Demonstrations expressed the general anger against French colonial policies such as heavy taxation and state monopolies on certain goods, as well as the corruption and perceived unfairness of local notables and mandarins.

The demonstrations spread quickly to the rural areas (districts of Thanh Chương, Nam Đàn and Nghi Lộc) and peasants demanded a moratorium on the payment of personal taxes, for an end to corvée labour and for rich landowners to return the communal lands which they had taken away.

[2] Economic hardship as well as discontentment with the French colonial administration and the local Annamite authorities had already been growing prior to these strikes and it was only a matter of time before two of the most explosive provinces in Vietnam would rise in protest yet again.

The three demonstrations of April were dispersed when the French-led garde indigène (native gendarmerie) fired on the crowds killing a total of 27 men, women and children and injuring many more.

In addition to this, the fear of public opinion in France on the severity of the repression against largely unarmed demonstrators forced Le Fol to prohibit the use of bombing.

Nevertheless, during the months to follow, the French Foreign Legion and French-led Vietnamese troops reoccupied forts used at the turn of the century for “pacification” and established new ones.

[7] As a result of massive French pressure in the eastern parts of Nghệ An including Vinh, the provincial capital, weakened the movement considerably by the spring of 1931.

The revolt intensified in the Sông Cả valley in the west and in the adjacent province of Hà Tĩnh, however, and a new wave of demonstrations broke out around May Day.

By this time however, fierce retaliation from the French, the arrests and executions of numerous demonstrators and party cadres as well as the worsening famine caused the revolt to be on the wane.

By early 1932, tens of thousands of peasants had been put in prisons or makeshift concentration camps with high mortality rates and 99 percent of the cadres of the ICP had been killed or arrested.

Bernal estimates that over 1300 men, women and children were killed and around a thousand people died of disease and malnutrition in the prisons and concentration camp.

Corporal punishment, tortures, brutal methods will teach the crowds cowardly enough to listen to the inciters of rebellion that we, too, are terrible in repression and that the last word will be ours.”[11] In total, over a thousand Vietnamese lives were lost, but only one Frenchman was killed in the uprisings in 1930 and another during the military action against the rebellious provinces in 1931.

Bernal notes that the central committee was not in favour of this rapid dismantling of county administrations and the setting up of “soviets” because the “time for revolution was not yet ripe”.

Disagreement, however, lies in what was the critical factor which pushed an otherwise relatively quiescent, albeit discontented, populace to rise up in large scale protest.

Some contend that the revolt was spontaneous and reflected the anger of poor peasants and workers at deteriorating economic and social conditions, which had by 1930 surpassed a critical threshold.

These agricultural failures intensified hatred of the French, particularly because of the latter’s unwillingness to build irrigation works, as they had in Thanh-Hoa, the province immediately to the north, and in sharp contrast to their road and rail construction in Nghệ Tĩnh.

They explain that the Depression exacerbated the general economic malaise of the poorer classes, citing the falling of rice prices and land values leading to a sharp drop in farm income and increasing penury.

[19][20] Bernal notes, however, that most of the rural population appears to have been only slightly affected during the duration of the revolt because the Great Depression only took effect in Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh, as in the rest of Indochina, only in the mid-1930s.

Firstly, poverty and density population had led many peasants to seek employment in plantations and factories which had to retrench or reduce the wages of their workers due to a fall in global and local demand for their products.

Cutbacks on commercial agriculture in Cochinchina led to the return of labourers to their homes in Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh, exerting greater pressure on the already densely populated and famine ridden land.

These differing perspectives regarding the critical factor which led to the uprisings may be seen within the larger debate about the attitudes of workers and rural folk, and the reasons for which they revolt.

[18] The three demonstrations on May Day 1930 which began the movement in Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh were planned and organized by the party in places where they knew people had acute grievances.

The role of the ICP in revolt was that it created clear organizational links which unified and coordinated previously disparate protests, explaining and generalising individual and local discontent.

[22] However, it is difficult to verify if the mobilizing activities of communist cadres raised the level of discontentment in these areas, even if it is recognised that they did provide a certain degree of leadership and organization in the uprisings and the village peasant sections (or soviets) which appeared during that time.