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HISTORY |
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Vietnam as a unified state within its present geographical
boundaries has only existed since the early nineteenth century. The
national history, however, stretches back thousands of years to a
kingdom in the Red River Delta
The beginnings
The most significant period in Vietnam's early history began in about
2000 BC with the emergence of a highly organized society of rice-farmers,
the Lac Viet. Held to be the original Vietnamese nation, this embryonic
kingdom, Van Lang, evolved into a sophisticated Bronze Age culture whose
greatest creations were the ritualistic bronze drums , found near Dong
Son.
Chinese rule
In 111 BC, the Han emperors annexed the whole Red River Delta and so
began a thousand years of Chinese domination. They introduced
Confucianism and with it a rigid, feudalistic hierarchy dominated by a
mandarin class. Mahayana Buddhism first entered Vietnam from China
during the second century AD.
The local aristocracy increasingly resented their Chinese rulers and
engaged in various insurrections, culminating in the battle of the Bach
Dang River in 938 AD, a famous victory for Ngo Quyen, leader of the
Vietnamese forces, who subsequently declared himself ruler of Nam Viet ,
heralding what was to be nearly ten centuries of Vietnamese independence.
Champa
Meanwhile, in the south of Vietnam it was the Indianized kingdom of
Champa which dominated the region until the late tenth century. Ruled
over by divine kings who worshipped first Shiva and later embraced
Buddhism, the Champa people built temples all along the coast of south-central
Vietnam, including the magnificent My Son.
By the end of the eleventh century, Champa had lost its territory north
of Hué to the Viets, and four centuries later the whole kingdom became a
vassal state under Viet hegemony
Independent Vietnam
Back in the Red River Delta, the period immediately following
independence from Chinese rule in 939 AD was marked by factional
infighting until Dinh Bo Linh finally united the country in 968,
securing the country's future by paying tribute to the Chinese Emperor,
a system which continued until the nineteenth century.
For the next ten centuries, Dai Viet (Great Viet) was ruled by a
sequence of dynasties , the most important of which were the Ly dynasty
, who founded the city of Thang Long, the precursor of modern Hanoi, the
Tran dynasty , who repelled three successive Mongol invasions, and the
Later Le dynasty who reconstructed the nation after a brief relapse into
Chinese rule from 1407 to 1428.
As the Later Le declined in the sixteenth century, two powerful clans
took over, splitting the country in two at the Gianh River, near Dong
Hoi. The Trinh lords held sway in Hanoi and the north, while the Nguyen
set up court at Hué. The Nguyen lords conquered the Mekong Delta, and by
the mid-eighteenth century Viet people occupied the whole peninsula down
to Ca Mau.
The Nguyen dynasty
In 1771, three disgruntled brothers raised their standard in Tay Son
village, west of Qui Nhon, and ended up ruling the whole country. Their
Tay Son rebellion gained broad support for its message of equal rights,
justice and liberty, and by the middle of 1788 had overthrown both the
Trinh and Nguyen lords.
One of the few Nguyen lords to survive the Tay Son rebellion was Prince
Nguyen Anh who, with the help of a French bishop, Pigneau de Béhaine,
raised an army and regained the throne in 1802 as Emperor Gia Long .
For the first time Vietnam , as the country was now called, fell under a
single authority from the northern border all the way down to the point
of Ca Mau. Gia Long established his capital at Hué, where he built a
magnificent citadel in imitation of the Chinese emperor's Forbidden City.
Gia Long and the Nguyen dynasty he founded were resolutely Confucian. He
immediately abolished the Tay Son reforms, reimposing the old feudal
order, and gradually closed the country to the outside world.
French rule
In the nineteenth century, French governments began to see Vietnam as a
potential route into the resource-rich provinces of southern China and
in 1858 an armada of fourteen French ships captured Da Nang. By 1862,
they controlled the whole Mekong Delta, and by 1887 had power over the
whole country, which they combined with Cambodia and, later, Laos to
form the Union of Indochina . For the next seventy years Vietnam was
once again under foreign occupation.
