republic of Vietnam, after 1954.

28 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The political atmosphere seems to have influenced the monk Thiện

Chiếu to take more aggressive action in support of his conceptions of

‘renewed Buddhism’. According to the Buddhist historian Nguyễn

Lang, he reacted against the passivity of the Buddhist community after

1932 by establishing a ‘truly progressive’ Buddhist organization in

1937. This was the association Phật Hoc Kieˆm Tế (The Buddhist
Studies and Aid Society), which found a h˙ ome in Tam Bảo pagoda in

Rach Gia´. In 1938 this group started its own newspaper, Tiến Hoa´,
wh˙ ich could be translated as Evolution or Development. The idea behind

the new association was not just to study Buddhism but to study ways to

‘govern the state and aid humanity’, as the Vietnamese phrase has it (kinh
bang teˆ´ theˆ´). This temple claimed to be the first in Vietnam to establish a

Western-style orphanage. It also took on the responsibility of feeding
flood victims in 1938, after a violent storm.38 This is an early sign of the

‘engaged Buddhism’ that the monk Th´ıch Nhất Hanh would develop in
˙
the 1960s.

The writing in Tiˆ´en Hoa´, however, began to take on an overtly leftist

character. The paper announced that it would publicize not just

Buddhist ideas, but any effective doctrine for promoting popular well-

being and happiness. In fact, any doctrine that taught ‘compassion and
altruism’ could be accepted as Buddhist, the writer claimed.39 This

sort of broad interpretation of religion was not uncommon within

modernizing movements, but it usually aroused suspicion among
religious conservatives. When Tieˆ´n Hoa´ began to advocate violence as a

way of transforming society, the authorities started to suspect that it was

controlled by Marxist –Leninists. By 1939 the paper was encouraging

Buddhist monks and laypeople to join the resistance to Japan, a fact

that seems to demonstrate close ties to the Chinese community, for

whom Japan had become an occupying power. After the collapse of the

French Popular Front, Tam Bảo pagoda was closed down and some of the

monks were arrested. The reforming monk Thiện Chiếu escaped to

Saigon, where he left the monkhood and joined the anti-French
resistance. He eventually regrouped to North Vietnam in 1954.40 From

the French –Việt Minh War through the 1960s Buddhist-led revolts in

the South, some groups of Buddhists would maintain links to the

revolutionary movement.

Overall, international politics was to have a divisive influence on

Vietnam’s independence movement, from the collapse of the Popular

THE VIETNAMESE RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM 29

Front to the final year of World War II. Like nationalists in other South
East Asian colonies, many Vietnamese viewed Japan as their potential
liberator. This group included the Cao Ða`i, the Hoa´ Hảo, the Trotskyists
and the Constitutionalists. In Vietnam the attraction of the Japanese
Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, offering ethnic unity against
the European imperialists, was somewhat tarnished by Japanese
willingness to cooperate with a French regime loyal to the pro-Nazi
Vichy government. But still, Japanese aid had a major influence on the
fortunes of the sects who supported them, encouraging a rapid growth
of their membership. Japanese military training was also available to
volunteers willing to join their militia and police force, including a
number of Trotskyists.

For the Vietnamese communists who remained loyal to Moscow’s
leadership, the choice of alliance with the Allied powers brought
them a degree of support from the Chinese nationalists, including
military training in southern China for members of the Việt Minh
alliance formed in 1941. The Việt Minh was formed to unite communist
and non-communist nationalists, although it was controlled by the
communist faction. The rise of a Free French government under
General de Gaulle after 1943, however, did not change their opposition
to French power in Indochina. While they refused cooperation with the
Free French, the Việt Minh front did seek a partnership with the
Americans stationed in China, as well as elements of the British Special
Operations Executive (SOE). The highpoint of this wartime alliance for
Hồ Ch´ı Minh and his small band of fighters was their work with the
Organization of Strategic Services, the OSS, the precursor of the CIA.
For the Việt Minh communists, this partnership ended all too quickly,
after the August 1945 Japanese surrender.

