‘It’s time for the Indochinese Revolution to show its true colours’: The radical turn of Vietnamese politics in 1948

Cold War historians have neglected the significance of the year 1948 for Indochina. Based on new sources, this paper shows critical shifts in politics within the Vietnamese nationalist movement in 1948. These were the result of converging developments during late 1947 and early 1948, including changes in international politics, in French–Vietnamese relations, and in the relationship between non-communist and communist leaders within the Viêṭ Minh state. By late 1948, Party ideologues were already looking beyond national independence towards building a new socialist regime. The nationalist coalition that had led the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was seriously damaged in 1948, even though civil war would only break out several years later. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, 1948 thus marked a new period: the beginning of the end of the ‘united front’ period and cooperation with bourgeois nationalists.