North Vietnam

• 1. Introduction

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  North Vietnam declared its existence on the 2nd of September 1945, when Hồ Chí Minh stood before the world and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam into being. Behind that act of proclamation lay decades of French colonial rule, a brutal Japanese occupation, and the sudden vacuum left by the end of World War II. The new state would last just over thirty years before it ceased to exist, not through defeat, but by absorbing its rival entirely. What follows is the story of how it got there, and what it cost along the way. How did a guerrilla movement born in rural wartime chaos build itself into a state capable of outlasting the world's largest military power? What kind of country was North Vietnam, beneath the slogans and the fighting? And what happened to the people who lived through its land reforms, its wars, and its decades of isolation from the capitalist world?

• 2. A Republic Proclaimed

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  For nearly three centuries, feudal dynasties had divided Vietnam against itself. The country had been reunited only in 1802, when Gia Long founded the Nguyễn dynasty, but that unity quickly gave way to French protectorate status after 1883. By 1940, Japanese forces occupied the country. When Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, the Việt Minh moved fast. In the August Revolution, the movement entered Hanoi and, on the 2nd of September 1945, Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, replacing the Nguyễn dynasty with a new government. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had himself opposed any return to French rule in Indochina and had proposed placing the region under United Nations trusteeship. The Việt Minh understood the power of that sentiment. The movement had been deliberately designed to appeal to a broader population than the Indochinese Communist Party alone could reach, cloaking its communist leadership in the language of Vietnamese nationalism. Even so, the new government's grasp on the country was shaky. British troops arrived in Saigon on the 12th of September 1945, and French forces occupied police stations and public buildings just eleven days later, on the 23rd of September. In the North, Chinese Nationalist troops came to disarm the Japanese, forcing Hồ to accommodate Kuomintang-backed Vietnamese nationalists. To hold power, Hồ's government made concessions. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Vietnam Revolutionary League were assigned 70 seats in the National Assembly, giving the DRV the appearance of an inclusive government, even as the Việt Minh moved to consolidate its actual control.

• 3. The First War

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  In January 1946, the Việt Minh held elections mainly in the North to establish a National Assembly. Former Prime Minister Trần Trọng Kim later claimed there were places where people were forced to vote for the Việt Minh. The negotiations with France that followed were fragile. In March 1946, the Franco-Chinese and Ho-Sainteny Agreements allowed French forces to replace the Chinese north of the 16th parallel; the last Chinese detachments left Haiphong on the 15th of June. With the Chinese gone, Võ Nguyên Giáp moved swiftly to drive out Vietnamese nationalists and secure the Việt Minh's monopoly on power. Reports at the time indicated that a force of about 13,000 nationalists was destroyed in Tonkin, with other estimates placing the massacres across northern Vietnam at 15,000. When France declared Cochinchina, the southern third of the country, a separate autonomous republic in June 1946, Vietnamese nationalists reacted with fury. By December 1946, the French had reoccupied Hanoi and the First Indochina War had begun. The Viet Minh fought largely in rural areas, while the French held the cities. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 changed the character of the conflict; the United States, which had been watching from a distance, began providing financial support to France, transforming what had been an anti-colonial struggle into a Cold War battleground. Chinese Communist forces had arrived on the border in 1949, and their aid transformed the Viet Minh from a guerrilla militia into something approaching a standing army. That army's victory came at the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, where Giáp's forces defeated the French outright.

• 4. The Geneva Divide

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  The Geneva Conference of 1954 ended the First Indochina War and did something no single battle could have: it cut Vietnam in two. The Geneva Accords provisionally divided the country along the 17th parallel, assigning the northern zone to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the southern zone to the non-communist State of Vietnam. Supervision of the accords fell to an international commission made up of India, Canada, and Poland, representing the non-aligned, capitalist, and communist blocs respectively. The partition was meant to be temporary, with general elections scheduled for July 1956 to reunify the country. Those elections never happened. South Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm announced in July 1955 that his government would not participate, arguing it had not signed the accords. In October 1955, Diệm held his own referendum, widely reported to have been marred by electoral fraud, which deposed Chief of State Bảo Đại and made Diệm the first president of a new Republic of Vietnam. The United States had not signed the Geneva Accords either, and stated it would pursue unity only through elections supervised by the United Nations. The immediate human consequence of partition was enormous. More than one million North Vietnamese moved south, many through the US-led Operation Passage to Freedom, with an estimated 60 percent of the North's one million Catholics making the crossing. The Viet Minh tried to stop people from leaving through intimidation, shutting down ferry services, and prohibiting mass gatherings. At the same time, between 14,000 and 45,000 civilians and approximately 100,000 Viet Minh fighters moved north.

