Decolonization In Vietnam Essay

When travelling through Vietnam nowadays, one could immediately notice that the country was occupied by the French. The architecture has French influences, the language contains French words and many hospitals and universities are still named after famous French people. The colonization and decolonization have had a huge impact on Vietnam. From 1887 until 1956, Vietnam was part of French Indochina (Ziltener & Künzler, 2013 p. 293). French Indochina belonged to the French colonial empire, being a federation of three Vietnamese regions, Laos, Cambodia and Guangzhouwan. As a consequence of colonization and decolonization, Vietnam has gone through many spatial changes as settlements, agricultural production systems and infrastructural changes.

In 1884, Vietnamese scholar-officials were forced by French authorities to sign the Treaty of Hue, which formally ended the independence of a unified Vietnam (St. John, 1998 p. 11). The French then divided the country administratively into three regions, Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina. The Vietnamese were not allowed to see themselves as Vietnamese anymore, or to call their country by its proper name. Instead, they had to identify themselves with the region they lived in. However, ‘to the Vietnamese, these were geographical terms, and their use by the French to imply a political division of the Vietnamese homeland was as odious to the Vietnamese as the loss of independence’ (St. John, 1998 p. 14). The capital of French Indochina had always been in Vietnam, first it was Saigon, later Hanoi. This emphasized the differences between the north and the south that were created by colonization, which later led to a communist north and a capitalist south after decolonization. Besides that, having a single strong capital that functions as an administrative and commercial centre also indicates a historical-empirical approach to development. This approach could also be found in the social differentiation and the drainage of the hinterland. Figure 1. Vietnamese Regional Devisions (St. John, 1998 p.