From French Indochina to Dien Bien Phu: The Roots of the Vietnam Conflict

France consolidated colonial rule over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia with the creation of the Indochinese Union in 1887, organizing an economy of rubber, rice, and mining around exports to France while keeping the Vietnamese monarchy under Emperor Bao Dai as a nominal facade of indirect rule. Early Vietnamese nationalist movements emerged from the start of the twentieth century; in 1930 the Vietnamese Nationalist Party led an armed uprising at Yen Bai that France crushed harshly, and that same year Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochinese Communist Party, fusing anticolonial nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology. Ho Chi Minh, born in 1890, had helped found the French Communist Party in 1920 and trained in Moscow under the Communist International during the 1920s. In 1941 he founded the Viet Minh, combining nationalism and communism under a broad front that organized guerrilla activity against the Japanese occupation of Indochina and received limited logistical support from American intelligence in the fight against Japan in 1945.