Paul Doumer, governor-general from 1897 to 1902, launched a massive
programme of infrastructural development , which was funded by punitive
taxes. There was a shift to large-scale rice production for export,
which eroded traditional social systems and forced peasants off the land
to work as indentured labour.
Up until the mid-1920s, Vietnam's various anti-colonial movements tended
to be fragmented. But, over the border in southern China, Vietnam's
first Marxist-Leninist organization, the Revolutionary Youth League, was
founded in 1925 by Ho Chi Minh . Born in 1890, Ho left Vietnam in 1911,
became a founding member of the French Communist Party and by 1923 was
in Moscow, training as a communist agent.
In 1930 Ho persuaded the various rival anti-colonial movements to unite
into one Indochinese Communist Party whose main goal was an independent
Vietnam governed by workers, peasants and soldiers. In preparation for
the revolution, cadres went into rural areas and among urban workers to
set up party cells.
World War II
The German occupation of France in 1940 overturned the established order
in Vietnam and by mid-1941 the region's coal mines, rice fields and
military installations were all under Japanese control.
In February 1941, Ho returned to Vietnam after thirty years in exile,
joining other resistance leaders at Pac Bo cave, near Cao Bang, where
they forged a nationalist coalition, known as the Viet Minh . The
organization was specifically designed to win broad popular support for
independence, followed by moderate social and democratic reforms.
Over the next few years, Viet Minh recruits received military training
in southern China and the Vietnamese Liberation Army was formed.
Gradually the Viet Minh established liberated zones in the northern
mountains to provide bases for future guerilla operations.
Meanwhile, Japanese forces seized full control of the country in March
1945. They declared a nominally independent state under Bao Dai, the
last Nguyen emperor, and imprisoned most of the French Army. The Viet
Minh quickly moved onto the offensive
The August revolution
The Japanese surrender on August 14 left a power vacuum and Ho Chi Minh
immediately called for a national uprising. On September 2, 1945, he
proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam .
The Potsdam Agreement , which marked the end of World War II, failed to
recognize the new Republic of Vietnam. Instead, Japanese troops south of
the Sixteenth Parallel were to surrender to British authority, while
those in the north would defer to the Kuomintang. In the south, the
British commander proclaimed martial law and Saigon was soon back in
French hands.
The French war
In the north, the 200,000 Chinese soldiers on Vietnamese soil acted
increasingly like an army of occupation, obliging Ho Chi Minh to sign a
treaty allowing a limited French force to replace them. In return France
recognized the Democratic Republic as a "free state" within the proposed
French Union. However, it soon became apparent that the French were not
going to abide by the treaty, and skirmishes between Vietnamese and
French troops escalated into an all-out conflict.
For the first years of the war against the French (also known as the
First Indochina War) the Viet Minh kept largely to their mountain bases
in northern and central Vietnam, where they could simply melt away into
the jungle whenever threatened.
The communist victory in China in 1949 proved to be a turning point.
Almost immediately, both China and Russia recognized the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam and military aid started to flow across the border.
Suddenly Bao Dai's shaky government in the south was seen as the last
bastion of the free world and America was drawn into the war, funding
the French military with at least $3 billion by 1954.
But by 1953, France was tiring of the war and both sides agreed to peace
discussions at the Geneva Conference, due to take place in May the next
year. Meanwhile, a crucial battle was unfolding near Dien Bien Phu ,
where French battalions established a massive camp, deliberately trying
to tempt the Viet Minh into the open. After 59 days of bitter fighting
the Viet Minh forced the French to surrender, on May 7, 1954, the eve of
the Geneva Conference.
The Geneva conference
The nine delegations attending the Geneva Conference succeeded only in
reaching a stopgap solution, dividing Vietnam at the Seventeenth
Parallel, along the Ben Hai River, pending nationwide free elections to
be held by July 1956; a demilitarized buffer zone was established on
either side of this military front. France and the Viet Minh agreed to
an immediate ceasefire, but crucially neither the United States nor Bao
Dai's government endorsed the Accords, fearing that they heralded a
reunited, communist-ruled Vietnam.
