Anticolonial Jubilation and Postcolonial Disenchantment: Vietnamese Political Thought and the Nhan Van Giai Pham Movement

“The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu,” Frantz Fanon said in his 1961 book Les Damnés de la Terre, “is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory.” Like Fanon, many anticolonialists around the world expressed jubilation at the astonishing Vietnamese military victory over France at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, ending nearly a century of French colonialism in Vietnam (1858-1954). Yet, outside of recent scholarship on Vietnamese history, few know that Vietnamese revolutionaries were in those years also struggling against an internal opponent—Vietnamese landlords—during the “land reform campaign” (1952-1955) and that this struggle did not produce clear victory but “mistakes,” “excesses,” and wrongful persecutions that leaders of the campaign later publicly admitted to. During the fallout of the land reform, shortly after victory at Dien Bien Phu, anticolonial thinkers published essays in two journals—Nhan Van (Masterpieces) and Giai Pham (Humanities)—that criticized their leaders for a lack of democracy, freedom of speech, and human rights, and called for liberal reforms. This period of public criticism is known as the Nhan Van Giai Pham movement (NVGP) (1955-1960). Drawing on these writings, this essay shows how Vietnamese anticolonial thinkers articulated internal political challenges facing them and their comrades in the new post-colonial communist state in northern Vietnam. Specifically, this essay explores how they sought to answer a question that persists for anticolonialists around the globe: how to create lasting freedom after expelling the colonizers? While it is easy to admire how the Vietnamese forged unified resistance and a sense of collective duty that paved the way to Dien Bien Phu, it is less obvious how to interpret the fraying of unity, demand for individual rights, and disenchantment expressed in the NVGP for the aim of decolonization, not only in 1950s Vietnam but also globally and in the long term. Fanon asked, “What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu?” This essay focuses on another, equally important, question— “What must be done to avoid the need for a Nhan Van Giai Pham?” —and shows how Vietnamese anticolonial revolutionaries have answered it.