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CHAPTER 6 The DRV’s Non-Communist Vision of Southeast Asia (1945–1948)

 CHAPTER 6 The DRV’s Non-Communist Vision of Southeast Asia (1945–1948) On top of the complex Vietnamese immigration and commercial activities based in Thailand I have described so far was yet another layer of operations, a diplomatic one. Between the end of World War II in 1945 and the November 1947 coup that brought Phibun back to power by early 1948, the DRV developed a largely unknown diplomatic relationship with Southeast Asia and the world thanks to its access to Thailand. Indeed, between 1945 and 1948, if not 1951 (see Chapter 8), Bangkok was the DRV’s most important diplomatic outlet to the region and one of its few windows to the world. Why is this postwar diplomacy important? On the one hand, the DRV diplomatic operations in Bangkok show how Vietnam’s anticolonial and non-ideological relationship with the region, first elaborated by Phan Dinh Phung and Phan Boi Chau in clandestine ways, came into the open in the wake of World War II. On the other hand, the DRV’s activitie...
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Chapter 5 Southeast Asian Commerical Networks of the DRV ( 1945-51 )

 Chapter 5  Southeast Asian Commerical Networks of the DRV ( 1945-51 ) The Viet Minh’s ability to regain and expand its hold upon the ICP’s prewar Southeast Asian network, including its new Indochinese sub-section, was crucial to the Viet Minh’s postwar success in supplying the war effort in Vietnam via Thailand. Between 1946 and 1951, overland and maritime routes operating from Thailand channelled stocks of weapons, equipment, explosives and medicines procured in Southeast Asia and elsewhere to Vietnam. Although the aid furnished by the Chinese communists from 1950 would be much greater and in the end decisive in the Viet Minh’s victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, it was access to Viet kieu bases in eastern Thailand and a remarkably vibrant Southeast Asian arms market based in Bangkok that helped the Viet Minh survive until Chinese communist troops opened a northern rearguard. Between 1946 and 1951, not only was the Vietnamese war against the French Indochinese ...
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