Whatever economic progress Vietnam made under the French after 1900 benefited only the French and the small class of wealthy Vietnamese created by the colonial regime. The masses of the Vietnamese people were deprived of such benefits by the social policies inaugurated by Doumer and maintained even by his more liberal successors, such as Paul Beau (1902–07), Albert Sarraut (1911–14 and 1917–19), and Alexandre Varenne (1925–28). Through the construction of irrigation works, chiefly in the Mekong delta, the area of land devoted to rice cultivation quadrupled between 1880 and 1930. During the same period, however, the individual peasant’s rice consumption decreased without the substitution of other foods. The new lands were not distributed among the landless and the peasants but were sold to the highest bidder or given away at nominal prices to Vietnamese collaborators and French speculators. These policies created a new class of Vietnamese landlords and a class of landless tenants who worked the fields of the landlords for rents of up to 60 percent of the crop, which was sold by the landlords at the Saigon export market. The mounting export figures for rice resulted not only from the increase in cultivable land but also from the growing exploitation of the peasantry.

The peasants who owned their land were rarely better off than the landless tenants. The peasants’ share of the price of rice sold at the Saigon export market was less than 25 percent. Peasants continually lost their land to the large owners because they were unable to repay loans given them by the landlords and other moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates. As a result, the large landowners of Cochinchina (less than 3 percent of the total number of landowners) owned 45 percent of the land, while the small peasants (who accounted for about 70 percent of the owners) owned only about 15 percent of the land. The number of landless families in Vietnam before World War II was estimated at half of the population.

The peasants’ share of the crop—after the landlords, the moneylenders, and the middlemen (mostly Chinese) between producer and exporter had taken their share—was still more drastically reduced by the direct and indirect taxes the French had imposed to finance their ambitious program of public works. Other ways of making the Vietnamese pay for the projects undertaken for the benefit of the French were the recruitment of forced labor for public works and the absence of any protection against exploitation in the mines and rubber plantations, although the scandalous working conditions, the low salaries, and the lack of medical care were frequently attacked in the French Chamber of Deputies in Paris. The mild social legislation decreed in the late 1920s was never adequately enforced.

Apologists for the colonial regime claimed that French rule led to vast improvements in medical care, education, transport, and communications. The statistics kept by the French, however, appear to cast doubt on such assertions. In 1939, for example, no more than 15 percent of all school-age children received any kind of schooling, and about 80 percent of the population was illiterate, in contrast to precolonial times when the majority of the people possessed some degree of literacy. With its more than 20 million inhabitants in 1939, Vietnam had but one university, with fewer than 700 students. Only a small number of Vietnamese children were admitted to the lycées (secondary schools) for the children of the French. Medical care was well organized for the French in the cities, but in 1939 there were only 2 physicians for every 100,000 Vietnamese, compared with 76 per 100,000 in Japan and 25 per 100,000 in the Philippines.

Two other aspects of French colonial policy are significant when considering the attitude of the Vietnamese people, especially their educated minority, toward the colonial regime: one was the absence of any kind of civil liberties for the native population, and the other was the exclusion of the Vietnamese from the modern sector of the economy, especially industry and trade. Not only were rubber plantations, mines, and industrial enterprises in foreign hands—French, where the business was substantial, and Chinese at the lower levels—but all other business was as well, from local trade to the great export-import houses. The social consequence of this policy was that, apart from the landlords, no property-owning indigenous middle class developed in colonial Vietnam. Thus, capitalism appeared to the Vietnamese to be a part of foreign rule; this view, together with the lack of any Vietnamese participation in government, profoundly influenced the nature and orientation of the national resistance movements.

Modern nationalism

A new national movement arose in the early 20th century. Its most prominent spokesman was Phan Boi Chau, with whose rise the old traditionalist opposition gave way to a modern nationalist leadership that rejected French rule but not Western ideas, science, and technology. In 1905 Chau went to Japan. His plan, mildly encouraged by some Japanese statesmen, was to free Vietnam with Japanese help. Chau smuggled hundreds of young Vietnamese into Japan, where they studied the sciences and underwent training for clandestine organization, political propaganda, and terrorist action. Inspired by Chau’s writings, nationalist intellectuals in Hanoi opened the Free School of Tonkin in 1907, which soon became a center of anti-French agitation and consequently was suppressed after a few months. Also, under the inspiration and guidance of Chau’s followers, mass demonstrations demanding a reduction of high taxes took place in many cities in 1908. Hundreds of demonstrators and suspected organizers were arrested—some were condemned to death, while others were sent to Con Son (Poulo Condore) Island in the South China Sea, which the French turned into a penal camp for Vietnamese nationalists.

Phan Boi Chau went to China in 1910, where a revolution had broken out against the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. There he set up a republican government-in-exile to attract the support of nationalist groups. After the French arranged his arrest and imprisonment in China (1914–17), however, his movement began to decline. In 1925 Chau was seized by French agents in Shanghai and brought back to Vietnam for trial; he died under house arrest in 1940.

After World War I the movement for national liberation intensified. A number of prominent intellectuals sought to achieve reforms by obtaining political concessions from the colonial regime through collaboration with the French. The failure of such reformist efforts led to a revival of clandestine and revolutionary groups, especially in Annam and Tonkin; among these was the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, founded in 1927 and usually referred to as the VNQDD). The VNQDD preached terrorist action and penetrated the garrisons of indigenous troops with a plan to oust the French in a military uprising. On the night of February 9–10, 1930, the troops of one garrison in Tonkin killed their French officers, but they were overwhelmed a day later and summarily executed. A wave of repression followed that took hundreds of lives and sent thousands to prison camps. The VNQDD was virtually destroyed, and for the next 15 years it existed mainly as a group of exiles in China supported by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang).

Vietnamese communism

The year 1930 was important in the history of Vietnam for yet another reason. Five years earlier, a new figure, destined to become the most prominent leader in the national movement, had appeared on the scene as an expatriate revolutionary in South China. He was Nguyen Ai Quoc, better known by his later pseudonym of Ho Chi Minh. In June 1925 Ho Chi Minh had founded the Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam, the predecessor of the Indochinese Communist Party.

Ho Chi Minh had left Vietnam as a young seaman in 1911 and traveled widely before settling in Paris in 1917. He joined the Communist Party of France in 1920 and later spent several years in Moscow and China in the service of the international communist movement. After making his Revolutionary Youth League the most influential of all clandestine resistance groups, he succeeded in early 1930 in forming the Vietnamese Communist Party—from late 1930 called the Indochinese Communist Party—from a number of competing communist organizations. In May of that year the communists exploited conditions of near starvation over large areas of central Vietnam by staging a broad peasant uprising, during which numerous Vietnamese officials and many landlords were killed, and “Soviet” administrations were set up in several provinces of Annam. It took the French until the spring of 1931 to suppress this movement and, in an unparalleled wave of terror, to reestablish control.

Unlike the dispersed and disoriented leadership of the VNQDD and some smaller nationalist groups, the Indochinese Communist Party recovered quickly from the setback of 1931, relying on cadres trained in the Soviet Union and China. After 1936, when the French extended some political freedoms to the colonies, the party skillfully exploited all opportunities for the creation of legal front organizations, through which it extended its influence among intellectuals, workers, and peasants. When political freedoms were again curtailed at the outbreak of World War II, the Communist Party, now a well-disciplined organization, was forced back into hiding.