They Left Their Plows Behind Them

ONE YEAR AGO tomorrow American B-52 bombers lumbered out of their hangars at air bases in Thailand, rolled down the runways and groaned into the air. Pilots set automatic controls, navigators plotted courses and bombardiers checked their payloads. The crews then settled back for a long, monotonous flight.

All over North Vietnam, radar operators scanned their screens carefully. American bombing had stopped two months earlier, just before the U.S. presidential election, but eight years of air war had taught the North Vietnamese never to relax their vigilance. Furthermore, the Paris negotiations had broken down a few days previous and messages from Washington had grown increasingly menacing.

Suddenly the radar operators leaned forward in amazement. Flocks of giant blips appeared on their screens--blips that could only signify B-52's, the biggest and most awesome weapon in the United States's arsenal. The operators began to calculate coordinates and plot trajectories, and their fears mounted as they did so: the bombers were not heading for the mountainous trails of Laos this time, or for the panhandle villages, or for army camps in the countryside. The operators alerted the air defense crews with special urgency. The B-52's were all heading for Hanoi--the first installment of Richard Nixon's Christmas present to the people of Vietnam.

In Hanoi people were bicycling from work, strolling through parks or relaxing in front of their homes as the evening deepened. Three-fourths of the city's one million people had been evacuated to the countryside the spring before, when the most recent wave of bombing had begun; the rest had remained behind, trying to live under an air war.

Doctors and therapists in Hanoi's Bach Mai Hospital were working, also unaware of the air defense crews' feverish activity. One of the hospital's most important functions was to teach people deafened by bomb concussions to hear and speak again; staff members were leading patients in complex relearning exercises.

ABRUPTLY, air raid sirens wailed through the dusk. Orderlies trundled Bach Mai's patients into underground shelters, and the bicyclers, strollers and loungers retraced familiar steps to their assigned havens. Missile batteries in the city's outskirts rotated into position, and anti-aircraft crews within the city donned helmets and waited patiently. Some riflemen peered skyward, but their efforts were futile: unlike smaller fighter-bombers, B-52's fly too high to be seen by the naked eye. Most of the people of Hanoi crouched in their shelters; they huddled in the dark and waited.

The silence that followed the warning sirens was broken by the dull thud of exploding bombs. Sirens wailed again, this time directing ambulance crews to the wounded. Bach Mai Hospital suffered the first of many direct hits. Homes and schools crumpled under the onslaught, and the night sky lit up with strings of smaller explosions. Rescue teams poked through wrecked buildings, searching for wounded people trapped beneath the rubble. The dead lay silent.

Thirty-five thousand feet above Hanoi bombardiers pressed buttons and bomb-bay doors closed slowly. The first wave of B-52's arched gracefully in a semi-circle. Navigators plotted new courses, pilots fiddled with controls and the warplanes started the long haul back. They would return again and again and again, around the clock for the next two weeks, with a brief respite on Christmas Day. The Vietnamese Revolution--born four decades earlier in the dreams of a scattered group of exiles, nurtured in the mountains and jungles in the seven-year war against the French, and grown to maturity in the resistance to the Americans--was facing another trial by fire and iron.

I

NEWS IS MADE by kings, prime ministers and diplomats, history by an entire people. In Vietnam, history has been made by peasants. It is they who started to resist the French in the 1930's, joined the Viet Minh in the early 1940's and fought on to partial victory in 1954. Peasants dragged heavy artillery over jungle trails to the mountains overlooking the French garrision in the valley of Dienbienphu.

When the U.S.-sponsored Ngo Dinh Diem regime stepped up its repression in the South in the late 1950's, peasants left their plows and rice paddies and villages and joined the National Liberation Front. In the late 1960's peasants who had never seen a television set or a washing machine, who had never visited a city, successfully resisted the American war machine. They alternately evaded and defeated U.S. ground troops; they shot down American warplanes with rifles and with their bare hands rebuilt bombed-out bridges and roads.

Peasant resistance to foreign or domestic efforts to control their lives is not new in Vietnam. Modern Vietnamese history was inaugurated by the Tay-son rebellion, a convulsive peasant upheaval which began in central Vietnam in 1771. Peasant armies under rebel generals toppled the ruling dynasties and beat back a Chinese invasion force. And although one of the dynasties--the Nguyen--regained control 30 years later, sporadic peasant rebellions on a smaller scale kept the mandarins from ignoring the peasants.

