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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Education

The Việt Minh viewed education and propaganda as another key to countering biological warfare. Starting in the 1950s, they published several pamphlets and booklets on the subject, ranging from histories of biological weapons to manuals for medical doctors on how to deal with germs, insects, and other threats. Copies of several of these publications are still held in the Vietnam National Library. In addition to circulating printed material, there were no doubt word-of-mouth campaigns.

To the right is the cover of one undated educational pamphlet about biological warfare in Korea and China published by the military medical corps of the Việt Minh (Nhân Dân Triều Trung Chiến Thắng Chiến Tranh vi Trùng, 19??).

Who seems to have been the audience(s) for this pamphlet? What languages does it contain? What kinds of images?

The pamphlet shows the imagined geography of imperialist and non-imperialist nations and their relationship to invasion. In the lower right of the panel, a man who represents imperialist enemies seems to be on the run. Next to him is a bomb buried in the ground with insects and bugs escaping from it. In the upper right, two airplanes appear to be streaking downwards, black smoke trailing from them. On the left, a large hand holding a syringe along with a bayonet blade are pointed menacingly at the imperialist, his bomb, and his airplanes. These tools, of medicine and the military, protect factories and grain harvests below. Thus, the Chinese and North Korean people were, as the title of the pamphlet proclaims, able to defeat imperialists germ warfare.

Even though the Việt Minh quietly shelved their charges of germ warfare against the French, this pamphlet offers insights into the fears of biological warfare circulating among intellectuals and elites and to a lesser degree the broader populace. As Shellen Wu notes in her discussion of Xing An in the early twentieth century, the “educated elite from around the world increasingly spoke a common language of science and the social sciences.” The Việt Minh, and their medical cadre including Tôn Thất Tùng, spoke such a language to popularize knowledge about environmental warfare among both commoners and elite and to convince them of the threat of biological invasions. This pamphlet drew on information obtained at the end of 1952 and the beginning of 1953 in China. You can scroll over the title page for a translation and consider how the pamphlet's content reflected similar themes to those on Chinese propaganda posters from the Korean War.