Hồ Ch´ı Minh’s 2 September Declaration of Independence in Hanoi
took place with the OSS present, and apparently offering their full
support. Hồ made a point of borrowing some of the wording of the
American Declaration of Independence, to underline the legitimacy of
the Vietnamese break with France. But the post-war relationship of
the new Vietnamese government with the United States quickly
deteriorated when the French made clear their intention to reclaim
their colony. The communist backbone of the Việt Minh front was one of
the things that made the USA reluctant to offer full support; but their
main motivation at this point was to promote a stable France in Europe,

30 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

where communist strength was also growing. The importance of the
Indochinese economy to a France devastated by war, compounded by
de Gaulle’s determination to restore the glory of his nation, in the end
outweighed the US interest in rewarding nationalists who had opposed
the Japanese. The frustration and disappointment of those Vietnamese
leaders who had chosen to fight for national independence on the side of
the Allies, delaying their communist-inspired programmes to attack
capitalism in Vietnam, became palpable in the months that led to the
outbreak of the French– Việt Minh War in December 1946.

Conclusion

From the French conquest to the period leading up to the Việt Minh’s
Declaration of Independence, the Vietnamese had been drinking in
fresh ideas and modern education; creating new organizations while
searching for allies and military support in their quest for independence.
The spread of literacy and new roles for women facilitated the
transformation. This was a wide-ranging search provoked by foreign
interference in their society, curtailment of their basic rights and theft of
their resources. Communism became an important part of this quest for
change, but it was part of a much broader transformational process,
which included fresh interpretations of religion and identity. Modern
Vietnamese nationalism grew out of this time of upheaval.

CHAPTER 2

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE:
FIRST EFFORTS TO BUILD A

NEUTRALIST POLITICAL
MOVEMENT, 1954—64

Diệm Family Rule

The French attempt to reconquer their former colony ended with their
loss at the Battle of Điện Bieˆn Phủ in 1954. The peace conference
convened in Geneva that spring came at a moment of worldwide
exhaustion with war and superpower tensions. The 1954 Geneva
Agreements that formally concluded the French– Việt Minh War
reflected the desire for peace. They provided for the neutralization of
both parts of Vietnam. They stipulated that there were to be no
foreign military bases in either section of the temporarily divided
country, while the acquisition of arms from outside sources was to be
limited to replacement of existing armaments on a piece-by-piece basis.
A nationwide election in 1956 was due to decide the form of a unified
government. The formation of a separate state in southern Vietnam was
thus a technical violation of the arrangements worked out in Geneva.
Any modicum of legitimacy that this state enjoyed derived from the
backing of the United States, which failed to add its signature or
guarantee to the peace agreements. In contrast to the drafters of the Final
Declaration, the United States in 1954 viewed Geneva ‘as a disaster for
the Free World’, an event which increased Beijing’s prestige at the
expense of Washington.1

32 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

The southern government of which Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Diệm became prime
minister in June 1954 followed the Americans in its refusal to sign the
agreements, but he nevertheless attempted to define a guiding ideology
for his new state that would underline its distance from the capitalist
United States. Diệm’s attempts to develop an Asian version of the
philosophy of ‘communitarian personalism’ identified with the French-
man Emmanuel Mounier were a classic effort to define a ‘Third Way’ for
Vietnam – an ideology based on human dignity, wedded to either
Christian or Confucian values, was how the Ngoˆ brothers envisioned
their doctrine. In the early 1950s there was still a lively personalist
movement in Europe centred on the journal Esprit, which in fact
influenced US Christian activists such as Dorothy Day and Martin
Luther King, when he was a PhD student at Boston College. Mounier
himself was a progressive Catholic who joined the French resistance
during World War II and was imprisoned by the Vichy regime. His ideas
influenced a group of Vietnamese Catholic intellectuals who studied at
the University of Louvain in Belgium in the early 1950s, as well as
Diệm’s intellectual brother and adviser, Ngoˆ Đ`ınh Nhu. But Diệm and
Nhu used these ideas as a screen for their own authoritarianism and took
a grand, impersonal approach to social justice, which they couched in
terms of their anti-communist projects. The Western conception of
personalism emphasizes both the moral foundation of human existence
and individual engagement in the community, but the latter was
seemingly beneath the remote and status-conscious Ngoˆ brothers. They
could not escape their Confucian upbringing, which emphasized loyalty
to the ruler and duties before rights.

