Rice wars in colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh road to power

摘要

In the summer of 1944, poor returns from the five-month rice harvest in northern Vietnam set the stage for a major subsistence crisis. Typhoons and floods destroyed the tenth-month crop due at the end of the year, and an exceptionally long and cold winter added to the misery of a population already deprived of food. The following summer, after torrential rains lifted the Red River to unprecedented heights, water poured through collapsing dykes, inundating paddy fields in large sections of the Tonkin delta. Credible estimates suggest that at least one million people starved to death.