Winning or Losing the 'Recolonization'

Organised by

• Department of History

This talks aims at connecting two seemingly unrelated events which transformed Asia between 1945 and 1954: the Chinese communist revolution and the decolonization of French Indochina. To do that, I will drop the methodological scales of national and international histories to look onto societies, institutions, ethnic groups, towns and villages – in a word, people. I will analyze three case studies: the transformation of the Chinese community in Saigon-Cholon under growing pressure of the French federal police (Sûreté Fédérale); the complex political vagaries affecting the animist-Baptist Lahu people on the borderland of China, Laos and Burma; and the grinding of southwestern Chinese peasants through land and market reforms performed rather by rapacious bands of militarized local ‘bullies’ than idealistic communist cadres. On the basis of these examples, I am going to demonstrate how a late-colonial/postcolonial/anticolonial politics and social programs – all proudly flying flags of progress, development, and liberation – in fact created or reinforced regimes of oppression fueled by economic weakness, lack of competent ceadres, proclivity to brutality, and increasingly sophisticated toolbox of institutionalized violence. In conclusion, although national histories write this vast region apart and emphasize difference over unity, it was reformulated very recently, by forces and ideologies of global origin and application. To understand the meaning of this change, we need to sensitize toward local agencies, societal ability of self-transformation under duress, and discrepancies between official discourse and ground level developments.