Their major obstacle to finding a ‘third path’ for their state was,
however, their complete reliance on the United States. As French
ambassador Roger Lalouette pointed out in a report to Paris early in
1960, the Diệm government’s dependence on foreign aid meant that it
could not escape identification with the West and America.2 In the fiscal
year of 1955, US economic aid paid almost all government salaries, as
well as the Diệm government’s other operating expenses, a total of $320
million. The military equipment supplied by the USA averaged $85
million annually, until a major increase in military assistance began in
1962.3 From 1954 until 1975, US money and military support is what
kept the southern government afloat. In 1962 Diệm and Nhu balked at
the numbers of US advisers sent to work with their government, but the

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 33

reality was that, barring major political compromise with their
opponents, they could not survive without this support.

Moreover, the zeal with which the Ngoˆ family, Diệm and his brothers
Nhu and Cẩn, organized an authoritarian political structure to combat
communism left very little room for legal opposition. The human
dignity associated with personalism was only weakly reflected in the
1956 constitution, which made South Vietnam a presidential republic.
Although this constitution affirmed the separation of powers within the
government, it also granted the president the right to ‘harmonize the
legislative, executive and judicial functions’. The President was given
the right to rule by decree and to declare an emergency when he deemed
it necessary (Articles 41 and 44). He also had significant latitude to
temporarily suspend civil liberties, including freedom of movement,
residence, opinion and the press (Article 98).4 One former opponent has
established a list of 12 newspapers that had their permission to publish
cancelled by the government, for the expression of opinions displeasing
to the president. Occasionally the police organized gangs to attack the
offices of papers out of favour, a practice that was explained as ‘an
expression of the workers’ indignation’.5

The cadre party developed by Ngoˆ Đı`nh Nhu, the Personalist Labour
Revolutionary Party (Cần Lao Nhaˆn vi Ca´ch Mang Ðảng), had agents at
all levels of society who helped to f˙erret out˙ disloyalty to the clan.
Anyone who wanted to acquire influence within the Diệm government
was expected to join this organization, which had many similarities to
the communist party. The Cần Lao controlled the secret police, the
backbone of campaigns to ‘Denounce Communists’ and harass the
families of those who had regrouped to the North in 1954– 5. The first
of these denunciation (Tố Cộng) campaigns began as soon as the 300-day
period for free movement between North and South, stipulated by the
Geneva Agreements, had elapsed. Ordinance No. 6 passed in January
1956 gave local officials the authority to arrest anyone considered a
danger to the security of the state and public order. This ordinance
authorized the creation of detention camps, where the opposition could
be legally detained.6

Another aspect of the Ngoˆ family’s rule, which caused widespread
alienation, was their close identification with the Catholic Church.
Buddhist civil servants resented the obligatory training sessions at the
V˜ınh Long ‘Personalist Philosophy Centre’, where most of the teaching

34 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

and training staff were priests and bishops. The Buddhists also chafed
at the fact that they were denied official recognition as a religious
group. Decree 10 passed in 1950 by the Bảo Đai government had made
Christianity the only officially recognized relig˙ion in Vietnam, and the
Diệm government did nothing to reverse this decision. Documents sent
to the UN from the Overseas Buddhist Association in 1963 noted cases
of Buddhists being forced to take religious instruction in Catholicism, as
well as cases of forced conversions.7 In B`ınh Đinh province, for example,
Buddhists who had been active in Việt Min˙h political organizations
were forced to migrate to unsettled areas, or alternatively, to join the
Catholic Church.8 Some Buddhists feared that the Catholic Church saw
Vietnam as a potential Philippines, ripe for ‘total conversion’. Another
complaint was that Buddhist monks were often drafted for military
service and given the most dangerous assignments. Even the final
secondary school exam, the Baccalaureate, was modified to include an
option on Christianity and Personalism in the Diệm years.9

The government suspicion of Buddhism was, of course, not without
foundation. During the French Indochina War the Buddhists had shown
considerable support for the Việt Minh, and the resistance in North
Vietnam often used pagodas as a key part of their underground
infrastructure. In Central Vietnam Buddhist pagodas were one place that
communist party members could take shelter from the campaigns to
denounce communists. In the South, as we shall see, some Buddhist
temples in Saigon such as Gia´c Laˆm pagoda became the meeting places
for urban communist cells throughout the American War. But none of
these facts could justify the attitude of condescension shown towards
Buddhism by the Diệm government, which viewed it as a second-rank
religious force in Vietnamese life.

