Vol 5, No 1S (2021)

Using materials from the Vietnam’s National Archives Center No. 2, in particular the incomplete series of the Military Administration Committee’s weekly or monthly reports, as well as recently published archival documents from the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN), this paper aims to shed light on the issue of “Tiếp quản”, the transition of power in Saigon after 30 April 1975 from the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) to the combined Vietnamese revolutionary forces by studying the Ủy ban Quân quản Thành phố Sài Gòn – Gia định (UBQQSG), the Military Administration Committee for the City of Saigon – Gia Dinh.

This paper will start by examining what kind of challenge Saigon represented for the Vietnamese revolution and how the revolutionaries prepared to face it. Second it will tackle the issue of the presence of Southerners in the state apparatus for transition. Third, it will go over the main policies that the UBQQSG implemented, what resistance it confronted and how it struggled with issues of discipline amongst its assigned cadres. Finally, the article proposes an expansion of the dates in which the Vietnam War is generally examined by pushing back the end of the periodization to July 1976 and the official reunification of Vietnam.

The item about border between China and Vietnam is not just a contemporary issue. Its building and its story takes its roots in the past and the colonial period played a major role. This article aims to analyse how the French colonial administration tried to keep order on the Tonkin border. First, the structure of the maintenance of law and order along the border is analysed to better understand how these diverse borderlands areas with a harsh climate and a multi-ethnic population resulted in many issues, giving birth to the challenges of law and order on border. Then, dynamics of cross border criminal activities are studied. The authority of these isolated French colonial troops in the borderlands is usually fragile. In front of this situation, the author will question the colonial administration’s response against the threat of cross border criminality. Military actions and police operations are mixed and order and law is kept thanks to an auxiliary force made up of local populations, the “partisans”, that is the real backbone to maintain law and order in the borderlands.

In Ho Chi Minh City, private complexes of rental rooms designated in Vietnamese as nhà trọ form one of the cheapest housing stocks, targeting the working-class, including internal rural migrants. This article combines the insights of both migration and urban studies to analyze the occupation of the nhà trọ through the concept of temporariness. It addresses the tensions between present constraints and long-term plans of rural migrants as well as their translation into the occupation of the urban space. The method draws upon observations of rental housing and interviews conducted in two suburban neighborhoods of Ho Chi Minh City in 2020 and 2021, with migrants coming from deltaic and coastal rural areas of Vietnam. It is found that the nhà trọ provide housing for rural migrants who are in a long-term temporary situation, within a tight urban fabric with scarce opportunities for access to urban land ownership. Informants have moved to the city up to thirty years ago. Both the move and the duration are explained by multiple factors, from economic and social mutations to environmental pressures on the deltas and the coast. Relative job stability and trust-based interpersonal relationships in the city may strengthen over time, encouraging migrants to stay. Nevertheless, no matter how long they remain in Ho Chi Minh City, many migrants perceive their stay as temporary before a projected return to the hometown, where their permanent residence registration remains. The occupation of the nhà trọ observed, their adaptations, and the narratives of migrants reveal the relative nature of temporariness in migration and draw the contours of the spatial footprint of low-skilled rural migrants in Ho Chi Minh City.

Although history ultimately favored the portuary development of Sài Gòn and Hải Phòng, it was Tourane (Đà Nẵng) that was the initial target of French colonial ambitions in the Indochinese peninsula. For over a century (1740–1858), its bay and territory had been the scene and the epicenter of Franco-British overseas imperial rivalries, a fact which actively fostered an entire set of colonial images about the site, which was quite often referred to as potential base to serve the interests of commerce and the Navy. Despite these ambitions nurtured over a long period, it was only after the conquest of Tonkin, thirty years after the Cochinchina expedition, that its territory was finally established as a concession: on 3 October 1888, the French were finally seizing juridical control of Tourane.

As a conceded territory, Tourane was essential to French colonial and imperial designs. The focal point of political and economic ambitions, it was both a gateway and a means to prepare and support the French colonial project in Indochina. A hybrid and previously unknown template, the conceded territory model designed for, and from, Tourane indeed allowed the French to implement new strategies to tighten colonial rule in Indochina.

Offering an unprecedented analysis on the creation of the French concession of Tourane at the end of the 19^th century, this research examines the political context during which it was conceived, the work and conclusions given by the commission in charge of studying its borders and jurisdiction, and the steps taken by the colonial administration in order to seize definitive control of a strategic territory inside what was then left of the Đại Nam Kingdom. All in all, comparing Tourane with others treaty ports, it shows how and why its territory stood out as a “micro-colony” in a protectorate territory (Annam-Tonkin).

This paper provides an overview of the Buddhist community in the 50s and 60s, addressing the creation of the first national Buddhist association: the General Buddhist Association of Vietnam (Tổng Hội Phật Giáo Việt Nam, GBA). Most academic works sum up the GBA to the date of its foundation by three regional delegations of Buddhists believers in May 1951, and its participation in the political crisis of 1963, the so-called Buddhist Crisis. Its genesis, the internal structures of this first national association, the philosophy and new national narrative of its leaders, their conflictual and distant relationship with secular power and other Buddhists group, remains largely unknown. Providing a new set of contextual elements, this analysis of the GBA’s history will contribute to our understanding of Vietnamese Buddhism history in the 20th century, in its continuities and inconsistencies. Essentially a failed first attempt to build a Buddhist “church” the history of the GBA is highly revealing of the long-standing aspirations of its creators and should be understood as a transitional step between early reform movement and the 1964 UBC. Emphasizing on cultural, social, and political matters, this paper is mainly based on barely used primary sources available in Vietnam.

The review is given for the book “Bamboo in Vietnam. An Anthropological and Historical Approach” by Đinh Trọng Hiếu and Emmanuel Poisson. The book is richly illustrated with old engravings and lithographs. It is a kind of encyclopedia that describes in detail the whole range of uses of bamboo in the life of the Vietnamese.

A Selection of Books