INDO-CHINA: The New Frontier

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The French invested $2 billion, built up Indo-China's rice and rubber production; before World War II, the colony, along with Siam and Burma, was one of the world's three leading rice exporters. Its surplus went to rice-short China, a fact of great significance these days in Communist China's support of Communist Ho Chi Minh. All the raw rubber France needed came from Indo-China. There were other lucrative items: coal, wolfram, pepper, opium (which, to French shame, was sold to the natives through a state monopoly) and many jobs for a white bureaucracy. French politicians called the colony "our marvelous balcony on the Pacific."

A Dangerous Liability. Indo-China is no longer a golden asset for France. As everywhere in the East, the old colonialism has died beneath the impact of Western nationalist, egalitarian ideas, a process greatly hastened by the Japanese march in World War II under the slogan "Asia for the Asiatics." The French have bowed grudgingly to the times.

In an agreement signed March 8, 1949 with Bao Dai, they promised limited freedom for Viet Nam within the French Union. Under its terms, a Viet Nam cabinet has charge of internal affairs, the right to a national army. Paris keeps direct control of foreign policy, maintains military bases and special courts for Frenchmen, retains a special place for French advisers and the French language.

By that time the French were up to their necks in a costly campaign to crush Ho Chi Minh and his Communist bid for power. The civil war has cut rice production in half and disrupted the rest of Indo-China's economy. It has tied down 130,000 French troops, about half of the Fourth Republic's army, and thereby weakened the contribution France might make to Western Europe's defense. In lives, the Indo-China war has cost the French 50,000 casualties. In money, it has cost $2 billion—just about the sum of ECAid to France.

Indo-China, in brief, has become a dangerous liability for France—nor does any realistic Frenchman think it can ever again be an asset. Why, therefore, spend more blood and treasure in thankless jungle strife? Why not pull out?

The answer is: more than French war weariness and prestige are at stake. If Indo-China falls to Communism, so, in all probability", will all of Southeast Asia.

For U.S. citizens, the first fact about their new frontier is that it will cost money to hold—much more than the French can pay alone, much more than the $15 million in arms and $23 million in economic aid thus far promised by Washington. The second fact is more compelling : the new frontier, if it is not to crumble, may need U.S. troops as well as French.

Otherwise, the U.S. might surfer another catastrophic defeat in the Far East.

A Question of Sympathy. The French have made more than the usual colonial mistakes. All too often, especially since they put the Foreign Legion and its German mercenaries to the work of restoring order after World War II, they have been arrogant and brutal toward the Indo-Chinese. They are paying for it now, for the bulk of Communist Ho Chi Minh's support comes from anti-French, or anticolonial Indo-Chinese. A sign over an Indo-Chinese village street tells the story; it reads "Communism, No. Colonialism, Never."