AuthorPeter Man Archives
March 2022
Categories |
Back to Blog
Who Lost Vietnam?14/11/2018 First learn about Who lost China, and we may come to the same conclusion that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was the pivotal moment and President Wilson, the Princeton Democrat, might have been the original culprit. No one actually lost China or Vietnam of course, this is just an exercise to dig a little deeper beneath the superficial half-truths inculcated in our minds as the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Without going much further back than the colonization of Vietnam by the French in the nineteenth century, otherwise we will learn that many people have lost Vietnam in the past, let us start the story at the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century when great change was in the air. Vietnam had been colonized by the French for several decades. Vietnam was and still is a fiercely independent people. There were frequent uprisings, one of which was actually led by a Chinese known as Liu Yongfu, later glorified as the Black Flag general. To clarify the situation a bit, China itself was at that time under the rule of a foreign tribe, the Manchu, which had descended from the south Siberian Jurchen. Their dynasty is known as Qing, and it is under the weakened rule of the late Qing when the foreign powers turned China into a semi-colonial country. Under Qing rule, the common Chinese people did not have a strong view of nationalism. This may help to explain why it was possible for 20,000 English and French soldiers to run rough shod over the 200,000 Qing army in the Opium Wars. The small foreign army was supplied and sometimes guided by the locals. To the Chinese peasants, it was a fight between the western foreigners and the foreign Manchu court. The peasants paid their taxes and their rents to the local gentries; they didn’t care if the barbarians wanted to slaughter one another. Things changed with the fall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China. The Chinese literati and academia aspired to be independent from the foreign powers. This led to the rise of nationalism in China. Certainly, the Vietnamese had similar hankering. While the political ties between China and Vietnam over the ages have been complicated, the deep cultural ties are unmistakable and undeniable. Vietnamese nationalism had a chance to make itself heard at the end of World War I, the war to end all wars. After all, Wilson’s Fourteen Points did clearly and unequivocally state that the people of the colonies would have a say in determining their own country’s sovereignty. At the Paris Peace Conference, China as a victor on the Allied side experienced another humiliation when its territory was ceded to Japan. This event led to the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. Few people know that while China still had a representative at the conference, a young Vietnamese scholar was stopped at the door. This young man quickly learned the western lesson that “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” The Vietnamese people would have no say in the sovereignty of Vietnam. It would remain a French colony. This young Vietnamese scholar in Paris would one day lead the Vietnamese people (with the help of the Chinese and the USSR) to fight the Japanese, the French, and later the Americans at the cost of great suffering and bloodshed. His Democratic Republic of Vietnam would eventually evict the foreign soldiers and unify the country to achieve independence. His name is Nguyen Tat Thanh, better known to us by his Chinese name Ho Chi Minh.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |