"Revolution in the Village"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the book "Revolution in the Village" by Hy V. Luong. It shows how the colonial era changed life in the villages of Vietnam and continued to do so into the 1930s, a time when there were increasing actions being taken to oust the French, with the French fighting back. It discusses how both sides made use of the village structure and altered village life as they sought to achieve their goals. It analyzes the long history of the development of anti-colonialism in Vietnam and the Yen-Bay uprising. It looks at how Luong argues that local traditions played an important role on shaping the response of villagers to both the imposition of colonial capitalism and to the socialist polices of the Vietnamese revolution and sets out to prove the logical connection.

From the Paper:

"The French era in Vietnam started after some 900 years of self rule, and it began with a treaty that was humiliating to the Vietnamese when it was accepted in 1862. Even the French were surprised at the way this treaty was accepted by a people who had resisted Chinese incursions for 900 years. In fact, some Vietnamese accepted the French conquest because of dissatisfaction with the oppressive monarchy and because the ruler at the time had not been able to protect his people either from foreign aggression or from an unusually high incidence of natural disasters such as floods, famines, locusts, droughts, and a cholera epidemic in 1865 that killed more than one million people. Over time, a French-Vietnamese landholding class developed in the region, but Vietnamese, were appointed only to the lower levels of the bureaucracy established to administer the new colony. This created a new dissatisfaction, this time with the French rulers."

More papers on "Revolution in the Village":

• Analytical Essay # 15069 : "Revolution In The Village" by Hy V. Luong"
• Book Review # 87660 : "Analyzing the Affect of the Chinese Industrial Revolution"
• Essay # 36264 : "The Deserted Village"

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