Bac Son Uprising

The Bac Son uprising took place in a northern province of Vietnam that borders on China. The event happened in late 1940, after the German-sponsored government of Vichy France and Japan, an ally of Germany, had already signed an agreement whereby Japan acknowledged French sovereignty over its Indochinese colony. In exchange, Japan was allowed to use all Indochinese military facilities as well as station a specific number of troops in Indochina. Notwithstanding that accord, on 22 September 1940, the Japanese Canton army attacked and overran a few French outposts along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier. The operation lasted only three days, but it was sufficient to demonstrate that French Indochinese forces were in no position to resist the Japanese onslaught.

Capitalizing on these circumstances and waiting for the French along their humiliating retreat, Vietnamese anti-French groups—such as members of the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, the local cadres of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), and the Tho minority—all took up their arms in an attempt to chase the French military out of the northern provinces of Vietnam, including Bac Son's province of Thai Nguyen. The insurgents succeeded in occupying a couple of French military positions, disarming a number of French and indigenous soldiers, and issuing declarations of independence. Vietnamese historians label this movement the Bac Son uprising, elevating it—as well as the insurgency that occurred two months later in the south, known under the name of the Southern Vietnam uprising—to the same level as many anti-Chinese struggles in the past, such as that of the Trung Sisters in 40 CE, Le Loi in the fifteenth century, or the Tay Son in the late eighteenth century.

The Bac Son uprising naturally ended in disaster within less than a month. In effect, even if the French could not mount an appropriate resistance to Japanese troops, they were ten times better armed and more adequately trained than a few thousand thinly armed and untrained freedom fighters, no matter what degree of determination and enthusiasm the rebels had attained. It has been said that the Bac Son uprising contributed greatly to the military training of the members of the Indochinese Communist Party, for Bac Son constituted that organization's first armed confrontation with colonial forces, and it was also there that the first guerrilla units were set up.

McAlister, John T. (1969) Viet Nam: The Origins of Revolution. New York: Knopf.

Nguyen Khanh Toan, ed. (1989) Lich su Viet Nam. Vol. 2. 2d ed. Hanoi, Vietnam: Nha Xuat Ban Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi.