China and the First Vietnam War, 1947-54

Laura M. Calkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134078547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

This book charts the development of the First Vietnam War – the war between the Vietnamese Communists (the Viet Minh) and the French colonial power – considering especially how relations between the Viet Minh and the Chinese Communists had a profound impact on the course of the war. It shows how the Chinese provided finance, training and weapons to the Viet Minh, but how differences about strategy emerged, particularly when China became involved in the Korean War and the subsequent peace negotiations, when the need to placate the United States and to prevent US military involvement in Southeast Asia became a key concern for the Chinese. The book shows how the Viet Minh strategy of all-out war in the north and limited guerrilla warfare in the south developed from this situation, and how the war then unfolded.

1 The changing strategies of struggle, 1947–49

An anonymous reporter for The Times of London, writing for his newspaper in 1946 during the Fontainebleau talks between the governments of France and the Communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), noted that if the DRV remained, as it was then, chiefly based in northern Tonkin, it would never emerge as a dominant force within the French scheme for the “Associated States of Indochina.”¹ Without incorporating the rice-producing delta lands of southern Vietnam, where the French had just created a new stand-alone state, the Republic of Cochin-China, even a wholly controlled Communist state with a capital at Hanoi would be relatively insignificant, in economic and probably political terms. The French certainly realized this, and created Cochin-China out of the most Francophile part of the former Vietnamese empire. Ho Chi Minh and his compatriots in the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), then an underground institution but an active and thriving one nonetheless, also realized this. In August 1946 Ho Chi Minh himself suspended the Fontainebleau negotiations, which aimed to permit the DRV’s entrance into the French Union, because the French were taking new actions to consolidate the separate Vietnamese state in the south. In 1946, Ho Chi Minh decided that the incorporation of the South into the already recognized Communist-led North was an issue of such central significance that it was worth embarking upon a potentially prolonged and certainly costly military confrontation with France.

Ho’s decision was a calculated gamble, but a highly risky gamble nonetheless. Within his own organization of political cadre, armed units, and auxiliary support personnel, the overwhelming strength in both manpower and reliable political organization lay in the north. The French had succeeded in crushing the Communist movement in the south following a series of uprisings, demonstrations, and arrests in the south in the 1930s. Ho now decided to lay claim to that part of Vietnam where his own organization was weakest, and to make French capitulation on the issue of controlling the South the lynchpin of Vietnam’s nationalist and Communist revolutions. With British and French forces fully in control of the South in early 1946, it would be an uphill slog to recreate a functional revolutionary organization in the South and to control its actions, all the while contesting French plans for Paris-dominated governments in Laos and Cambodia as well. Yet this is the task that Ho Chi Minh and his Central Committee allies endorsed in 1946: the unification of northern and southern Vietnam under Communist authority.

This plan would be articulated through many themes and would employ many tools: anti-colonialism, nationalism, propaganda, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and pitched battles. It would also develop against the background of a global Cold War that pitched Western empires and anti-Communist containment strategies against revolutionary international solidarity and Moscow-style Sovietism. While resting in his sumptuous quarters at the palace of Fontainebleau, Ho was surely well aware of this emerging divide in global politics. Yet even he probably did not foresee the 30 years’ war that would ensue from his strategic decision to incorporate the south in the new Communist government, of which he was President. Unveiled publicly in Hanoi just one year earlier, the DRV was as yet more a paper tiger than a fully articulated government. While Japanese troops still controlled Indochina and Allied troops were yet to arrive to accept their surrender, Ho Chi Minh had traveled incognito to Hanoi, and on September 2, 1945 had announced the formation of a new government for all of Vietnam. Even then, his relatively small Viet Minh front organization, through which cadre, fighters, and farmers were drafted into the Communists’ plan, was almost exclusively an organization of the north. Circumstances had not changed substantially in the year that followed. Ho and the rest of the Vietnamese Communist leadership had watched French determination to reoccupy all of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia become French policy. Paris had reasserted much of its prewar political, military, and economic authority over its profitable possessions in Indochina. French troops had peacefully displaced those of its Allies, the British in the south and the Nationalist Chinese in the north. French warships occupied Vietnam’s natural ports and international trading centers, the principal ones being Saigon in the south, Tourane (Nha Trang) in central Annam near the imperial capital city at Hue, and Haiphong in the north. French forces were also back in position in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, and in Luang Prabang and Vientiane, the key political cities in Laos. With the Viet Minh organization most numerous and well-armed in the northern reaches of Tonkin and some areas in the Red River Delta of the north that lay between Hanoi and Haiphong, Ho’s vision of a united Vietnam – north and south – under the control of his Communist-led organization was a remote goal, and one upon which he was prepared to negotiate, delay, and compromise, but not abandon.