Diem and the south
On July 7, Emperor Bao Dai named himself President, and the vehemently
anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem Prime Minister, of South Vietnam. Diem
promptly ousted Bao Dai, declared himself President of the Republic of
Vietnam, and began silencing his enemies, chiefly members of the Hoa Hao
and Cao Dai religious sects and Viet Minh dissidents in the South. Over
50,000 citizens died in his pogrom.
Back in Hanoi&
In Hanoi , meanwhile, Ho Chi Minh's government set about constructing a
socialist society. Years of warring with France had profoundly damaged
the country's infrastructure, and now it found itself deprived of the
South's plentiful rice stocks. Worse still, the land reforms of the mid-1950s
saw many thousands of innocents "tried" as landlords by ad hoc People's
Agricultural Reform Tribunals, tortured, and then executed or sent to
labour camps.
Conscription was introduced in April 1960, cadres and hardware began to
creep down the Ho Chi Minh Trail , and Hanoi orchestrated the creation
of the National Liberation Front (NLF), which drew together all
opposition forces in the South. Diem dubbed its guerilla fighters Viet
Cong , or VC, Vietnamese Communists, though in reality the NLF
represented a united front of Catholic, Buddhist, communist and non-communist
nationalists.
America enters the fray
In early 1955, the White House began to bankroll Diem's government and
the training of his army, the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam).
Behind these policies lay the fear of the chain reaction that could
follow in Southeast Asia, were South Vietnam to be overrun by communism
- the so-called Domino Effect .
Diem's brutally repressive government was losing ground to the VC in the
battle for the hearts and minds of the population. Buddhists celebrating
Buddha's birthday were fired upon by ARVN soldiers in Hué, sparking off
riots against religious repression, and provoking Thich Quang Duc 's
infamous self-immolation in Saigon. America tacitly sanctioned a coup in
1963 that ousted Diem, who was shot.
In August 1964, when two American ships were subjected to allegedly
unprovoked attacks from North Vietnamese craft, reprisals followed in
the form of 64 bombing sorties against Northern coastal bases. US
senators empowered Johnson to deploy regular American troops in Vietnam,
"to prevent further aggression".
The escalation of the war
Early 1965 saw the start of Operation Rolling Thunder , a sustained
carpet-bombing campaign, which lasted three and a half years and saw
twice the tonnage of bombs dropped (around 800 daily) as had fallen on
all World War II's theatres of war. Despite this, Rolling Thunder failed
either to break the North's sources or their lines of supply. North
Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops continued to infiltrate the South in
increasing numbers, so that by 1967 over 100,000 a year were making the
trek south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
By the end of 1965, there were 200,000 GIs in Vietnam - a figure that
was to approach half a million by the winter of 1967. Their mission was
largely confined to keeping the NVA at bay in the central highlands and
neutralizing the guerrilla threat in the Viet Cong power-bases of the
South. They also flushed active Viet Cong soldiers out of villages, most
infamously at My Lai .
The Tet offensive
On January 21, 1968, around 40,000 NVA troops laid siege to a remote
American military base at Khe Sanh , near the Lao border. They were met
with a carpet-bombing campaign that claimed over 10,000 victims. However,
Khe Sanh was primarily a decoy to steer US troops and attention away
from the Tet Offensive that exploded a week later. In the early hours of
January 31, a combined force of 70,000 communists violated a New Year
truce to launch offensives on over a hundred urban centres across the
South. But the campaign failed to spark a hoped-for revolt against the
Saigon regime and the VC was left permanently lamed.
However, success did register across the Pacific, where the assault on
the US Embassy in Saigon , during which five Americans died, caused a
sea change in popular US perceptions of the war. On March 31, President
Johnson announced a virtual cessation of bombing and peace talks began a
month later.
The fall of the south
In 1969, Richard Nixon's presidency introduced the strategy of "
Vietnamization ", a gradual US withdrawal coupled with a stiffening of
ARVN forces and hardware. By the end of 1970 only 280,000 US troops
remained, while ARVN numbers topped a million.
Under the terms of the Paris Accords , signed on January 27 1973 by the
United States, the North, the South and the Viet Cong, a ceasefire was
established, and all remaining American troops were repatriated. But the
agreements allowed the NVA and ARVN troops to retain whatever positions
they held and renewed aggression soon erupted. Thieu's ARVN soon set
about retaking territory lost to the North and then, over Christmas
1974, an NVA drive overran the area north of Saigon now called Song Be
Province. Towns in the South fell like ninepins, President Thieu fled to
Taiwan, and Saigon fell to the North on April 30.
