There is no reason why organized revolutionary movements, once on the scene, cannot appeal to many different kinds of agrarian cultivators, including "traditional" ones. This certainly was what the Vietnamese Communists succeeded in doing. In mountainous areas, they mobilized minority ethnic groups, peasants, and notables together by appealing to their fears of ethnic exploitation. In northern Vietnam, they mobilized peasants by displacing the French and by pushing aside within the communal villages the exploitative landlords and the Confucian notables. And in southern Vietnam they mobilized peasants-including..., the rice sharecroppers-by seizing and redistributing large land holdings and by organizing local associations to support peasant livelihood and defend their possession of the redistributed land… The historical record shows that peasant-based revolutions have (alternatively or simultaneously) received support both from peasants economically or politically threatened by newly penetrating capitalist forces and from agrarian cultivators involved in export-agricultural production. In Vietnam, for example, the revolution gained support from northern peasants resentful of French colonial controls, and also from southern peasants set in opposition to the great landlords who dominated the export-oriented rice economy. The Vietnamese Communists were able to sink roots in both groups, drawing from them resources to wage prolonged revolutionary war.
The Vietnamese Revolution also grew out of the impact of colonialism upon the politics of indigenous middle-class Vietnamese, who became modern-educated, yet were denied important elite posts in the French-dominated colonial state. Nationalist and revolutionary political movements were the predictable result. Thereafter, the progress, even survival, of these movements depended upon a weakening of French power-and that came only with the interimperialist military rivalries of World War 11. The Japanese captured colonial Vietnam and in 1945 displaced the Vichy French administrators, only themselves to face defeat soon thereafter at the hands of the United States and Britain. The disruptions-and ultimate vacuum-of state power during World War I1 gave the Vietnamese Communists an ideal opportunity to claim the nationalist mantle, to assert sovereignty on the heels of the departing Japanese, and finally to mobilize Vietnamese peasants (especially in the North) to resist France's attempt to reimpose colonial control.
Thus, the military and political reverberations of imperialist expansion contributed crucially to the emergence and success of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. Without the breakdown of the imperial and colonial regimes, without the emergence of organized revolutionary parties, and without the openings created for them by interimperialist military rivalries, the peasants of China and Vietnam could not have been mobilized for revolution. And given the local agrarian structures of China and Vietnam, the peasants could not have become revolutionary in the absence of direct mobilization.
