Mandarin Bureaucracy and Politics in South Viet Nam

Abstract

P7HE ADMINISTRATIVE BUREAUCRACY is an appropriate starting place for the I study of politics in South Viet Nam. At the time of independence, it constituted one of the few organized groups functioning on a nation-wide basis. The Republican Army' had not yet come into being, and Vietnamese troops under arms were in either the French military establishment, the Communist-led Viet Minh forces or the military-religious Sects. The former colony of Cochin China now comprises the heartland of the Republic of South Viet Nam. In this area, as distinguished from the northern and central regions of Viet Nam,3 French rule had been direct. Throughout the colonial period, the recognized political process was essentially administrative-virtually a dictatorship of fonctionnaires. The Vietnamese were denied posts as administrators in Saigon and were permitted to rise only to the rank of district chief, and then only in some districts within certain provinces. During the final years of French control (the period of nominal independence from I946 to I954), the mandarin officials were promoted to the top rungs of the administrative ladder. These Westernized officials had discarded the former traditional mandarin robes in favor of the white sharkskin suit that came to be regarded as the uniform of the French officials. They constituted an elite corps of indigenous administrators called the Doc Phu Su, which, in I955, numbered about i20 men in key positions in a more or less modern administrative system.4