Anxious Economies: Labor, Infrastructure, and Hunger in the First Indochina War

• In Event: Invisible Actors and Factors of Infrastructure: Ethnicity, Gender, and Work across Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

For farmers and would-be laborers, the First Indochina War was as much an economic struggle as a political contest. In territory recently won by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), cadres from late 1952 strove to transform the Black River region’s agrarian economy to meet growing state and military consumption. This paper builds on an affective shift in the language local actors used to describe liberation, one that resonated with larger transformations in exchange and subject relations. Residents who had just welcomed soldiers and cadres with “enthusiasm” began to respond with “anxiety” about rising claims on household resources. Popular anxiety closely tracks the making of “people’s laborers” (dan cong) and the mobilization of their labor power for use on road crews and infrastructure projects. Official histories have celebrated an abstract dan cong but, like scholars more broadly, have not interrogated them as nationalizing bodies. When Thai and Khmu women hit the road, they experienced and enabled novel forms of mobility and visibility but also shouldered heavy burdens. Household hunger and starvation indicate the consequences of diverting scarce labor away from food production and the precarity of family structure in the new Vietnam.

Author

• Christian Lentz, University of North Carolina