Paris Peace Summit, 1971 - World Model United Nations

Cochin China for their own gain. He increased revenues by
creating ocial monopolies over the production and sale
of alcohol, salt, and opium. Of the three, opium production
had the greatest repercussions on the Vietnamese people.
Although only the Chinese living in Vietnam had smoked
opium prior to the arrival of the French, a new opium renery
in Saigon encouraged local Vietnamese consumption of
the narcotic. Vietnamese addiction accelerated—and soon
revenue from opium production and sale accounted for one
third of the colonial administration’s income. 18 Opium trac
would have grave inuences on the Vietnamese people even
aer the departure of the French.
Rice cultivation in paddies was critical to the economic
survival of peasants.
Doumer pursued a land reform that accelerated the
dispossession of rural peasants from the land. While the
emperors had prohibited rice exports to insure against
leaner times, rice was a valuable commodity to Doumer
and the French. French speculators and wealthy landowners
grabbed any fertile land to ride the wave of lucrative rice
cultivation, at the expense of peasants, who lost their land
and became tenants or worked small plots, in subsistence
farming. Doumer found use for these landless peasants—
as cheap labor in mining, rubber, construction, and other
industries. Conditions in these sectors were abysmal, with
many workers serving as little more than indentured labor,
and oen working until they died of disease.
While Doumer achieved his objective of turning the
impoverished colony of Vietnam into a humming gear in the
machine of the global French economy, the plundering of
French capitalists set into motion the ideology of the extreme
nationalists. Led by Ho Chi Minh, the Communists, the
most ferocious adversaries of colonialism, would capture the
popular discontent against French injustice, and eventually
bring down the foreign regime.
“Patriots of All Ages and All Types”
Isolated from the all-but-obsolete Confucian philosophy
that bound the older generation of mandarins, the young
Vietnamese intelligentsia looked westward for a way to come
to terms with French domination. Following the October
Revolution in Russia in 1917, a number of young Vietnamese
found themselves drawn towards the socialism that spurred
the Bolshevik revolutionaries. 19 Among these Vietnamese
was a young Ho Chi Minh, who was at the time living in
Paris, writing articles and impassioned pamphlets for labor
journals and participating in lively debate circles. For Ho,
the decision to join the Communists, who had broken away
from the gentler ideologies of the socialists, was that “their
Soviet patrons had the potential power to spark the global
revolution that would liberate Vietnam.” 20 What Ho found
most compelling about Lenin’s thesis was his unrelenting
critique of world imperialism.
When Ho visited Moscow in 1924, however, he found that
Soviet leaders were too busy squabbling among themselves
for the succession of power to Lenin, to have sucient
interest in Vietnam. 21 Nonetheless, Ho used his time in
the Soviet Union to specialize in peasant aairs for the
Communist International (Comintern) and before long was
assigned to propagandize and recruit in China. In 1930, he
founded the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), which,
escaping the French suppression that undid rival groups,
would become the most eective of the Vietnamese anticolonial
organizations. 22 e ICP was thus better prepared
than their rivals to seize the opportunity presented by the
outbreak of World War II—and the Japanese occupation.
e Japanese wave swept over Southeast Asia in 1940, as the
Japanese Imperial Army poured down from China, crushing
the French in Vietnam, the British in Malaya, the Dutch
in Indonesia, and the United States in the Philippines. e
Western colonial powers had fallen to an Asian nation—
and native nationalists throughout Southeast Asia ocked
to Japan. 23 Ho Chi Minh, however, was not convinced that
the Japanese would be much kinder masters than the French
they replaced. Instead, he expected the Allies to win—and
to oust the French (who were now operating in Vietnam
on behalf of the Japanese). In 1941, he formed a broad
movement of “patriots of all ages and all types, peasants,
workers, merchants and soldiers” to ght the Japanese and
their French collaborators. 24 Led by the Communists, they
called the nationalist organization the Viet Nam Doc Lap
Dong Minh, the Vietnam Independence League—or the
Vietminh, for short.
Harvard WorldMUN 2012 PARIS PEACE SUMMIT 1971 8