• 5. Land, Reform, and Blood

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  A Viet Minh Land Reform Law dated the 4th of December 1953 laid out the program explicitly: confiscate land from enemies of the regime, requisition land from those deemed less threatening, and purchase the rest with payment in bonds. The campaign ran from 1953 to 1956 and reshaped rural North Vietnam. By 1960, some 40,000 cooperatives covered nearly nine-tenths of all farmland, and agricultural production had climbed to 5.4 million tonnes, more than double the pre-Indochina War levels. The economic gains came at a brutal cost. From the beginning, the program contemplated executions of those classified as reactionary and evil landlords. A Politburo document dated the 4th of May 1953 fixed the planned execution ratio at one per one thousand people of the total population. How many people actually died became one of the most contested questions in Cold War historiography. Estimates range widely, from historian Gareth Porter's figure of between 800 and 2,500, based on a South Vietnamese government document from 1959, to scholar Edwin E. Moise's revised estimate of around 13,500, including people who committed suicide following arrest. Scholar Balasz Szalontai, writing in 2007, found that Hungarian diplomatic documents recorded 1,337 executions by December 1955 from among 62,182 identified landlords. Economist Vo Nhan Tri reported uncovering a central party archive document placing wrongful executions at 15,000. On the 18th of August 1956, Hồ Chí Minh formally apologized, acknowledging that too many farmers had been wrongly classified and executed. A serious riot broke out in November 1956 in one largely Catholic rural district, leaving 1,000 people dead or injured and several thousand imprisoned. By September 1957, as many as 23,748 political prisoners had been released as part of the correction campaign. Concurrently with all of this, over 12,000 people had died from famine in Viet Minh-controlled zones by the end of 1954, the result of economic turmoil combined with floods and crop failures.

• 6. War and the World Outside

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  North Vietnam was diplomatically isolated from much of the world for most of its existence, recognized mainly by communist states including the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba. The country refused to establish diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia from 1950 to 1957, reflecting its alignment with Soviet criticism of Josip Broz Tito's government. Non-aligned countries tended to extend de facto rather than formal recognition. Algeria was an exception; relations between Algiers and Hanoi were close enough that the DRV secretly transferred weapons to the Algerian independence movement, and Algeria later placed a draft resolution at the 1973 summit of the Non-Aligned Movement calling on members to support North Vietnam. In 1969, Sweden became the first Western country to extend full diplomatic recognition to North Vietnam. By December 1972-49 countries had established diplomatic relations with the DRV, and in 1973 France restored formal ties as well. Japan's path was unusual. In March 1955 a Japanese friendship association was created, and private exchanges continued even while official ties were frozen. Japan and North Vietnam signed a formal agreement restoring diplomatic relations on the 21st of September 1973, in Paris, with the document written in French. The agreement was signed by Japanese Ambassador Yoshihiro Nakayama and North Vietnamese Charge d'Affaires Võ Văn Sung. Japan then paid the equivalent of US$45 million in World War II reparations in the form of economic cooperation grants and opened an embassy in Hanoi on the 11th of October 1975. A subsequent agreement reached on the 6th of October 1975 provided an additional endowment worth 13.5 billion yen, of which 8.5 billion yen was designated for heavy farmland cultivation machinery and public works through Japanese-owned corporations.

• 7. Victory and Aftermath

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  Lê Duẩn, who led North Vietnam from 1960 onward, saw the war through to its end. The fall of Saigon came on the 30th of April 1975. North Vietnam and South Vietnam were officially reunited on the 2nd of July 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The merged government was dominated by holdovers from North Vietnam and adopted the North Vietnamese constitution, flag, and anthem. North Vietnam's constitution had itself been modelled on Joseph Stalin's 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union, an ideological lineage that carried into the unified state. The country's system of autonomous regions, which had given tribal minorities self-government in exchange for accepting Hanoi's authority since 1955, was discontinued after reunification and fully abolished by 1978. What followed reunification was not straightforward either. The unified country experienced economic decline, refugee crises, a conflict with the Khmer Rouge in 1978, and a war with China in 1979. The Soviet-style political and economic system remained in place, along with membership in Eastern Bloc organizations such as COMECON, until the Đổi Mới economic reforms of 1986 began to change the country's direction. The Thái-Mèo Autonomous Region, established in 1955 and renamed the Northwestern Autonomous Region in 1962, stands as a small measure of how thoroughly the political geography North Vietnam had built was dismantled in the years after 1976.