On the eve of the French takeover in the 1860's Vietnam was an integrated traditional society. The basic social unit was the village, which for the most part functioned autonomously, with strict direction from the imperial government in Hue. Peasants tilled their plots of rice land and participated in village affairs in accord with an ancient body of traditions and laws. Land distribution was not equal, but precedent and a sense of community in the villages--along with the possibility of peasant unrest--limited the inequities. Much of the land was owned communally, by the village; the proceeds from it were used to help the poorer peasants pay their taxes, to finance schools and pay teachers, to provide for widows and orphans. There were as yet no classes of wealthy landlords and of landless rural poor. Except during infrequent periods of natural disaster, on one went hungry in rural Vietnam.

THEN THE French came to Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese resisted, but the French seized the southern third of Vietnam in 1864 and extended their control to the center and north by 1885. By the turn of the century, Vietnam was firmly under French control; the imperial court was tolerated merely as an adjunct to the French administration.

Fifty years later the Vietnamese had raised an army, declared themselves independent, defeated the French and thrown them out of Vietnam for good. The Viet Minh was a peasant army and North Vietnam was and is in many ways a government of peasants. What had happened to the Vietnamese under the French? What features of French rule had turned peasants into soldiers, rice farmers into social revolutionaries?

Historians have neglected these questions. They have recorded certain features of French colonial rule: how many miles of roads the French built, which Vietnamese served in the successive puppet governments, what the various French governorsgeneral thought of Vietnam and its people. But until this year, there has been no study in English of the Vietnamese peasants themselves, of how colonialism changed their traditional way of life and how they reacted to their French rulers.

Ngo Vinh Long '64, a Vietnamese who works with the Vietnamese Studies Project at Harvard's East Asian Research Center, has taken up this neglected area. Before the Revolution is a remarkable and insightful book which draws upon many Vietnamese and French sources and Long's own experience in his homeland to depict the agonizing destruction of rural Vietnam. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, Long painstakingly molds reams of statistics into a moving but never heavy-handed description of the French transformation of rural Vietnam. In Part II, he presents his own translations of articles and stories written by Vietnamese observers of the new, harsher life that existed in the countryside under the French. The stories are numbing: in one, a peasant woman must sell her seven-year-old daughter to pay her taxes. In them rural Vietnam speaks, and gives life to the statistics.

LONG EXPLAINS that the French set to work immediately to remake rural Vietnam. Even as resistance to the invaders continued to flicker in isolated spots, the French military expropriated by decree extensive tracts of land, which they then gave to a handful of French and Vietnamese collaborators. Peasants returning home after the resistance had ended discovered that they no longer owned their land; village leaders found that the communal lands, which had provided for the young and the sick and the poor, now belonged to outsiders. As the French widened their control over Vietnam and cleared new lands for cultivation, they continued the expropriation by decree. By 1931 the French had stolen and redistributed over two-fifths of the arable land in Vietnam.

The French land policy transformed the character of life in the countryside, creating a tiny elite of largely absentee owners--who controlled wide tracts of land--and a huge class of landless tenants. An 1839 Nguyen decree had limited the size of an individual's landholdings; under the French some landlords owned up to 150 times this limit. Every peasant in traditional Vietnam had been guaranteed his share of land; under French rule over half the peasants became landless and many of the rest owned plots so small that they had to rent more from the landlord.

The new landlord class dictated harsh terms to their tenants. The peasants had to pay all production costs and turn over 50 to 70 per cent of their crops to their landlords. In addition, the colonial government ate away at the remainder of peasant production with a stiff new set of taxes. In traditional Vietnam the Nguyen government had taken an estimated 6 per cent of the peasant's income in taxes. The French added stiff head and alcohol taxes and hiked this to 10 to 20 per cent. Widescale growing corruption among both French and Vietnamese officials in the colonial government added to the burden. The landlords were generally exempt from taxes.

