An Quang’s Fateful Bargain: South Vietnamese Political Buddhism between Rival Authoritarian Regimes, 1967-1975

• In Event: 58. Transcending the Seventeenth Parallel: Exploring Common Features, Patterns and Interactions in North and South Vietnamese State-Civil Society Relations, 1955-1975. Sponsored by the Vietnam Studies Group

Abstract

In the early 1960s, South Vietnamese Buddhists led by the Ấn Quang faction represented the South Vietnamese state’s most formidable non-communist challenger. Indeed, Buddhist uprisings helped topple President Ngô Đình Diệm and shattered state control over Central Vietnam in 1963 and 1966 respectively. But after the 1968 Tết Offensive, with Buddhists equally exposed to indifferent communist violence, Ấn Quang’s leaders were forced to reconsider their delicate balance between rival Northern and Southern authoritarian regimes. Disabused of the notion that it could prosper under communist rule, Ấn Quang opted for de facto autonomy under the reviled but relatively toothless South Vietnamese state rather than contend with the communists’ more assertive administrative control. Astonishingly, given its radical heritage, Ấn Quang emerged after Tết as one of South Vietnam’s more conservative opposition groups, unwilling to risk seats in the increasingly powerless National Assembly at a time of spiraling discontent with President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. Although the decision not to forcefully contest the Saigon regime has been almost entirely overlooked in Vietnam War scholarship, Ấn Quang’s reluctant bargain proved a critical if poorly understood factor in prolonging South Vietnamese survival.

Drawing on newly available South Vietnamese archival sources, memoirs, and print media, this paper explores the calculations behind, and consequences of, Ấn Quang’s decisive post-Tết bargain. By analyzing Ấn Quang’s role as political broker, it reveals how both communist and anti-communist states struggled to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of ambivalent Southern constituents, providing a more complete understanding of the war’s fateful denouement.

Author

• Sean Arthur Fear, Dartmouth College