The toll of the American War, in human terms, was staggering. Of the 3.3
million Americans who served in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, over
57,600 died, and more than 150,000 received wounds which required
hospitalization. The ARVN lost 250,000 troops. Hanoi declared that over
two million Vietnamese civilians, and one million communist troops, died
during the war.
Post-reunification Vietnam
Vietnam was once again a unified nation, and in July 1976 the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam was officially born. However, the North had no
industry, a co-operative system of agriculture, and much of its land had
been bombed on a massive scale. In stark contrast, American involvement
in the South had underwritten what John Pilger describes as "an 'economy'
based upon the services of maids, pimps, whores, beggars and black-marketeers",
which dried up when the last helicopter left Saigon.
Hanoi was intent on ushering in a rigid socialist state. Privately owned
land was confiscated, collectivization of agriculture was introduced,
and as the state took control of industry and trade, output dwindled.
Vietnam was, until 1993, unable to look to the IMF, World Bank or Asian
Development Bank for development loans .
Anyone with remote connections with America was interned in a " re-education
camp ", along with Buddhist monks, priests and intellectuals. Hundreds
of thousands of southerners were sent to these camps, and some remained
for over a decade. Discrimination against those on the "wrong side" in
the war continues today, in areas as diverse as health care and job
opportunities.
The quagmire Vietnam found itself in after reunification prompted many
of its citizens to flee across the oceans; from 1979 until the early 90s
alone, an estimated 840,000 of these " boat people " arrived safely in "ports
of first asylum" (Hong Kong was the prime destination), of whom more
than 750,000 were eventually resettled overseas.
A return to war
Three weeks before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Pol Pot 's genocidal
regime had seized power in Cambodia; within a year his troops were
making cross-border forays into regions of Vietnam around the Mekong
Delta and north of Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon had been renamed).
Finally, on Christmas Day 1978, 120,000 Vietnamese troops invaded
Cambodia and ousted Pol Pot. They remained there until September 1989.
Doi moi& and the future
By the early 1980s the only thing keeping Vietnam afloat was Soviet aid.
Finally, in 1986, Nguyen Van Linh introduced sweeping economic reforms,
known as doi moi or "renovation". Collectivization and central planning
were abandoned, a market economy was embraced, agriculture and retail
businesses were privatized, and attempts were made to attract foreign
capital.
In 1993, the Americans lifted their veto on aid, and Western cash began
to flow. By year's end, inflation was down to five percent. Vietnam was
admitted into ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in July
1995, and full diplomatic relations with the US were restored.
Revenues from oil, manufacturing and tourism took off and everyone was
forecasting Vietnam as the next Asian tiger . But by 1997 the honeymoon
period was definitely over. Economic growth flagged as foreign companies
scaled back, or pulled out altogether, frustrated by an overblown
bureaucracy and regulations in a constant state of flux. As the economic
crisis in Southeast Asia took hold, Vietnam's state-run industries
became increasingly uncompetitive, and smuggling grew at an alarming
rate.
National elections in July 1997 ushered in the popular new prime
minister, Phan Van Khai , who has continued both the economic reforms
and the fight against corruption. One of the government's biggest
immediate problems is how to speed up the restructuring and
privatization of debt-ridden state enterprises. As Vietnam enters the
new millennium, there's no doubt a great deal has been achieved in a
comparatively short time; perhaps the initial expectations of doi moi
were just unrealistically high - on all sides.
The Vietnamese dynasties
|
Ngo |
939-965 AD |
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Dinh |
968-980 |
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Early Le |
980-1009 |
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Ly |
1009-1225 |
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Tran |
1225-1400 |
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Ho |
1400-1407 |
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(Ming Chinese |
1407-1428) |
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Later Le |
1428-1789 |
|
Nguyen and Trinh lords
|
1592-1788 |
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Tay Son |
1788-1802 |
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Nguyen |
1802-1945 |
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