His personal political skill and determination, and that of his comrades, followers, and fighters, put Indochina at the center of the Great Powers’ concerns, both in their regional policies for Southeast and South Asia, and in their greater global strategic program. The connections between Ho’s organization and the neighboring Chinese Communist movement were central to the Western Powers’ calculus, and they form the essential concern of this book. How did the Viet Minh’s lopsided military and political organization in northern Vietnam cultivate and control revolutionists in the South? How did the Chinese Communists, whose own revolution brought them to the very edge of Indochina, respond to developments there? Amongst the cataract of nationalist, anti-colonial, and Communist-led revolutionary movements of the postwar period, how did Vietnam’s revolution emerge as the primus inter pares?

The origins of Sino-Viet Minh military cooperation

Franco-Viet Minh military hostilities began in earnest in November/December 1946 in the cities of Haiphong and Hanoi.² The Viet Minh armed forces, officially constituted as a “people’s army” in December 1944, remained relatively small, disorganized, poorly equipped, and dispersed, and by mid-1947 French military operations had rendered the Viet Minh forces in Tonkin vulnerable to military defeat.³ The French, on the other hand, were able to place around 110,000 well-trained and relatively well-equipped troops in Indochina by mid-1947.⁴ Guerrilla attacks by small Viet Minh units could harass French military and economic installations, in the hope of eroding the political resolve of the French authorities, but such attacks could not displace thousands of metropolitan troops from well-defended redoubts or from key urban areas. By contrast, the military forces led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in north-central China were in mid-1947 making the transition from guerrilla conflict to major main-force engagements, and the Chinese Nationalists’ offensive in the spring of 1947 proved to be their last large military initiative of the Chinese civil war. As Pepper has observed, the commanders of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had begun to “transform their anti-Japanese guerrilla experience into campaigns of mobile warfare.”⁵

The utility of force amalgamation and of more sophisticated tactics, particularly for the “liberation” of territory, was not lost upon the Viet Minh leadership. Already by the autumn of 1947 Truong Chinh, Secretary-General of the Marxist Studies Association (the front organization for the officially “dissolved” ICP) had formulated an outline for the development of Viet Minh forces and tactics, one modeled closely upon Mao Zedong’s military writings and theories of the progressive development of revolutionary warfare.⁶ The Viet Minh military forces had, however, suffered major battle defeats in the first half of 1947. Truong Chinh was writing against the background of new efforts to develop local and regional guerrilla and militia forces, which were being recognized as necessary force structures for a successful transition to main-force mobile warfare, or, in Truong Chinh’s analysis, the higher stages of the revolutionary armed struggle.⁷

As the Chinese Communist leadership prepared for and then, in 1949, launched the advance of the PLA south of the Yangzi River, the Viet Minh made their own preparations for a reorganization and improvement of their military forces. Regional and guerrilla forces were strengthened, and in 1949 plans were implemented to transform some elements of the Viet Minh forces into larger, more sophisticated units capable of both mobile and sustained engagements against the French. Before either the Chinese advance to the south or the redevelopment of the Viet Minh’s force structure took place, however, both the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist leaderships recognized the potential importance of military cooperation between their guerrilla forces in the China-Indochina border area.

After the outbreak of Franco-Vietnamese hostilities in December 1946, the Viet Minh’s covert arms supply routes from Bangkok were severely disrupted. Viet Minh units in northern Vietnam began to look to maritime links with Macao and Hong Kong and to cross-border trading with pro-Communist elements inside China for new sources of supply.⁸ First reports of substantive military cooperation between Viet Minh and Chinese Communist guerrilla forces date from September 1947, when Nationalist Chinese, or Kuomintang (KMT), reports indicate that proCommunist Chinese sold a quantity of arms worth 12 million piasters to the Viet Minh.⁹ By December 1947, only a few months later, the French authorities reported the CCP’s emerging policy of improving links with the Viet Minh. During January 1948, for example, the French commander at Lang Son in northeastern Tonkin reported increased collaboration between local Viet Minh forces and pro-CCP guerrillas inside Guangxi province, and there were also reports that a regularized trans-border arms traffic had been established.¹⁰ New impetus for greater cooperation may have been given to both sides after January 1948, when a secret FrancoNationalist Chinese border control agreement was reportedly concluded.¹¹ If the French expected that the agreement would stem the illegal flow of arms from China into Tonkin, they were – at least in Lang Son – disappointed: the KMT officers who arrived there in April 1948 to liaise with the French were themselves promptly arrested for selling arms to the Viet Minh.¹²

