During the mid-1950s, China sought to build contacts
with the nonsocialist world. A cease-fire agreement
brought the Korean War to an end in July 1953, and
China signaled its desire to live in peaceful coexistence
with other independent countries in the region. But a
relatively minor conflict now began to intensify on Beijing’s
southern flank, in French Indochina. The struggle
had begun after World War II, when Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese
Communist Party, at the head of a multiparty
nationalist alliance called the Vietminh Front, seized
power in northern and central Vietnam after the surrender
of imperial Japan. After abortive negotiations between
Ho’s government and the French over a proposed
“free state” of Vietnam under French tutelage, war broke
out in December 1946. French forces occupied the cities
and the densely populated lowlands, while the Vietminh
took refuge in the mountains.
For three years, the Vietminh, waging a “people’s war”
of national liberation under the leadership of the popular
Ho Chi Minh, gradually increased in
size and effectiveness. What had begun
as an anticolonial struggle by the Vietminh
Front against the French became
entangled in the Cold War in the early
1950s when both the United States
and the new Communist government
in China began to intervene in the
conflict to promote their own national
security objectives. China began to
provide military assistance to the Vietminh
to protect its own borders from
hostile forces. The Americans supported
the French but pressured them
to prepare for an eventual transition to
non-Communist governments in Vietnam,
Laos, and Cambodia.
With casualties mounting and the
French public tired of fighting the
“dirty war” in Indochina, the French, at
the Geneva Conference, held in 1954,
agreed to a peace settlement with the
Vietminh. Vietnam was temporarily divided
into a northern Communist half
(known as the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam) and a non-Communist southern half based in
Saigon (eventually to be known as the Republic of Vietnam).
Elections were to be held in two years to create a
unified government. Cambodia and Laos were both declared
independent under neutral governments. French
forces, which had suffered a major defeat at the hands of
Vietminh troops at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, were
withdrawn from all three countries.
China had played an active role in bringing about the
settlement and clearly hoped that a settlement would
lead to a reduction of tensions in the area, but subsequent
efforts to bring about improved relations between China
and the United States foundered on the issue of Taiwan.
In the fall of 1954, the United States signed a mutual security
treaty with the Republic of China guaranteeing
U.S. military support in case of an invasion of Taiwan.
When Beijing demanded U.S. withdrawal from Taiwan as
the price for improved relations, diplomatic talks between
the two countries collapsed.
World History
