Southeast Asia: Political map (2003)

Some Vietnamese Communists today point to early anti-French communist groups that emerged in North Vietnam in the 1930s, but no serious nationalist or communist movements emerged before World War II. The Japanese invaded French Indochina in 1940 and, as everywhere, they claimed the slogan "Asia for Asians." This revolutionary idea took hold throughout Southeast Asia where local people were astounded to find out that their large and populous territories had been controlled by Europeans (with guns) from relatively tiny and distant countries.

In 1941 the Vietminh organization was set up as the League for the Independence of Vietnam. A banished scholar of European Marxist ideas named Ho Chi Minh returned from exile to join the Vietminh and free Vietnam from imperialist European control. The Vietminh quickly seized the north and central regions of Vietnam from postwar Chinese control, while the French re-assumed control only of the south from British forces. The "first Vietnam war" between the French-controlled south and the Communist-led north began in December 1946. In 1954 the French withdrew, leaving Vietnam an indepedent but divided nation.