On Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam by Christian C. Lentz

Review Essay I: Grace Cheng

Before it became Northwest Vietnam, the Black River region was home to various ethnic groups, including a Tai majority whose elites ruled through a local system of rule, referred to as muang in Tai language. It was a region characterized by thriving production of commercial crops, connected to trade networks that overlapped with areas of what are now parts of China, Thailand and Laos. Tai domination was premised on the control of land and labour, rather than territory. On the other hand, modern states, including those emerging in the postcolonial period like the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), premise their sovereignty on territory. In Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam, Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Christian Lentz adopts a theory of territory as never a given but as a government project that seeks to control space, while eliminating competing claims to that territory. During “the long 1950s” (p. 2), such claims over the Black River region were asserted by not just Vietnamese anticolonial movements but also the resurgent French colonial state and the Tai Federation the state ruled through, as well as other ethnic groups. This study of the territorialization processes that resulted in the incorporation of the Black River region into the modern Vietnamese state reveals such “hidden histories about a place often invoked but poorly understood” (p. 22).

In addition to a history of how the Black River region became a borderland of the modern Vietnamese state, Contested Territories also elaborates on an important dimension of the Vietnamese communist success in the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, a remote valley deep in a Tai-dominated region. Lentz provides a counterpoint to the focus in much of the existing scholarly literature on the military aspects of the famous military campaign, focusing instead on how the “success of battle/war depended crucially on local participation in everyday struggles over logistics” (p. 181). Examining the everyday work of territorial construction, the book brings to the forefront the experiences of communities in the region as well as of party cadres working there during and after the Indochina or Franco-Viet Minh War (1945–54). Campaigns to enlist local peoples laid the groundwork for the DRV’s victory at Điện Biên Phủ. However, Lentz claims the entanglement of territorialization with the militarization of the space did not translate into the successful imposition of the state’s rational administration over the region’s people. After 1954 and the end of the Indochina War, the DRV exercised de facto jurisdiction over all of Vietnam above the 17th parallel. Further demands of its new citizens ignited popular protests in the Black River region, including a millenarian ‘Calling for a king’ (xưng vua đón vua) movement later that same decade. The book’s narrative concludes with a discussion of the Vietnamese state’s successful efforts to put down such resistance by force.

Lentz’s description of the expansion of the DRV into the Black River region captures both the interactions of DRV cadres with local people as well as the violence inherent in the Vietnamese state-building project. Although Vietnamese institutions did not take hold in the region until the Điện Biên Phủ campaign in 1953–54, that place was already part of the modern Vietnamese state in the nationalist territorial imaginary, as proclaimed in the 1945 declaration of independence and reflected in “maps and reports that refer routinely to colonial space in terms of a ‘zone still temporarily occupied by the enemy’” (p. 69). Interpreting this history through theories of territory from the discipline of geography challenges the nationalist historiography that dominates popular ideas about the history...