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War & Society Volume 31, 2012 - Issue 2: Bringing Asia into Focus: Civilians and Combatants in the Line of Fire in China and Indochina
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Original Article

The (Transformative) Impacts of the Vietnam War and the Communist Revolution in a Border Region in Southeastern Laos

Vatthana PholsenaNational Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, SingaporeView further author information
Pages 163-183 | Published online: 12 Nov 2013

  • Marr DavidG., Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), p. 403. See also Christopher E. Goscha, ‘A ‘Total War’ of Decolonization? Social Mobilization and State-Building in Communist Vietnam (1949–54)’, in this Special Issue.
  • McAlister JohnT., ‘Mountain Minorities and the Viêt Minh: A Key to the Indochina War’, in Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, ed. by Peter Kunstadter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 771–844 (pp. 831–32).
  • Goscha, ‘A ‘Total War’’.
  • Goscha, ‘A ‘Total War’’; and Christian C. Lentz, ‘Making the Northwest Vietnamese’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 6·2 (2011), 68–105.
  • Goscha ChristopherE., ‘Vietnam and the World Outside. The Case of Vietnamese Communist Advisers in Laos (1948–1952)’, South East Asia Research, 12·2 (2004), 141–85.
  • But, see Erik Harms, ‘The Critical Difference: Making Peripheral Vision Central in Vietnamese Studies’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 6·2 (2011), 1–15.
  • Thongchai Winichakul, ‘Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Postnational Histories in Southeast Asia’, in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, ed. by Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), pp. 3–29 (pp. 3–4).
  • Lary Diana, The Chinese People at War. Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 2–3.
  • Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Bringing the State Back In, ed. by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 170–91 (p. 170).
  • Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, ad 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA & Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997), p. 21 (first quote) and p. 70 (second quote).
  • However, later works on state formation in both European and non-European societies have refined Tilly’s argument, and have stressed instead factors such as elite ideologies and politics (including elite families), administrative models (inspired by colonial or indigenous structures), or religious doctrines, as being more conducive to bureaucratic centralization than war depending on the historical, political, and social contexts. See Tuong Vu, ‘Studying the State through State Formation’, World Politics, 62·1 (January 2010), 148–75 (pp. 152–58).
  • ‘Le PCI fonda la survie de l’État-nation sur le postulat que la guerre et la construction étatique étaient deux processus allant de pair. Créer un front national n’était pas une initiative suffisante. Un État, l’État, devait exister pour que la guerre soit conduite, que les forces armées soient soutenues et dirigées, que l’action soit menée en coordination avec la communauté internationale et pour que la souveraineté politique et la mainmise territoriale s’incarnent et se pérennisent’. Christopher Goscha, Vietnam. Un État né de la Guerre 1945–1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, Kindle Edition, 2011); 156 out of 11,055.
  • This paper is based on material collected during fieldwork in the districts of Sepon, Vilabuly, and Phine, all of which are located in the easternmost parts of Savannakhet Province. I first visited the area in 2004, returned in both 2005 and 2006, and again in 2008 and 2010, totalling eleven months of field research.
  • John McKinnon and Jean Michaud, ‘Presentation: Montagnard Domain in the South-East Asian Massif’, in Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: The Mountain Minorities of the South-East Asian Massif, ed. by Jean Michaud (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), pp. 1–25; Willem van Schendel, ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20 (2002), 647–68; James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
  • Jean Michaud, Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), p. 5.
  • Bernard Gay, La nouvelle frontière lao-vietnamienne. les accords de 1977–1990 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995).
  • Li Tana, n Cochinchina. Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2002), p. 120.
  • Anh, ‘Établissement par le Viêtnam de sa frontière dans les confins occidentaux’, in Les frontières du Vietnam. Histoire des frontières de la Péninsule Indochinoise, ed. by Pierre-Bernard Lafont (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), pp. 185–93 (pp. 190–91).
  • Gábor Vargyas, A la recherche des Brou perdus, population montagnarde du Centre Indochinois (Paris: Etudes Orientales/Olizane, Les Cahiers de Péninsule n. 5, 2000), pp. 13–15.
  • M. Damprun, ‘Monographie de la Province de Savannakhet (Laos Français)’, Bulletin de la Société des Etudes Indochinoises, 1 (1904), 61.
  • Such works, notably by Frederick Jackson Turner, have since been (much) criticised by ‘new western historians’, see for instance Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987); and ‘What on Earth is the New Western History’, in Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), pp. 81–88.
  • The Lao kingdom of Lan Xang (‘the kingdom of a million elephants’) reached its zenith in the seventeenth century under King Sourinyavongsa. On the death of the ruler in 1695, the kingdom, undermined by internal divisions, was progressively broken up and became the object of struggles for influence between its two powerful neighbours, Siam (present-day Thailand) and Dai Viêt (present-day Vietnam).