The Roots of Neutralism

Had they been less Confucian, less sure of their rectitude and more in
touch with ordinary Vietnamese, the Ngoˆ brothers might have found
support from another political current that was attracting Asian leaders
in the 1950s. This was the idea of neutralism, which embodied a concept
of Third World spiritual exceptionalism that came into bloom during
the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. The neutralist solution was
not necessarily a utopian dream in these years. In 1954 and beyond,

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 35

neutralism was backed by the DRV’s communist sponsors, the departing
French, and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, as well as major
Asian states, including India, Burma and Indonesia.

For opponents of Diệm, including the Việt Minh infrastructure
remaining in the South, the creation of a neutral government appeared to
be a promising way to start the political process mandated by the closing
statement of the Geneva Conference. Such a government could have
maintained relations with the communist state in the North, the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), while the French and the
International Control Commission (ICC) oversaw the nationwide
elections due in 1956. Hanoi became interested in some sort of national
unity government for the South, as it became clear that the country
would be divided. As the Geneva conference moved into its final phase,
Hanoi’s lead negotiator Pham Va˘n Đồng met a number of southern
Vietnamese figures who had˙ had links with the Bảo Đai government.
These included Pham Coˆng Tắc, the senior spiritual leade˙r (Hộ Pha´p) of
the Cao Đa`i religio˙n, and Trần Va˘n Hữu, a former Prime Minister in the
Bảo Đai government. In a cable sent on 7 July 1954, Pham Va˘n Đồng
wrote t˙o Hanoi that his meeting with Pham Coˆng Tắc ˙

˙

was undertaken with the approval of and under the guidance of the

French delegation, and it is possible that FBrảeoncĐha˙,iaaftgerreeadcetaosetfihries
meeting as well. With the approval of the

agreement is reached these people want to form a government in

the temporary occupied area, a government that would allow them

to have contact with us . . . This demonstrates that the French are

now preparing for a peace settlement with us, and that is why they

are placing pro-French henchmen in positions of power and why

they are agreeing to hold free general elections leading to the

unification of Vietnam . . . In this situation, we want to take the
initiative to win the sympathy of this government . . .10

Hanoi prepared the Party’s Central Committee for the concessions that
would be required by the final Geneva Agreement at its Sixth Plenum,
held 15 –17 July. In his report to the plenum, Hồ Ch´ı Minh laid out the
new policies and tasks that would prevail after the Geneva Agreement
was signed. He explained that as US policy now was to ‘broaden and
internationalize’ the fighting in Indochina’, the DRV’s policy must be to

36 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

‘fight for peace, unity, independence and democracy.’ This policy would
require concessions to France that had been unthinkable just a few
months earlier.

Before, we confiscated the property of French imperialists; now
that we are negotiating, we can follow a policy of equality; each
side should gain some economic benefits . . . we have to make
concessions to each other at an appropriate level. Previously, we
didn’t take into account the French Union, now we have agreed to
discuss participation on an equal and voluntary basis . . .
Previously, we called for the extermination of the puppet forces
in order to achieve unification; now we are using a policy of
generosity [khoan dung] and the method of nationwide general
election to achieve unity.11

We can see that Hồ Ch´ı Minh was depending on an understanding
with a sympathetic French government to counteract American policy
in the South. He must have also felt some confidence in the potential
of the Vietnamese neutralists allied with France. He may have been
hoping that the French role would decrease the DRV’s dependence
on Chinese advisers. The DRV leadership did not foresee how quickly
the USA would replace France as the sponsor of the South Vietnamese
government. They would be disappointed by Prime Minister Pierre
Mende`s-France’s unwillingness to stand up to Washington when it
came to French relations with Hanoi.12

