The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 37
rounded up and thrown in prison, Bay Vien emerged as a government
police official.
The Japanese occupation of Vietnam shadowed An’s teen -
age years. He saw the Japanese as a belated addition to the
long line of invaders who had tried to rule his country. If anything,
the Japanese were even more brutal than the French.
Other Vietnamese allied themselves with this new political
force, excited by the prospect of Asians ruling Asia—a racial
platform that the Japanese exploited to good effect.
“The Japanese talked of ‘Great Asia’ and ‘Asia for East
Asians,’” An says. “They wanted to kick all the white people out
of Asia. Eventually South Korea and Hong Kong were the only
two places where the Caucasians still had their foot in the door.
The Japanese considered this their great achievement.”
Vietnam’s political parties and even its religious sects began
to hew the Japanese line. “The Japanese were very smart,” An
says. “They invented the Hoa Hao religion. They co-opted the
Cao Dai religion. They set up the Dai Viet political party and
recruited students into the Vietnamese Kuomintang (VNQDD),
influenced by Sun Yat-sen. They were also very smart in using
the French against the Communists. They knew the Vietnamese
Communists opposed them, so to keep order and mobilize the
economy to serve the Japanese forces, they left the French in
place to do their bidding.”
Part of this mobilization involved converting Vietnam’s rice
crop to fuel for Japan’s military machine, which resulted in two
million Vietnamese starving to death. The charade of French
rule in Vietnam ended in 1945 with the Japanese coup d’état.
As An watched the French citizens of Can Tho being beaten
and forced to sit in the town square without water all day before
being thrown into prison, the scene left him with a visceral
distaste for the Japanese and their colonial legacy in Asia.
Caught up in the patriotic fervor sweeping over Vietnam
at the end of World War II, when the country seemed poised
to shake itself free from the defeated French and retreating