  • ‘[À] l’apogée de la monarchie, le système le plus généralement admis était la soumission des populations périphériques au tribut, tandis que le contrôle de l’administration mandarinale vietnamienne sur leur territoire s’exerçait par l’intermédiaire de chefs coutumiers […] Les régions périphériques, néanmoins, restaient mal intégrées dans l’espace étatique vietnamien et demeuraient, de tout temps, une zone de dissidence, de rébellion, de refuge, de passage’. Anh, ‘Établissement par le Viêtnam de sa frontière’, p. 186.
  • Anh, ‘Les conflits frontaliers entre le Viêt Nam et le Siam à propos du Laos au XIXe Siècle’, The Vietnam Review, 2 (Spring-Summer 1997), 154–72.
  • A study undertaken by Lê Quý Ðôn, a high-ranking mandarin under the dynasty, entitled biên and published in 1776, provides invaluable information on the ethnic Viêt’s penetration in the hinterlands of Central Vietnam. The document takes the form of a compilation of miscellaneous records on the peripheral lands of Hóa and Nam. Beyond the military and political aspects, hill peoples and lowland ethnic Viêt are shown to be interacting daily on the ground. Lê Quý Ðôn notes patterns of exchanges involving upland agricultural and forest products (rice, chicken, buffaloes, bamboo shoots, textiles, etc.), on the one hand, and lowland items (salt, dried fish, iron and copper objects, silver jewellery, etc.), on the other.
  • Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, ‘From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History’, The American Historical Review, 104·3 (1999), available at: <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/104·3/ah000814.html> [accessed 20 February 2007] (para. 3 out of 80).
  • The historical phase of territorial expansion and political consolidation through military conquests and administrative centralization in mainland Southeast Asia began in the mid-eighteenth century with the advent of the Konbaung dynasty in Burma. Anh, ‘Dans quelle mesure le XVIIIème siècle a-t-elle été une période de crise dans l’histoire de la péninsule indochinoise ?’, in Guerre et Paix en Asie du Sud-Est, ed. by Anh and Alain Forest (Paris: L’Harmattan, Collection ‘Recherches Asiatiques’, 1998), pp. 159–73 (pp. 165–68).
  • The administrative boundaries of these châu corresponded with the confines of the local muang that had been tributaries of the state since the reign of Emperor Gia Long (1802–20). The nine châu in were: , [Muang Sepon?], [Muong Nong], Tá-bang [Muong Pha-Bang], [Muong Xieng Hom?], [Muong Phong], Ba-lan [Muong Phalane], [Muong Nam Nau], and (or Lang-thìn) [Muong Phine]. Anh, ‘Les conflits frontaliers’, p. 158.
  • Charles Lemire, Le Laos Annamite. Régions des Tiêm (Ailao), des Moïs et des Pou-Euns (Cam-Môn et Tran-Ninh) Restituées en 1893 (Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1894), pp. 14–16.
  • On 3 October 1893, a treaty signed between France and Siam forced the Siamese to cede to France their territories on the east bank of the Mekong.
  • Chou Norindr, Histoire Contemporaine du Laos, 1860–1975 (San Diego, CA: Connaître le Laos Society, 1994), pp. 108–09; Vargyas, A la recherche des Brou perdus, p. 88.
  • Bernard Gay, ‘La frontière Vietnamo-Lao de 1893 à nos jours’, in Les Frontières du Vietnam. Histoire des frontières de la Péninsule Indochinoise, ed. by Pierre-Bernard Lafont (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), pp. 204–29 (p. 217).
  • Lieutenant Barthélemy, ‘Rapport (du 31 décembre 1947) du Lieutenant Barthélemy, Délégué administratif de Tchépone, concernant les problèmes que pose l’actuelle frontière séparant les provinces, laotienne de Savannakhet, et vietnamienne de Quangtri’, in Vargyas, A la recherche des Brou perdus, pp. 257–97.
  • Vargyas, A la recherche des Brou perdus, p. 78. In the 1930s, the French introduced a policy of building up a special and exclusive relationship with indigenous people in the Central Highlands in Vietnam, whom they named the ‘Montagnards’. They encompassed under this name various Austronesian and Mon-Khmer ethnic groups living in Vietnam’s southern mountains in an attempt to present an image of the Montagnards as constituting — despite their cultural and linguistic differences — a single category in juxtaposition to the ethnic Vietnamese.
  • Clive J. Christie, ‘Loyalism and ‘Special War’: The Montagnards of Vietnam’, in A Modern History of Southeast Asia (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1996), pp. 82–106.
  • Vatthana Pholsena, ‘In the Line of Fire: The Revolution in the Hinterlands of Indo-China (1957–1961)’, in L’Échec de la Paix? L’Indochine entre les Deux Accords de Genève (1954–1962), ed. by Christopher Goscha and Karine Laplante (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2010), pp. 341–59.