These developments, together with Ho Chi Minh’s denunciation of the new pro-French Bao Dai government and the CCP’s decision to “step up” the level of Communist activity in southern China, formed the background to the emergence of a new stage in Sino-Viet Minh relations beginning in June 1948. Small-scale cross-border cooperation had taken place since 1946.¹³

However, intelligence reports in the British and US official archives indicate that an agreement on military cooperation between the Chinese Communists and the Viet Minh was concluded in June 1948.¹⁴ These reports variously describe the agreement as including a combination of mutual defense, personnel exchange, and liaison clauses. French authorities privately acknowledged that to some extent Nationalist Chinese reports on the agreement had been fabricated by KMT agents, who no doubt also wished to bolster French resolve, but it was nonetheless believed that the KMT accounts were exaggerations of actual, if “purely local,” arrangements between Chinese Communist groups and Viet Minh networks in northern Tonkin.¹⁵ The French later confidentially informed US officials that no Sino-Viet Minh treaty document per se had been “uncovered,” but they maintained the belief – perhaps also calculated to elicit greater US support – that a bilateral Communist military agreement of some kind had been concluded in June 1948.¹⁶

Developments along the China-Indochina border during July 1948 bear out the likelihood of closer cooperative arrangements amongst the Communists, with the Viet Minh taking the lead. On July 15, following an unsuccessful raid on Funing in extreme southeastern Yunnan, the principal Chinese Communist guerrilla commander in Yunnan province, “Chu Chia-pi,” took 1000 of his pro-CCP guerrilla forces across the Indochina border into Ha Giang province in north-central Tonkin.¹⁷ “Chu” was the leader of the pro-CCP “Democratic United Army,” a guerrilla organization then active chiefly in Yunnan. He had reportedly been trained at the CCP stronghold of Yan’an between 1939 and 1943, and had entered Tonkin in 1945, presumably with the KMT forces who occupied northern Indochina under Allied agreements at the end of the World War II. He had been arrested in Hanoi, but was released after the personal intervention of the principal commander of the KMT’s occupation forces in Indochina, Gen. Lu Han.¹⁸ US diplomats reported that “Chu” was acquainted with Ho Chi Minh during the period of KMT occupation in late 1945 and early 1946.¹⁹ After entering Ha Giang province in July 1948, “Chu” and his forces remained in a Viet Minh base area during the rainy season of 1948, receiving both arms (captured from the French) and military training from his Viet Minh hosts. Together with some Viet Minh units, “Chu” and his forces reportedly participated in “several attacks” on French military posts. After the Chinese force crossed back into Yunnan, probably in November, selected pro-CCP guerrillas from Yunnan were reported to be arriving back in Ha Giang province at the Viet Minh base area to attend “training and indoctrination courses.”²⁰

Meanwhile, in southern China itself, both sides in the civil war were making preparations for a possible change of power. KMT authorities reportedly created an “underground organization” in southern China that could continue to operate in the event of a Communist conquest.²¹

Contemporaneous efforts were made by the Chinese Communists who, using Hong Kong as the central base for coordinating their activities, prepared their own local Party cells and guerrilla networks in the southern provinces for increased political agitation and military activity. Evidence of the CCP’s broadened activities came to light in September, as the result of a series of raids and arrests by KMT authorities in Kunming, Yunnan’s provincial capital. On September 4 the KMT arrested “Tuan Ying,” commander of the “Western Yunnan Column” of “Chu’s” “Democratic United Army.” “Tuan,” who had reportedly joined the CCP in 1927, and who at one time commanded some 3000 pro-CCP guerrillas in Yunnan, was a member of a Hong Kong-based organization, the “China Democratic League. ”²² At around the same time, pro-CCP leader “Ho Cheng-ping” was also arrested by the KMT in Yunnan. He was believed to have been sent to eastern Yunnan “to direct [Communist] military operations” in the Yunnan-Guizhou-Guangxi border region, in preparation for the advance of the PLA into the south.²³ In mid-September, the Kunming police uncovered a “military liaison station” sent by the Democratic League in Hong Kong to “maintain contact” with pro-CCP guerrilla groups in Yunnan.²⁴

These links substantiate reports by British Coloni...