Indochina War Research Articles

Cooperation and conflict in the Mekong river basin

In the peace following the Indochina Wars, multiple project concepts have been advanced for the economic development of the Mekong River Basin. There are currently six overlapping and uncoordinated frameworks in which project planning is being carried out. The different agendas reflect the different political and economic interests of the riparian states. Three frameworks are particularly important. The Mekong River Commission is involved in water resource management. The Greater Mekong Subregion growth zone promotes integrative economic links among the riparian states. Finally, the concept of Mekong Basin development is now embedded in the overarching framework of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The cooperative programs have to overcome the long‐standing patterns of ethnic and geostrategic conflict that have made the Mekong region the “Balkans” of Asia. To these historical antagonisms, which threaten successful regional cooperation, new competitions for economic advantage have to be added.

Introduction

Nearly three decades ago, at the height of the Indochina Wars, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) began probing the relationships between knowledge and power and between structural and financial imperatives and scholarship. As the CCAS statement of purpose framed it in the charged atmosphere of spring 1969: “We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of our profession with regard to that policy.” The world has since undergone profound changes, as have many of the ways it has been studied. For all these changes, however, the original concerns for the relationship between knowledge and power, and between scholarship and the state, retain their salience and are addressed here.

Les anarchistes et les soulèvements coloniaux. De la guerre d'Indochine à la guerre d'Algérie

Sylvain Boulouque, Colonial Uprisings and the Anarchists : From the War in Indochina to the Algerian War Nationalism and colonialism have always inspired heated debate within the anarchist movement. An historical evaluation of anarchist attitudes relative to colonial uprisings indicates how the anarchist movement has reacted when confronted with events which do not enter comfortably within its traditional analytical framework. The anarchists have tended to issue warnings about the lack of internal democracy in anticolonial movements and how external forces can transform newly created states into totalitarian systems.

The Huong Lap and Phu Loi Incidents, and the Decision to Resume Armed Struggle in South Vietnam (January-April 1959)

The Vietnam War should more correctly be called the Indo-China War. Both Cambodia and Laos were integral to Hanoi's strategy for the reunification of Vietnam. Of the two, Laos was particularly impo...

Short reviews

In an attempt to publish some reviews sooner after material comes out, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars has added this section of short reviews of individual books, movies, TV series, and so on. If you are interested in writing a short review, please contact Peter Zarrow (for more information, see the introduction to the list of books to review on p. 84 of this issue).As someone who proudly served in the antiwar movement, I tend to believe we can't have too many books about the righteous struggle waged in the United States to end the Indochina wars. So on one level I welcome Tom Wells's expansion of his Berkeley Ph.D. thesis into the volume under review here. The War Within has many strengths. It mercilessly exposes the ignorant, reflexive anticommunism of such war managers as CIA director Richard Helms, White House advisor (and ideological architect of the wars in Indochina) Walt Rostow, the Nixon entourage, and others. Furthermore, Wells does what no other writer has done: narrate the interfamilial generational conflict between government officials and their children brought on by the Indochina conflicts. Offspring of Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Spiro Agnew, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman joined (or as in the case of Kim Agnew, wanted to join) the movement. Daniel Ellsberg has told us how pressures from those he loved helped transform a once gung-ho Marine and prowar government policy maker into an antiwar militant, and Wells cites Ellsberg's experiences, adding horrifying details on the savage assaults mounted on him by the Nixon administration.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Indochina War — From the Japanese defeat to the Geneva Agreements (1945–1954)

Institutions — like individuals — have a memory. They are rooted in it and draw strength from it to weather the vagaries of vogue and sentiment. To a large extent the historical consciousness is the source of the standards set for the present and for the future.Yet time does take its toll, first dimming the memory of past events, then shrouding them in the mists of oblivion.

Anthony Eden, British diplomacy and the origins of the Geneva Conference of 1954

ABSTRACTIt is almost forty years since the Geneva conference of April–July 1954 ended the French war in Indo-China. The ‘success’ of the conference was seen as a triumph for the efforts of British diplomacy, and for Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in particular, a judgement which has altered little with the passage of time. The following article questions this view on the grounds that, ironically, British support for Geneva had little or nothing to do with the situation in Indo-China. On the contrary, it arose in the wider context of policy towards the European Defence Community. It was also a product of Eden's unhappiness at Britain's junior status in the so-called Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. The British attitude to Geneva only became more positive in March-April 1954 when French fortunes reached their nadir and the alternative to a negotiated solution in Viet-Nam seemed to be American, or American-led, military intervention. Faced with this potentially catastrophic prospect, the previously ‘unwanted’ conference assumed a new relevance for Eden and British diplomacy.