  • Karl Deutsch, ‘Social Mobilisation and Political Development’, American Political Science Review, 55·3 (1961), 493–514 (p. 494).
  • Võ Nguyên Giáp, Banner of People’s War, the Party’s Military Line (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 26.
  • Joseph J. Zasloff wrote in his US-government-sponsored study that ‘interviews with refugees from Xieng Khouang Province stated that porterage was ‘the single most unpopular aspect of life under the Pathet Lao’’. Joseph J. Zasloff, The Pathet Lao. Leadership and Organization (Massachusetts, Lexington: Lexington Books, 1973), p. 66.
  • In the course of the Geneva Conference, the status of the RLG as the internationally recognized Lao political entity was confirmed, as was its territorial integrity. Nevertheless, the powers at the conference stated that the PL should continue to administer the two provinces of Phong Saly and Huaphan (these two northeastern provinces had been occupied by the PL and the Viêt Minh troops since December 1953) until a negotiated settlement could be reached between the RLG and the PL, and arranged the political, administrative, and military integration of these two provinces in the RLG system.
  • Goscha ChristopherE., ‘The Revolutionary Laos of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam: The Making of the ‘Pathet Lao Solution’ (1954–1957)’, L’Échec de la Paix? L’Indochine entre les Deux Accords de Genève (1954–1962), ed. by Christopher Goscha and Karine Laplante (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2010), pp. 61–84 (p. 78).
  • According to Goscha: ‘[t]he Vietnamese spent almost four billion ðong (3,978,783,560d) or some 2,471,294 US$ on the Pathet Lao project between 1954 and 1957’, Goscha, ‘The Revolutionary Laos’, p. 83.
  • John Prados, The Blood Road. The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998), p. 15.
  • The Military Transportation Group 559 was set up in May 1959 to construct the first North-South Road and to organize the logistics (weapons and supplies) to the south, specifically to Inter-zone V. In the same month, a North Vietnamese Army battalion (the seventieth) was formed; its task was to transport weapons, ammunition, mail, and supplies to South Vietnam through southeastern Laos, as well as to guide the infiltration groups and to help the sick and injured cadres returning to the north. According to the Military History Institute of Vietnam: ‘Group 559 transported a total of 165,600 weapons [‘artillery pieces, mortars, and anti-aircraft machine guns’] to the battlefields in the South during the 1961–1963 period’ (Military History Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam. The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975 (University Press of Kansas, 2002), p. 115.
  • All figures are quoted from the article by Channapha Khamvongsa and Elaine Russell, ‘Legacies of War’, Critical Asian Studies, 41·2 (2009), 281–306. A recent survey by the National Regulatory Authority (NRA) for the UXO/Mine Action sector in Laos reveals that more than 50,000 people were hurt or killed by unexploded ordnances (UXO) between 1964 and 2008, Vientiane Times, 6 February 2010.
  • Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, Highway No. 9. Opportunities and Challenges (Hanoi: Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, 2009), p. 41.
  • Danièle Voldman, ‘Les populations civiles, les enjeux du bombardement des villes (1914–1945)’, in La Violence de guerre, 1914–1945. Approches comparées des deux conflits mondiaux, ed. by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, Christian Ingrao, and Henry Rousso (Bruxelles: Éd. Complexe, 2002), pp. 151–73.
  • Lary, The Chinese People at War, p. 2.
  • An estimated 700,000 civilians had been displaced at least once since 1962, partly as a consequence of the US bombing. Zasloff, The Pathet Lao, p. 65.
  • Vatthana Pholsena, ‘Life under Bombing in Southern Laos (1964–1973) Through the Accounts of Survivors in Sepon’, European Journal of East Asian Studies, 9·2 (2010), 267–90 (pp. 277–78).
  • Overy RichardJ., ‘Air Power in the Second World War: Historical Themes and Theories’, in The Conduct of the Air War in the Second World War. An International Comparison, ed. by Horst Boog (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992), pp. 7–28 (p. 25).
  • See also Vatthana Pholsena, ‘Highlanders on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Representations and Narratives’, Critical Asian Studies, 40·3 (2008), 445–74.
  • The disciplined regimen that prevailed in PL-controlled zones was confirmed by refugees who had fled these areas; their testimonies were collected by political scientist Joseph Zasloff, who subsequently reported that ‘life was extremely difficult in the PL zone: the burdens of duties of porterage and other corvée labor were heavy; taxes were high and rice was scarce; most able-bodied men and some women were conscripted for fighting; movement was tightly controlled; underground agents monitored behaviour; and people had to devote much time in organizations listening to monotonous propaganda’. Zasloff, The Pathet Lao, p. 67.
