Sino-French War
France's victory in its 1884–1885 war with China over Vietnam marked a major expansion of Western imperialism in Asia. The defeat of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) discredited the dynasty's prevailing strategy of "self-strengthening." The Sino-French War was one of several conflicts in the years from 1839 to 1911 showing the Qing court's indecisiveness in setting policy directions and its inability to enforce traditional tribute relations with surrounding states. The Qing did not take their defeat in the Sino-French War as an opportunity to undertake reform and so found itself in much deeper trouble when a conflict broke out with Japan in 1894 over a similar situation in Korea.
Origins of War
Although Vietnam's Nguyen dynasty (1802–1955) owed its rise in part to French help, once in power, the Nguyen rulers preferred conservative neo-Confucian styles of court life and governance and tried to limit additional French influence and prevent French territorial encroachment. In spite of the Nguyen emperors' increasing reliance on their Qing suzerains for diplomatic and military protection, the French steadily increased their territorial control in Vietnam. Beginning in Cochin China (in the south), the French established a protectorate over Annam (central) and outposts in Tonkin (the northern part of Vietnam) in the years between 1862 and 1880.
In the 1870s and 1880s, the Vietnamese repeatedly sought help from China on the basis of the two countries' long-standing tributary relationship. In China, a debate arose at the Qing court about how best to deal with French adventurism. The self-strengthening school, led by Viceroy Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), championed having the Qing build up its own modern technology and modern military units, but continued to fear battle with French military power. The self-strengtheners counseled a diplomatic settlement with France, while more adventurist officials such as Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) and Zhang Peilun (1848–1903) advocated military intervention on behalf of the Nguyen dynasty. In fact, since the late 1870s, the Qing had allowed irregular military units called the Black Flags to operate in the Sino-Vietnamese border region. The Black Flag troops, which included remnants from armies of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) along with local brigands, began engaging French units inside Tonkin in 1882 in undeclared guerrilla-style warfare.
When the succession crisis arose in 1883, the Qing court increased its support for the Nguyen cause by permitting regular Qing dynasty troops to join the Black Flags in Vietnam. Still, the two parties at the Qing court continued to debate their respective positions. The self-strengthening advocates advised a diplomatic settlement against what they saw as a strong Western opponent, while the war party wanted vigorous military action against what it saw as hollow threats from a weak France. Still, both parties stopped short of advocating a formal declaration of war.
The Qing court, then dominated by Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), had Li Hongzhang negotiate a settlement with a French diplomat in 1883 that put Vietnam under joint French and Qing protection, but Paris rejected the arrangement. In the field, French units defeated the Black Flags, and a French assault on Qing territory appeared imminent. Hoping again to avoid a formal state of war with France, the empress dowager dismissed Prince Gong (1833–1989), the dynasty's minister of foreign affairs. She then had Li Hongzhang negotiate another settlement with a new French representative, F. E. Fournier, but it was rejected again by Paris and was sharply criticized by the war party in China.
In early 1884 renewed clashes in Tonkin produced modest Qing victories. In July 1884 the French government issued an ultimatum to the Qing. When the Qing failed to respond satisfactorily, the long-burning informal conflict became a state of war. In the first act of formal warfare, on 23 August the French took decisive military action, sinking eleven modern Chinese warships, and destroyed the foreign-built shipyard at Fuzhou on China's southeast coast, hundreds of miles from Vietnam. Thus, the war party's evaluation of French military abilities turned out to be disastrously wrong, while the self-strengtheners saw one of the Qing dynasty's most important military assets destroyed in an afternoon by the French. Hostilities continued along the Chinese-Vietnam border, but the Li-Fournier agreement was revived and accepted by both sides in its final form in June 1885. Under its terms, the Qing dynasty gave up all claims to its interests in Vietnam and French dominance over the Nguyen dynasty was accepted.
French Expansion Assured
The French victory against the Qing dynasty removed the one power that might have checked Western imperialist expansion in Southeast Asia. French dominance over Vietnam was assured. In 1887 France quickly began to establish its grand design for Southeast Asia, the so-called Indochinese Union, a combination of Cochin China, Annam, Tonkin, Cambodia, and Laos controlled from Paris. Through a combination of battlefield and diplomatic victories, the French consolidated their empire in Southeast Asia and held on to this position until 1954. Though defeated, the Vietnamese desire for independence and autonomy never died out and burst into flame again at the end of World War II in the revolt of the Viet Minh.
Further Reading
Buttinger, Joseph. (1968) Vietnam: A Political History. New York: Praeger.
Eastman, Lloyd E. (1967) Throne and Mandarins: China's Search for a Policy during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880–1885. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Immanuel, C. Y. Hsu. (2000) The Rise of Modern China. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Liu, Kwang-ching. (1980) "The Military Challenge: The Northwest and the Coast." In The Cambridge History of China, edited by John King Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.
McAleavy, Henry. (1968) The Black Flags in Vietnam. New York: Macmillan.
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