By 1955, neutralism was becoming a well-articulated policy option
for newly independent states in Asia and it is not surprising that
different groups of Vietnamese saw advantages in this path. From the
time of the Geneva Conference and the emergence of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) on the world diplomatic stage, peacemaking
was in the air. Asian religious traditions, and their modern expressions
such as Gandhism and Buddhist socialism, were certainly key influences.
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, grappled with the idea of
non-alignment and neutralism from the early 1950s, when he called for
the admission of the PRC into the United Nations. He saw neutralism as
a realist response to international politics and as a way for the Asian
countries to avoid being drawn into the Cold War arms race. As he told
the Indian parliament in 1953, ‘It would be absurd for certain Asian

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 37

countries to want to join together and call themselves a third force or
third power in a military sense . . . One can speak of a third zone, a zone
which first in a negative sense opposes war, and then which works in a
positive way for peace and cooperation.’13 Interestingly, when the term
‘Third World’ was first used in the 1950s, it was often applied in this
sense, to mean an area where a higher, more moral kind of civilization
would emerge, beyond the Cold War system of power relationships.14

In 1955 at Bandung, it was Nehru and Indonesia’s President Sukarno
who played the most visible roles as spokesmen for the neutralist
idea, with Zhou Enlai representing a benign China, willing to promise
non-interference in its smaller neighbours’ affairs. Sukarno spoke
passionately of the need for non-alignment: ‘Perhaps now more than at
any other moment in the history of the world, society, government and
statesmanship need to be based upon the highest code of morality and
ethics. And in political terms, what is the highest code of morality? It is
the subordination of everything to the well-being of mankind.’15 The
Asian and African countries assembled at Bandung did not succeed
in defining a common attitude towards the two superpower blocs and
were aware that this was a difficult challenge for those nations that had
just regained their independence, or were in the process of doing so.
On the part of Vietnamese neutralists, there was a hope that analysis
and reflexion would lead to the discovery of a solid foundation for the
neutralist group, ‘as an effective solution to the contradictions of the
contemporary world’.16

Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia was an early convert to the
idea of neutralism and non-alignment, which given Cambodia’s history
was not a surprising choice. In February 1956, he was invited to China,
where he made a public endorsement of neutralism as the guiding
ideology of his state.17 This stance turned Cambodia into a refuge for
political opponents of Ngoˆ Đı`nh Diệm while at the same time Sihanouk
refused full diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Vietnam (RVN).
The Diệm government’s representatives in Paris and Phnom Penh used
both political and financial pressure to persuade Sihanouk to reduce his
support for their opponents. They viewed any kind of opposition as
either rebellion or part of a communist plot. They apparently did not
consider opening any political avenues for consultation at this stage in
the development of their state. On the contrary, in 1956 Diệm was
preoccupied with holding a South Vietnamese election to make himself

38 THE THIRD FORCE IN THE VIETNAM WAR

head of a presidential republic and with obstructing communist pressure

for the nationwide elections promised at Geneva.

One of the first Vietnamese opposition figures to appear in Phnom

Penh was Nguyễn Manh Ha`, a Catholic who had briefly served as a
minister in Hồ Chı´ M˙ inh’s 1946 Provisional Government. He was a

non-communist who happened to be the son-in-law of a French

communist deputy, Georges Marrane, someone who had known Hồ since

the 1920s. As Secretary for the Economy, Ha` often met Hồ Chı´ Minh, Vo˜

NofghuiymeˆnsoGhia´ipghalnydtPhhata˙mheVian˘nviĐteồdnghiimn early 1946. Hồ Chı´ Minh thought
to take part in the Fontainebleau

negotiations in the summer of that year. After the French– Việt Minh

war broke out at the end of 1946, Ha` stayed on in French-controlled

Hanoi, often being called on to act as an intermediary to the Việt Minh.

