ABSTRACT

Vietnamese nationalism was nurtured in the cradle of the country's history of resistance to Chinese domination. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the purpose and leadership of the nationalist movement underwent gradual changes. Many of the more than 100,000 Vietnamese who saw wartime service in France joined the nationalists in making modest demands for participation in the councils and for a larger number of positions in civil service. The French destruction of the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang accounted for the lack of strong and effective non-Communist leadership among the Vietnamese nationalist ranks in the post-1930 period. The Allies, including the Soviet Union and Nationalist China, were engaged in a common struggle against the Japanese, a situation making for strange political bedfellows. The Allies, meeting at Potsdam, had decided to establish the status quo ante and to that end asked Nationalist China to occupy Vietnam north of the sixteenth parallel and Britain south of it.