History 498

Fall 2010

Devine

 

Study Questions for Bradley, Imagining Vietnam & America, pp. 107-192

 

 

  1. How did Vietnamese communists make their revolutionary program more palatable to their non-communist countrymen during World War II?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Why did Vietnamese communists pursue a strategy of “more friends and fewer enemies” during World War II?  What was their primary focus during the war and how did this strategy address their goals and priorities?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How did the Viet Mihn gain support among the Vietnamese during the Japanese occupation of their country?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How would you characterize U.S.-Viet Minh relations during World War II?  What factors helped to shape these relations?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. In appealing for U.S. support, how did the Vietnamese draw on conceptions of the U.S. that dated back to the 1920s?  How did the way the Vietnamese had long “imagined” the Americans help to frame their appeals to U.S. government officials?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How did U.S. officials’ positive impressions of Ho Chi Minh depart from the generally negative preconceptions Americans held of the Vietnamese?  How, according to Bradley, was the reaction to Ho also in keeping with long-held anti-Vietnamese stereotypes?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Some scholars have emphasized the differences between U.S. field representatives in Vietnam and Washington officials with regard to their assessment of the Vietnamese. What evidence does Bradley introduce to support his case that such “differences” have been overstated?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. By 1946-1947, why was the notion that the Vietnamese were susceptible to communist (i.e. Soviet) influence particularly easy for the Americans to accept, given what they had come to think of the Vietnamese?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How did the DRV’s outreach to other Asian nations help sustain its struggle against the French between 1945 and 1950?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How did the struggle against the French shape the DRV’s domestic policies between 1945 and 1950 – for example, its land reform policy?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How did concerns about France and China affect the Truman administration’s willingness to engage the DRV’s diplomatic initiatives?  What other factors contributed to the U.S. wariness of the DRV?  Why, ultimately, did Washington reject the DRV’s attempts to improve relations?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How did American policy makers’ attitudes about their own racial and cultural superiority affect their conduct of diplomacy with the Vietnamese?  Why, according to Bradley, were these attitudes still pertinent in the case of Indonesia even though the US decided to recognize that Asian nation’s independence? (pp 173-74) 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Bradley acknowledges that the Cold War came to Vietnam in 1950, but maintains that on both the Vietnamese and American sides, long held preconceptions from colonial days still influenced policy and attitudes.  What evidence does he introduce to support this argument? (Consider, among other things, Vietnamese attitudes about the Chinese and the emergence of “modernization theory” in the U.S.)

 

 

 

 

 

  1. More than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, to what extent have racial and cultural stereotypes continued to influence how Americans and Vietnamese “imagine” each other?  What continuities do you see between the 1920s and today?

 

 

 

 

 

  1. What do you believe are this book’s most significant contributions to our study of US-Vietnamese relations?

 

 

 

 

 

Study Questions: Duiker, Sacred War – Chapter 1

 

  1. How did French policies in colonial Vietnam distort the economy and produce sharp inequalities and widespread suffering?  Why did the “economic advances” that the French touted often prove to be less than beneficial to the majority of Vietnamese?

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. In what varying ways did the Vietnamese elite respond to French colonization?  How did Vietnamese resistance change over time?

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Why is the ongoing debate between Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh significant in the context of studying the colonizer-colonist struggle?  On what issues – tactical and strategic – did the two disagree?

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. How did Lenin link anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism?

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Why did noncommunist Vietnamese nationalists fail to unite? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Why was Ho’s Revolutionary Youth League (RYL) so successful?  How did Soviet interference undermine the RYL during the early 1930s?  What differences over strategy did Ho have with the Comintern?

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. What were the short- and long-term goals of the Vietminh?  Why did there have to be two strategies which, arguably, were in conflict?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. Why did Ho discourage his more militant comrades who wished to launch a revolution in Vietnam sooner rather than later? Instead, what kind of strategy did he pursue?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  1. What impediments did the Vietminh face in consolidating its power after the Vietnamese declaration of independence?  To what extent was its claim to be the preferred government of the Vietnamese people a legitimate one?