The Strategic Triangle and Regional Conflicts: Lessons from the Indochina Wars.Min Chen

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsThe Strategic Triangle and Regional Conflicts: Lessons from the Indochina Wars. Min Chen Allen S. WhitingAllen S. Whiting Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 30Jul., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2950008 Journal History This article was published in The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs (1979-1995), which is continued by The China Journal (1995-present). Copyright Australian Journal of Chinese AffairsPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Chlorinated Hydrocarbon Insecticide and Polychlorinated Biphenyl Residues in Soils from Southern Provinces of Vietnam

Abstract Soil samples collected randomly from the provinces of Tayninh and Songbe, southwestern Vietnam, were analysed for the presence of DDTs, HCHs and PCBs. Residues of these chemicals were detected in all the analysed samples. Concentrations of σ DDT in cultivated soil samples were relatively high with the highest level of 290 ng/g. However, non-cultivated soil samples recorded lower levels of σ DDT. On the other hand, concentrations of σ HCH were low ranging from 0.09 to 2.3 ng/g in cultivated and from 0.09 to 2.1 ng/g in non-cultivated soils, respectively. Maximum concentrations of PCBs were recorded with the highest level of 150 ng/g in a cultivated soil sample. As for non-cultivated soil samples, the highest level was found in a former U. S. air base grounds. It can then be implied that the PCBs were incorporated in the arms used by allied forces during the Second Indochina War.

China and the First Indo-China War, 1950–54

Despite its obvious significance, the involvement of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the First Indo-China War has long been an under-researched and little understood subject in Cold War history. Because of lack of access to Chinese or Vietnamese sources, few of the many publications in English deal with China's connections with the war. In such highly acclaimed works as Marilyn B. Young's The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, Jacques Dallaoz's The War in Indo-China, 1945–1954, Anthony Short's The Origins of the Vietnam War, R. E. M. Irving's The First Indo-China War, Ellen Hammer's The Struggle for Indo-China, 1946–1955, Edgar O'Ballance's The Indo-China War, 1945–1954, and Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy: Insurgency in Vietnam, 1946–1963, the PRC's role is either discussed only marginally or almost completely neglected.

The Strategic Triangle and Regional Conflicts: Lessons from the Indochina Wars.

Focusing on the period during the 1964-1980 Indochina wars, this book examines the big power triangular relationship involving China, the Soviet Union and the United States. The author challenges the myth that, during the Nixon years, this strategic triangle was efficient in its efforts to halt the Vietnam War, and argues that, on the contrary, the triangle was restrictive, or at best had limited capability to manipulate the situation. This analysis, including a discussion of smaller triangles at work within the larger, is not only a history of the Indochina wars, but also can be applied to other triangular relationships, such as the emerging economic triangle incorporating Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

Persistent organochlorine residues in soils from tropical and sub-tropical asian countries

Soil samples from paddy fields, uplands, and urban areas (gardens and roadsides) collected from Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan were analysed to determine the residual levels of persistent organochlorine compounds such as DDTs, HCHs, and PCBs. DDT concentration in soil samples from Vietnam were found to be highest, with a mean value of 110 ng g −1, and were followed by those in Taiwanese soils with a mean value of 20 ng g −1. HCH concentrations were highest in soil samples from Vietnam (a mean value of 4·8 ng g −1) and were followed by those from Taiwan (a mean value of 1·4 ng g −1). Concentrations of PCBs were found to be highest in Taiwanese soil samples, with a mean of 95 ng g −1. Interestingly, relatively high concentrations of PCBs in rural cultivated-soil samples from Vietnam were recorded with a mean value of 25 ng g −1, probably suggesting PCB release from different kinds of weapons used during the Second Indochina war. The lowest concentrations of DDTs, HCHs, and PCBs were obtained in soil samples from Thailand, with mean values of 8·3 ng g −1, 0·4 ng g −1, and 2·7 ng g −1, respectively.

Vietnam: the struggle for national identity

Ethnicity, geography and early history a millennium of freedom the French conquest of Vietnam the nationalist movement roots of the second Indo-China War the Indo-China imbroglio the new Vietnam Vietnam's international relations the Cambodian question and US-Vietnamese relations.