PEASANTS IN traditional Vietnam never had been particularly wealthy, but they had owned their own land, produced their own food, and been guaranteed a measure of security by the village communal lands. The French stole their land and brutally forced them into a tenuous life on the edge of existence. To pay the frightful rents and skyrocketing taxes, peasants were forced to borrow from their landlords--at interest rates ranging from 100 to 3650 per cent. The peasant had to sell everything he owned--his water buffalo, old heirlooms, sometimes even his children--to keep his head above water. He hitched his wife and children to his plow to replace the water buffalo, but still his debts continued to mount. And if he missed a payment on his taxes or loans, he was tossed into a colonial jail and beaten.

The peasant also was in fairly constant danger of starving to death. Since the colonial land policy gave no incentive to land improvements--the peasant could not afford fertilizer and the landlord put his money into usurious loans--land fertility declined until rice yields were among the lowest in the world. (In North Vietnam, which has broken up the large holdings and outlawed sharecropping and usury, rice yields today are four to five times greater than in the South.) Moreover, the French exported rice to take advantage of higher prices on the world market. Coupled with the declining yields, this exportation forced the peasants to the brink of starvation in normal times; during disasters--floods or bad harvests--widespread famines swept the countryside. After the 1944 Red River flood in northern Vietnam two million people starved to death--two million victims of the land policy brought to Vietnam by the French.

Why did the Vietnamese peasant not leave the countryside for a better life in the cities? Long explains that there was no place to go; the French made no real attempt to industrialize Vietnam. Their efforts were confined mainly to using taxes collected from the peasants to widen roads and improve ports in order to speed rice exports. And in the only industrial enterprise of any significance--the rubber plantations in the South--conditions were even worse than in the rural villages. The workers there were slaves: they worked long hours, were fed next to nothing, and could be murdered by guards at whim. Of 45,000 people who worked in one plantation between 1917 and 1944, 12,000 died there. Life was brutal in the village, too, but at least it was a familiar harshness.

II

HARDSHIP ALONE does not breed peasant revolution. A whole set of factors, some as yet dimly understood, prompted Vietnamese peasants to leave their villages and enter the inferno of revolutionary war. Long has promised to examine this question in another study; judging from Before the Revolution, his next book should be a useful and important contribution to a growing debate among students of Vietnamese history.

In Fire in the Lake, the best-known book about Vietnam, Frances FitzGerald 62 argued that the Vietnamese peasants had a particular cast of mind, a conception of the world, which conditioned their response to certain events in the 1940's and caused them to join the Viet Minh resistance. Her analysis--which drew upon the work of Paul Mus, an eminent French scholar of Vietnam--explained that in traditional Vietnam the peasant believed that his father, ancestors and emperor exercised great mystical powers over events. After the French consolidated their control over the country, they replaced the emperor at Hue as the omnipotent father; this mystical sense of respectful awe enabled the French to transform Vietnamese society without serious opposition. When Ho Chi Minh and a small Viet Minh contingent marched into Hanoi unopposed on August 19, 1945, French omnipotence was undermined; the mandate of heaven now descended upon the revolutionaries, and peasants flocked into the Viet Minh. Fewer than 11,00 French had sufficed to keep order before World War II; after it, more than ten times that number fought for seven years and lost.

Ngo Vinh Long has disagreed elsewhere with certain aspects of the Mus-FitzGerald analysis. Traditional Vietnam, he argued in a Ramparts review of FitzGerald's book, was not a stable, ordered moral universe. Vietnamese history is punctuated with peasant upheavals and popular resistance to foreign invasions, including to French landing parties in the 19th century. Resistance diminished somewhat in the middle years of French rule, Long suggested, not because some heavenly mandate rested upon the French, but because their rule so brutally and swiftly transformed Vietnamese society that the peasants were unable to act. Not some mystical power of French rule--but its shocking, wrenching brutality--prevented an immediate peasant response. Long's analysis was regrettably brief and sketchy; his next, longer study should be an exciting and vital elaboration of his basic argument.

In North Vietnam today, at this moment, former peasants are watching radar screens. The bombing ended last January, but U.S. reconnaissance planes still fly over the country and the B-52's are still based in Thailand. From time to time U.S. officials threaten to resume the air war; the watchers remain alert. Across North Vietnam workmen are rebuilding bombed-out bridges, doctors are tending patients and students are attending school. And peasants--men and women who have defied the American thunder and built a new society--are plodding along behing their plows, tilling their increasingly bountiful rice fields.