Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- 1. Origins of the Viet Minh
- a. Pre-World War II Vietnamese Political Movements
- (1) The Political Situation During the 1920's and 1930's
In eighty years of French domination of Vietnam there had been no increase in per-acre yield of rice, so that the comparative fertility of Vietnam's fields were, in 1940, the lowest in the world.1 Viet population increased at double the expansion in rice production from cultivating new land. Thus, French contentions that their imperium had uplifted the Vietnamese notwithstanding, there is no evidence that they improved popular diet, or solved the problem of recurrent famine. In fact, the rural peasants were in 1940 socially disadvantaged in comparison with their ancestors, in that the pre-colonial mandarinal society with its subsistence economy had better provided for their basic political, economic and social needs. Moreover, the neomercantilism of France had, in fact, given the Banque d'Indochine a key role in colonial policy. The Banque was a virtual French monopoly, nearly as baleful an influence over the Vietnamese as the communists depicted it; at least, with the colonial administration, it defended the French economic position through blocking Vietnamese social and political mobility. Vietnamese entered legitimate domestic businesses under severe handicaps, and were all but foreclosed from foreign commerce. Few descriptions of pre-World War II Vietnam by non-French authors fail to portray a colonialism like that depicted by Karl Marx. For example, the Austrian-American authority, Joseph Buttinger, characterized the state of Viet society and politics in the late 1930's as follows:
- "Pauperization was the lot of most peasants and of all tenants, not only in overpopulated Tongking and Annam, but also in Cochinchina, which was much richer than the other four Indochinese states that it contributed 40 per cent to the general budget. The economic burdens of French rule, according to a contemporary English writer, 'were shouldered principally by the rural population, and the fiscal demands, together with the increasing birthrate, led to a progressive pauperization of the countryside, a process illustrated by the fact that rural indebtedness in Cochinchina alone increased from 31 million piasters in 1900 to 134 million piasters on 1930.'
- "There is, however, no more devastating verdict on the failure of the French to combat rural poverty than the dry statement of another French authority on living conditions in Vietnam. 'It is only in periods of intense agricultural labor,' wrote E. Lerich in a study published in 1942, 'which means during