The strategic triangle and regional conflicts: lessons from the Indochina wars

The strategic triangle and regional conflicts: lessons from the Indochina wars

Confronting the dilemmas of socialist development

Since 1975, following the U.S. military withdrawal and political disengagement from Indochina, there has been a slow but steady growth in scholarly literature devoted to the U.S./Indochina War and the problems of postwar reconstruction. While it is difficult to classify these studies unambiguously, it is perhaps useful to group them into two broad categories. On the one hand, one group of authors address questions such as “What went wrong?” “Why didn't the United States win the war?” and “How could things have been different?” These studies are essentially normative, that is, they embrace the underlying premise that Vietnam was indeed a noble cause, and even if the war was not winnable in a conventional sense, communism could have been contained if only a different set of strategies had been used. Despite their ideological biases, these studies are useful sources of information and should not be dismissed as postwar Pentagon-style propaganda. What is interesting to note is how the State Department, Defense Department, and Pentagon followed the advice presented by many of these authors in conducting the Gulf War in 1991.

Mother of Writing: The origin and development of a Hmong Messianic script By William A. Smalley, Chía Koua Vang, and Gnia Yee Yang, and: Hmong Njua: Syntaktische Analyse einer gesprochenen Sprache mithilfe datenverarbeitungstechnischer Mittel und sprachvergleichende Beschreibung des südostasiatischen Sprachraumes By Bettina Harriehausen (review)

REVIEWS165 Halle, Morris, and Michael Kenstowicz. 1989. On cyclic and noncyclic stress. Cambridge , MA: MIT, ms. Halle, Morris, and Jean-Roger Vergnaud. 1978. Metrical structures in phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT, ms. Hayes, Bruce. 1981. A metrical theory of stress rules. New York: Garland. [Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation, 1980.] ------. 1982. Extrametricality and English stress. Linguistic Inquiry 13.227-76. Kiparsky, Paul. 1973. 'Elsewhere' in phonology. A Festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by Stephen R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky, 93-106. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Levin, Juliette. 1988. Generating ternary feet. Texas Linguistic Forum 29.97-113. [University of Texas, ms, 1985.] Liberman, Mark, and Alan Prince. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8.249-336. McCarthy, John J., and Alan Prince. 1986. Prosodie morphology. Brandeis University and University of Massachusetts, ms. ------, ------. 1988. Quantitative transfer in reduplicative and templatic morphology. Linguistics in the morning calm 2, ed. by Seuk-Dik Kim, 3-35 Seoul: The Linguistic Society of Korea. ------, ------. 1990. Foot and word in prosodie morphology: The Arabic broken plural. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8.209-84. Miner, Kenneth L. 1979. Dorsey's law in Winnebago-Chiwere and Winnebago accent. International Journal of American Linguistics 45.25-33. Prince, Alan. 1983. Relating to the grid. Linguistic Inquiry 14.19-100. Rappaport, Malka. 1984. Issues in the phonology of Tiberian Hebrew. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. Department of Linguistics[Received 21 June 1991; 501 Calhoun Hallrevision received 24 September 1991.] The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1196 Mother of Writing: The origin and development of a Hmong Messianic script. By William A. Smalley, Chía Koua Vang, and Gnia Yee Yang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xii, 221. $15.95. Hmong Njua: Syntaktische Analyse einer gesprochenen Sprache mithilfe datenverarbeitungstechnischer Mittel und sprachvergleichende Beschreibung des südostasiatischen Sprachraumes. By Bettina Harriehausen. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 245.) Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. Pp. xxv, 307. DM 128.00. William Bright, University of Colorado* Among languages spoken by recent arrivals in the United States, one of the most interesting is Hmong—introduced by immigrants from Laos who fled their homeland, starting in 1975, because of the Indochina war. Varieties of this language (a member of the Hmong-Mien family) are spoken by perhaps as many * Thanks for my introduction to Hmong go to Ka Yang and to Annie Jaisser; and, for other help, to William Smalley and to Lise Menn. 166LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) as six million people, centered in southern China and in adjacent areas of Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. The best known varieties in Laos and Thailand are Hmong Daw and Hmong Njua; these are, at least in part, mutually intelligible . Overseas populations now exist in France, French Guiana, and Australia ; and there are some 85,000 speakers in the US, especially in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.1 The Hmong people have historically lived as minority populations in mountainous areas, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture and lacking any established writing system. It is remarkable that, since 1950, two successful writing systems have been created for Hmong, each with its community of literates. One of these, the so-called Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), was devised in 1951— 53 by a missionary group which included William Smalley, and is now widely used. The other, the unique 'Pahawh Hmong', is said to have been revealed in 1959 to a native religious leader, Shong Lue Yang—called by his disciples the 'Mother (i.e. source) of Writing'—and has continued to be taught since his assassination in 1971. Both writing systems have unusual characteristics, and the Pahawh Hmong presents phenomena perhaps unique in the history of written language; these are the topic of the book by Smalley et al. here under review (hereafter MW). The book by Harriehausen is a descriptive syntax of Hmong Njua as currently spoken in California (and will be abbreviated HN); I will discuss it more briefly.2 1. MW has the distinction of being written by Smalley (the missionary who was one of the inventors of the RPA) in collaboration with two Hmong men who are active in transmitting Shong Lue Yang's messianic message as well as his writing system. As Smalley tells us, since...

