Asia/Pacific/Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. xix, 322 pp. (Tables, maps.) US$89.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4422-2302-8.
As World War II came to an end in the spring of 1945, Vietnam experienced the worst famine in its history. Resulting in one to two million deaths, this famine was preventable. As Geoffrey Gunn shows, while countless people died in north and central Vietnam, enough rice to avert the catastrophe was available in the south and, furthermore, rice exports to other parts of the Japanese empire continued unabated. Despite the magnitude of this tragedy, few historians have written on the topic. In this respect, Rice Wars is a welcome addition to the scholarship on modern Vietnamese history as well as the history of war and famine. The book sets out to understand the causes of the famine and to argue that this humanitarian disaster contributed to the Viet Minh’s rise to power in August 1945.
In identifying the many causal factors and leading players of this famine, Gunn eschews the blame game and instead tries to pursue something akin to a “truth commission-style investigation” (230). In doing so, he casts his net wide, examining the actions not only of the usual suspects, the French and Japanese, but also those of the Allies during the war. According to Gunn, Allied bombing, which damaged dikes and the transportation infrastructure, had an important role in the subsistence crisis. However, while the bombing had an impact, it did not cripple the transport system completely. Therefore, food could have been sent northward, had there been the political will (181). Alongside Allied bombing, Japanese policies, particularly the forced requisition of rice from peasants, contributed significantly to the crisis. Unfortunately, because of the “absence of incriminating Japanese documentation” (235), the book offers few details about Japanese activities during the famine.
On the role of the French, Gunn is able provide a more thorough examination. While Gunn shows that the French colonial government was implicated in the famine, he also implies that had it not been for the circumstances of the Second World War, Japanese impositions, and the coup de force of March 1945, French colonial authorities might have been able to avert the famine as they had done in 1937. According to Gunn, French colonial officials’ quick and generous handling of the subsistence crisis in 1937 prevented the outbreak of famine. Relying heavily on the French official reports, Gunn writes: “with memories of 1931–2 [peasant rebellion] in mind, the authorities did not stand idly by” (124). Instead, French officials set up work projects which provided 192,000 paid workdays. Gunn asserts that this swift response in 1937 was “a dress rehearsal for management of future tragedies, as with the Great Famine of 1944–45, to the extent, of course, that the French were still in the driving seat” (127). However, considering that his main sources are French colonial reports, particularly writings of officials who were reporting on their own activities, Gunn may have overstated French accomplishment in the 1937 crisis by surmising that “[i]nternational relief agencies, such as the present-day FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), IOM (international Organization for Migration), and UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), would not have been disappointed with this general approach to disaster management” (126).
For the 1945 crisis, Gunn argues that French colonial officials again took appropriate measures to alleviate the crisis. However, it is clear that there was bureaucratic neglect and mismanagement. Obvious signs of the crisis were already evident in the spring of 1944 and by the fall a number of typhoons had caused a subsistence crisis in northern Vietnam. In late 1944 a famine had broken out in Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces in central Vietnam (231). Despite these early warnings, French colonial officials did very little to ensure food security—no surveys were conducted to determine the impacts of the levy system on peasants (234), nor had a regular and reliable reporting of crop harvest been established (235). In January 1945, as the famine reached its peak, newly installed Resident Superior of Tonkin Paul Chauvet scrambled to assuage the crisis, but even then he was unwilling or unable to reduce the burdensome Japanese-imposed rice levy on peasants.
The subtitle of the book: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power, highlights the second argument of the book. According to Gunn, the 1945 famine undermined the “hydraulic pact,” the supposed tacit understanding between the French colonial government and the Vietnamese masses that promises state protection from natural disasters in return for Vietnamese acquiescence. According to Gunn, the unravelling of this pact led France to lose the “mandate of heaven,” which was subsequently seized by the Viet Minh. Few historians would disagree with Gunn on the supposition that the famine provided the Viet Minh and other anti-colonial nationalists with another political weapon. However, I would like to have seen more concrete evidence linking the famine to the Viet Minh’s rise to power. The sources Gunn uses do not provide enough connection. In the section on “Viet Minh Exploitation of the Famine” (206–208), there is only one paragraph describing the actions of the Viet Minh during the famine. The rest of the section is about Chauvet’s relief activities and French suspicion of Viet Minh manipulation of the crisis. The argument would have been more compelling had there been more information about the social mobilization and relief activities undertaken by the Viet Minh, and the famine’s role in Viet Minh propaganda and in the mainstream Vietnamese press. Moreover, revolutionaries were not the only people who participated in famine relief. As David Marr shows, Vietnamese of all political and economic backgrounds were mobilized for relief (1945 The Quest for Power, University of California, 1995, 103). It would be useful to learn how the Viet Minh’s relief activities differed and how the Viet Minh capitalized on this endeavour to win political power.
Notwithstanding the above observations, Rice Wars provides a good overview of the agrarian situation of French colonial Vietnam, and more importantly, it affords a comprehensive examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine and its context.
Van Nguyen-Marshall
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
pp. 714-716