Vietnam: Historical background

Vietnam has strong historical connections to China and India and has been ruled by both China and France. After turmoil and wars in the twentieth century, Vietnam embarked on a program of reform that has opened relations with the United States.

By Lorraine Aragon

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Vietnam is like all Southeast Asian countries in its historic cultural division between lowland, more urbanized peoples with access to foreign (particularly Indian) goods and ideas through waterway connections, and indigenous highlanders (in this case, Tai speakers) who farm rice in rugged mountainous regions. The latter groups of highland ethnic minorities are known in the Southeast Asian literature as “hill tribes” or “Montagnards” in Vietnam.

Vietnam is unique among the eleven nations of Southeast Asia because of its strong historical kingdom connections to China as well as India. What is now northern Vietnam was ruled by China for more than a thousand years, between the second century B.C.E. and the tenth century C.E. Ethnic Vietnamese have been both attracted to Chinese ideas and, at times, anxious to resist Chinese political rule for their own people.

The Chinese-influenced northern kingdoms emerged around the fertile Red River Delta, where the national capital of Hanoi is today. These kingdoms often rebelled against Chinese rule, and they eventually became stronger militarily than southern Hindu kingdoms ruled by Chams, who are linguistically related to Malays. The Chams built the Indianized Champa kingdom roughly contemporaneous with Angkor although today they are a small ethnic minority within Vietnam with a significant Muslim population.

The French sent Catholic missionaries to the Vietnam region beginning in the mid 17th century. When many of them were killed by Vietnamese emperors in the 1800s, the French government used their repression as a pretext for invasion and colonial conquest. Saigon was seized by the French navy in 1859. During the following decades, the French repelled the Chinese, who also considered Vietnam as theirs, and expanded French territorial control over what are now the nations of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They set their capital of Saigon in Vietnam’s second fertile river delta region, the Mekong.

Some Vietnamese Communists today point to early anti-French communist groups that emerged in North Vietnam in the 1930s, but no serious nationalist or communist movements emerged before World War II. The Japanese invaded French Indochina in 1940 and, as everywhere, they claimed the slogan “Asia for Asians.” This revolutionary idea took hold throughout Southeast Asia where local people were astounded to find out that their large and populous territories had been controlled by Europeans (with guns) from relatively tiny and distant countries.

In 1941 the Vietminh organization was set up as the League for the Independence of Vietnam. A banished scholar of European Marxist ideas named Ho Chi Minh returned from exile to join the Vietminh and free Vietnam from imperialist European control. The Vietminh quickly seized the north and central regions of Vietnam from postwar Chinese control, while the French re-assumed control only of the south from British forces. The “first Vietnam war” between the French-controlled south and the Communist-led north began in December 1946. In 1954 the French withdrew, leaving Vietnam an indepedent but divided nation. The United States sent troops to fight the Communists throughout the 1960s, bombing also in neighboring Cambodia.

The United States ended its part in the Vietnam War in 1975. Saigon quickly fell to the Communists who united North and South Vietnam. During the same year, the Communist Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia and ruled brutally until they were displaced by Vietnamese troops in late 1978.

In 1986, as the Cold War was ending, Vietnam began a series of market and social reforms, working to normalize its relations with the United States and open the country for tourism, which developed in the 1990s. Cambodia also aims to expand tourism to its sites at Angkor although devastation from its 1970s civil wars have left the country in a poorer condition than Vietnam.