But in 1951, while he was helping to draw up the statutes for a

Vietnamese national assembly, he was expelled from Vietnam by General
de Lattre de Tassigny and sent into exile in France.18

Back in Paris, Nguyễn bMeae˙nnhleHada`indgevfiegloupreesd contacts with left-wing
French Catholics who had in the Resistance. These

contacts may have eventually enabled Ha` to influence the views of

Charles de Gaulle, after 1962. At the time of the Geneva peace

conference in 1954, Ngoˆ Đı`nh Diệm sought him out, to try to persuade

him to join an anti-communist government. Ha` refused, being

committed to reconciliation with Hồ Ch´ı Minh’s government. Instead of

joining forces with Diệm and the Americans, Ha` aligned himself with a

former Prime Minister of wthoeulBdảhoaĐvea˙ifigrsotvecrrnosmseedntp, aTthrầsnwVha˘inle Hữu, in
exile in France. The two Ha` was

working for this French-sponsored government in 1951. He persuaded

Hữu, a wealthy southerner, to take the leadership of a group advocating

the implementation of the Geneva Agreements, in particular the

holding of nationwide elections to reunify Vietnam. At the close of 1955

Ha` returned to Hanoi, at Hồ Ch´ı Minh’s invitation, to discuss the issue

of reunification. He departed with a promise from Hồ, Pham Va˘ng Đồng
and Vo˜ Nguyeˆn Gia´p, that they would support his effort˙s to work for a
‘long-term, peaceful reunification’ of Vietnam.19

In the autumn of 1956, with the communist world in turmoil,

Ha` travelled to Phnom Penh on a French passport. He became one of the

two lead writers of a French-language newspaper, La Tribune, which first

appeared in October 1956. The goal of this paper was to promote

GIVING PEACE A CHANCE 39

neutralist policies for Vietnam and Cambodia. The first issue published a

long article entitled, ‘Ou va le neutralisme? Origine et e´volution’, with a

large portrait of Nehru. The second part of this series appeared in the

second issue. A later issue on 13 November carried a long ‘Open Letter

to President Ngoˆ Đı`nh Diệm’, published as a supplement to the paper.

Five issues appeared between 26 October and 14 November, when the

South Vietnamese began to pressure Sihanouk to close it down.

Diệm’s representative in Phnom Penh reported the activities of

NcogmumyễunniMst-a˙bnahckHeda` to Saigon, with the conviction that this was a
enterprise. He claimed that the other writer for

La Tribune, Trần Thoˆng, was a high-level communist cadre from the

northern province of Ninh Bı`nh, who was posing as a French teacher.

Some of the money to publish the paper came from France, he said, but

the bulk of its funding came from the communists, via the Polish

delegation to the ICC, whose representatives travelled between Phnom

Penh and Hanoi at least twice a month. To add insult to injury, copies of

the paper were being smuggled into Saigon in cars and vans belonging to
the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces.20 However, a French scholar with

family ties to the Catholic group behind La Tribune, Claire Trần Thi
Lieˆn, asserts that Trần Thoˆng was never a ‘high-ranking communist˙

cadre’, but rather a ‘brilliant seminary student’ who was sent to study at

the University of Louvain, where he became fascinated by Mounier’s
ideas and joined the group around the journal Esprit.21 Trần Thoˆng was

one of the theoreticians of the neutral idea; he admittedly did believe

that Christians should attempt to live with the communists, if
necessary.22 The funding for La Tribune came mainly from the personal

fortune of Pham Va˘n Nam, another northern Catholic, who worked as
the paper’s gra˙phic artist and photo editor.23 In fact, the paper survived

with very limited means and thanks to a Vietnamese printer in Phnom

Penh who refused payment for his services.

The activities of Trần Va˘n Hữu promised more than they delivered.

Although he was happy to be put forward as an alternative prime

minister to Diệm in 1954, his 1su9p5p6o.rTt ohfeNSoguutyhễnVMieta˙nnahmHesa`e’s diplomatic
efforts did not materialize in embassy in

Paris discovered via an article in the French press that Nguyễn Manh Ha`
had made contacts in India to arrange a meeting of Trần Va˘n H˙ữu and

Nehru for early 1956. The ex-prime minister was then due to continue

on to Phnom Penh, where he would take part in a congress of the South