  • Overy, ‘Air Power in the Second World War’, p. 25.
  • Timothy Mitchell, ‘Society, Economy, and the State Effect’, in State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural Turn, ed. by George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 76–97 (p. 77).
  • Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics’, The American Political Science Review, 85·1 (1991), 77–96 (p. 93).
  • Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State’, p. 93.
  • Gerald Cannon Hickey, Free in the Forest. Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands 1954–1976 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 125 (both quotes).
  • Christian C. Lentz, Mobilization and state formation on a frontier of Vietnam, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(3) (2011), 559–586 (p. 573). One should not overstate the efficacy of mobilization and propaganda works as Goscha fittingly recalls: ‘the hard, cold reality that many a peasant, too many by early 1953, did not want to take part in this increasingly deadly conflagration putting them at the mercy of some of the most deadly industrial weapons of the 20th century’. Nonetheless, the number of civilians the DRV mobilized into major battles of the First Indochina War was astonishing: between 1950 and 1954, the DRV recruited 1,741,381 people (mostly from rural areas) as civilian porters (Goscha, ‘A ‘Total War’’, in this Special Issue).
  • Vatthana Pholsena, ‘L’éducation d’une génération de patriotes révolutionnaires, du Laos au Nord Viêt Nam’, Communisme (2012), forthcoming.
  • Lockhart BruceM., ‘Education in Laos in Historical Perspective’, personal communication (2001), p. 21.
  • Christie CliveJ., ‘Marxism and the History of the Nationalist Movements in Laos’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 10·1 (March 1979), 146–58 (p. 156).
  • Pholsena, ‘L’Éducation’.
  • Vatthana Pholsena ‘La production d’hommes et de femmes socialistes nouveaux: expériences de l’éducation communiste au laos révolutionnaire’, in Laos. Sociétés et Pouvoirs, ed. by Vanina Bouté and Vatthana Pholsena (Bangkok-Paris: IRASEC-Les Indes Savantes, 2012).
  • The approach was less effective among other children. Some tried to escape, rebelled, or felt very homesick and suffered from isolation and loneliness, see Pholsena, ‘La production’.
  • See for similar experiences in the former Soviet Union and ex-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe: Detelina Tocheva, ‘Enfances dans le Kollektiv en Estonie et en ex-URSS’, Ethnologie Française, XXXVII (2007), 449–55; Alexia Bloch, ‘Longing for the Kollektiv: Gender, Power, and Residential Schools in Central Siberia’, Cultural Anthropology, 20·4 (2005), 534–69; and Alexia Bloch, Red Ties and Residential Schools. Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
  • Pholsena, ‘La Production’.
  • Benoît de Tréglodé, Héros et Révolution au Viêt Nam, 1948–1964 (Paris: L’Harmattan, ‘Recherches asiatiques’, 2001).
  • Lentz, ‘Mobilisation and State Formation on a Frontier of Vietnam’, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, 13–14 August 2010, p. 20.
  • For peasant resistance against rural collectivisation programmes in Laos, see Christian Taillard, ‘Les transformations de quelques politiques agricoles socialistes en asie entre 1978 et 1982 (Chine, Vietnam, Cambodge et Laos)’, Études rurales, 89/91 (1983), 111–43.
  • 2010 Sepon District statistics, collected by the author.
  • Sivapavatnyokhongphanakngankhu — ajan khonghongkanseuksa muang Sepon (‘Short biographies of teaching civil servants — Teachers of Sepon Education Office’), Savannakhet Provincial Education Department, 2008–09.
  • Silapavatnyokhongphanaknganhongkansathalanasuk muang Sepon (‘Short biographies of Sepon Health Office’s civil servants’), Sepon District Health Office, 2008–09.
  • Sivapavatnyokhongphanakngankhu — ajankhonghongkanseuksamuangVilabuly (‘Short biographies of teaching civil servants — Teachers of Vilabuly Education Office’), Savannakhet Provincial Education Department, 2008–09.
  • This issue is a subject of my ongoing research.
  • Interviews with fifty teachers (some of whom have retired), who were trained during and/or in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Sepon District, February–April 2010.
  • In 1935, only 8·45 per cent of the total public expenditure in Laos was allocated to education, compared to 18 per cent in Annam (today’s central Vietnam), 15 per cent in Cochinchina (south Vietnam), 12·87 per cent in Tonkin (north Vietnam), and 11·6 per cent in Cambodia. Geoffrey C. Gunn, Rebellion in Laos. Peasant and Politics in a Colonial Backwater (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2003), p. 53.
  • The ruins of these two military posts are still visible in these villages.
  • Gay, ‘La frontière vietnamo-lao’, pp. 213–21.
  • Prados, The Blood Road, p. 86.
  • Interview with the author, Savannakhet Capital, February 2010.

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