Indochine : les nouvelles frontières

Indochina : the New Frontiers, by Christian Lechervy The end of the third war in Indochina, and the collapse of communism in Europe, has killed the political concept of Indochina. Even though Vietnam remains fossilized in its mandarin Stalinism, it progressively reintegrates itself in the region. The « Asiatization » of its economy is becoming reality, pending the end of the American embargo. The multipolarization of the régional strategie game, however, has resulted in exacerbating économie rivalries and showing the ambitions of communist China. Thus little by little, the maritime daims in the China South Sea instrumentalize the inter-regional relationships in their dimensions of economie and military power.

Cambodia in 1991: An Uncertain Peace

Cambodia's once and future king, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, returned to Phnom Penh on November 14, 1991, 21 years and eight months after being overthrown by a military coup during the Second Indochina War. He was escorted from Beijing by Hun Sen, prime minister of the State of Cambodia (SOC), against whom Sihanouk had led a guerrilla insurgency for more than a decade. The United Nations Advance Mission in Cambodia (UNAMIC), numbering 268 members, was already in Phnom Penh, to be followed in early 1992 by a multinational contingent of U.N. military peacekeepers and civil administrators. Ready to greet Sihanouk in his capacity as president of the Supreme National Council of Cambodia (SNC) were representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and diplomatic missions from a score of countries. After decades of war, civil strife, and multitiered diplomacy, a compromise political settlement had finally come to Cambodia. How comprehensive the settlement actually was and how durable it would be remained in doubt. But clearly, Cambodia's best hope for peace had been realized during 1991. Sihanouk's return-arm in arm with his former enemy-to the royal palace overlooking the Tonle Sap River symbolized at once the rebirth of Cambodia and the uncertainties of a peace fraught with ambiguity and palpable dangers. The genesis of the peace settlement could be found in the decision of the external factors in the Cambodia conflictVietnam, China, and the Soviet Union-to remove Cambodia as a central irritant in their bilateral relations. For a number of reasons, these powers had concluded that the game was no longer worth the candle. The Soviet Union, in the throes of national disintegration, had neither the resources nor political inclination

Ethnicity and Development in Laos

The Lao People's Democratic Republic was founded as a socialist, multiethnic nation in 1975 at the conclusion of the second Indochina war. With a population of just over four million, it is home to nearly forty different ethnic groups.' Many leaders of the communist resistance were from ethnic minorities, and the avowed intent of the new government was to create a nation in which historic ethnic differences and prejudices would be erased. When this ideal confronted the practical realities of creating a nation-state, where no unified government had existed before, and of operating a government with virtually no resources, it was perhaps inevitable that the pluri-ethnic ideal would take second place to the immediate needs of administrative consolidation and economic growth. After 15 years of peace, Laos remains one of the poorest countries in the world, although political and economic changes have facilitated more rapid economic growth during the last four years. The Laotian2 development process is significantly affected by ethnic issues, which in some ways are sharpened by the same policy changes that facilitate growth. In this article, we will first outline the historical, cultural, and developmental context that shapes present-day ethnic relations in Laos, and then describe three examples of development practice illustrating the interconnection of development and ethnic issues. The Laotian government presently classifies all indigenous ethnic groups into three general categories, named after traditional residence patterns

The War in Indo-China, 1945–54

The War in Indo-China, 1945–54