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Learning from the Korean War
The Korean War (1950-1953) and the First Indochina War (1946-1954) were closely linked. A key event in Asia underlying both wars was the 1949 victory of the communist party, led by Mao Zedong, over the nationalist party and the formation of the People's Republic of China (PRC). With the founding of the PRC, and the subsequent entry of Chinese troops into the Korean War, understandings of the First Indochina War began to shift.
Among United States (US) leaders, the events of 1949 and 1950 recast the fighting on the Indochina peninsula from a colonial war in which the United States opposed the French, to a part of the Cold War in which the two governments shared common interests. Even though French leaders remained intent on keeping at least some of Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) as part of their empire, they were content to receive American aid that was earmarked as part of the battle against communism. This aid included fighter and bomber airplanes such as the Hellcat, the Bearcat, and the B-26, which showed up frequently in Việt Minh accounts of the First Indochina War. This technology served as a symbol of the US empire.
Ho Chi Minh and the Việt Minh were likewise careful observers of the Korean War. They quickly understood the implications when the North Koreans and Chinese communists leveled charges of biological warfare against the United Nations forces, led by the United States. These charges have persisted in memory and drew at the time attention from figures such as the biochemist and historian of science Joseph Needham.
Unpacking lesser known fears of biological weapons during the First Indochina War can similarly reveal different understandings of the relationship among bodies, politics, and death. Writing about government techniques to kill guerrillas during a civil war in Rhodesia, Luise White argues that "what made anthrax and parathion and other poisons so lethal-and powerful enough to be talked and written about for more than two decades-was that they inscribed politics and history on to the afflictions and additives that caused guerrilla deaths" (White 2004, 233). In other words, politics can give bodily death a communal, rather than individual, meaning, which enables stories of these deaths to be retained by social memory for long times. While Việt Minh did not die of biological warfare, the fear of such death motivated action and helped reshape Vietnamese spatial imaginaries.
In this path you will first explore the spatial imaginaries that informed fears of, and knowledge about, biological warfare in the Korean War. Vietnamese intellectuals and political leaders, for example, were inspired to draw on existing Sinosphere maps. Vietnamese leaders turned to political, intellectual, and cultural connections to China and Korea for relevant experience with biological warfare. Newer maps of the communist world both reinforced Sinosphere maps and placed Vietnam at the center of newer geographies of revolution. This path then considers an international conference held in Beijing that presented evidence for the charges of US germ warfare in North Korea and China. Finally, it offers some of the images produced in China related to germ warfare, which you can compare to those found in the Việt Minh pamphlet examined in "Resisting Biological Warfare."
Mapping Invasion: Vietnamese Responses to Biological Warfare During the First Indochina War
This module analyzes Vietnamese responses to the French military's possible use of biological warfare during the First Indochina War (1946-1954). Beginning in 1952, the Việt Minh, the anti-colonial popular front forces led by Ho Chi Minh, collected reports of French airplanes releasing powders, worm-infested leaflets, and other strange substances over Việt Minh-controlled territory in and around the Red River Delta. These reports assumed that the strange substances were biological weapons, including insects and microbes meant either to sicken or kill humans directly or to infect plants and animals and threaten the Vietnamese food supply. Such reports lasted until at least the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.
This module argues that Vietnamese responses to biological warfare were inherently spatial. They depended, for example, on mapping information gathered from dispersed sources, from conferences held in China to surveys of farmers in the Red River Delta. Moreover, this intellectual geography overlapped, and existed in tension, with a political geography of civilizations, regions, and nation-states, an emotional geography of fear, and a medical geography that linked airplanes, environments, microbes, and humans. Unpacking the (non) event of biological warfare shows, in turn, how responses to biological weapons had complicated effects on Vietnamese spatial imaginaries. From a Vietnamese perspective, germ warfare helped place northern Vietnam in reconfigured Sinosphere and borderland relationships and created newer nationalist and revolutionary worlds. In other words, this period shows a mix of old and new maps being used to understand new hybrid environments of microbial, human, and machine movement.
To make maps useful for combatting biological warfare, the Việt Minh had to understand conditions in local places at specific moments. Moving from generalized knowledge about the Sinosphere to specific knowledge about places in the Red River Delta took hard work. This module seeks to trace and, in a limited way, reproduce the labor needed to map the mobilities and immobilities of invasion. In other words, the structure of this module mimics the movement from general to specific, and old to new, and the intellectual and physical labor needed to make such a move. Such a structure encourages users to reflect on how historical actors moved between scales that were different in quantity and in quality, shifting between different geographic scales—global, regional, national, and local—and different types of maps—civilizational, emotional, and biogeographical. In other words, this module examines what certain Vietnamese thought about biological warfare and to explain what those actors thought with and how these structures changed over time.
This module is divided into three pathways, each of which explores a different theme in biological warfare. Path A is called "Learning from the Korean War." It encourages users to explores communist charges of biological warfare in North Korea and northeast China leveled against the United States military. It examines notes from a Vietnamese delegation to an international conference about biological warfare along with Chinese posters produced as part of a patriotic hygiene movement. A side path shows how northern Vietnam has been incorporated into various spatial imaginaries. Path B is called "Surveying Northern Vietnam." It encourages users to explore biological warfare in northern Vietnam during the First Indochina War. Drawing from reports of the Committee to Prevent Germs, this path traces the steps that the Việt Minh took to produce knowledge about biological warfare. A side path explores the life of one of the committee's leaders, the famous Vietnamese medical doctor Tôn Thất Tùng. Finally, this path offers a Google map of suspected incidents of biological weapons use drawn from the committee's work and other Việt Minh reports. Path C is called "Preparing for Biological Warfare." Such efforts included included producing and distributing a pamphlet meant to popularize knowledge about the history of American and Japanese use of biological weapons. This pamphlet sought to mobilize domestic Vietnamese audiences to fight. It aimed as well to show international audiences the Vietnamese connections to the communist revolutions that had taken place in China and Korea. Finally, the Việt Minh organized a Vietnamese Patriotic Hygiene Movement modeled on the Chinese Patriotic Hygiene Movement.

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Nhan Dan Trieu Trung Chien Thang Chien Tranh Vi Trung