Cultivating Cotton in the Red Earth of Kampong Cham: Self-Sufficiency, Alternative Modernities and Wartime Refugees in Cold War Cambodia, 1955–1970

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Cambodia’s postcolonial cotton ‘push’ was integral to its ultra nationalist vision of modernity and how Cambodia sought to survive within an increasingly acerbic Cold War landscape. In turn, Cambodia’s attention to its cotton and textile industry transformed its foreign policy, student study abroad destinations, state labour apparatuses and humanitarian aid programmes. Norodom Sihanouk’s Sangkum Party used the cotton industry to increase its national legitimacy and visibility, which was intended to help Cambodia gain traction in the Cold War ‘living standards race’. This history sounds innocuous enough except that the Party sustained its cotton push by drawing its labour pool in part from refugees and other marginalised communities. That these refugees were forced to work in Kampong Cham and Battambang cotton fields contradicts the rhetoric of the Buddhist–Socialist politics promulgated by the Sangkum Party. Consequently, the history of Sangkum cotton is at once a history of Cambodia’s early postcolonial period, the American War in Vietnam, and the internationalisation of the Cold War during the ‘Decade of Development’ in the 1960s.

KEYWORDS:

• Cambodia
• Cold War
• Sangkum era
• Vietnam War
• cotton
• alternative modernities
• Afro–Asian internationalism
• Khmer Socialism
• Non-Aligned Movement
• wartime refugees

Acknowledgements

I would first and foremost like to thank Trude Jacobsen for her feedback and encouragement throughout this entire writing process. Thank you to Shawn McHale for providing extremely helpful critiques of this article in its infancy and during my dissertation drafts. Thank you to Chelsea Davis, Wayne Duerkes, Sherril Erickson, Milorad Lazić and Soksreinith Ten, who all provided incredibly useful feedback on this article. I would like to thank the Albany State University Social Sciences Department and History Program for their support. Thank you also to GWU’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies, especially Benjamin Hopkins and Helen Jiang, for their support for this research endeavour. I am also very grateful to ASR’s David Hundt, Rizah Lilang, and the multiple anonymous reviewers whose conscientious feedback was of tremendous value to this work.

Notes

1. The Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular Socialist Community) era lasted from 1955 to 1970. The Lon Nol government overthrew the Sangkum Party in 1970 and reorganised the state into the Khmer Republic. The US-backed Khmer Republic (1970–1975) ended when the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) forced the government to surrender in 1975.

2. Royal Office of Cooperation (OROC); Office of State Enterprises (OFENET); State Enterprise for Imports/Exports (SONEXIM). The Party created SONATEX (State Enterprise for Textiles) in 1964. Led by Seo Hak, SONATEX was not a major contributor to Party projects, largely due to low production and sale of textiles.

3. Milorad Lazić, pers. comm., June 2020–June 2021. Thank you also to Milorad Lazić for locating/translating material on Cambodian–Yugoslav relations in Belgrade, Serbia.

4. The currency exchange rate between the riel and US dollar was relatively steady until the end of 1969. The rate of exchange on 18 August 1969 is used throughout this article: 35.00 Riels per 1.00 USD (WGB, 1969, 2).

5. Major General Ruiquing was also the Vice Premier of the State Council and Chief of the General Staff in 1964.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Khmer Studies under the 2017–2018 Dissertation Research Fellowship.