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 肉蒲團

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李漁（1611－1680），初名仙侶，後改名漁，字謫凡，號笠翁。 漢族，浙江金華蘭溪人。明末清初文學家、戲曲家。18岁補博士弟子員，在明代中過秀才，入清後無意仕進，從事著述和指導戲劇演出。 後居於南京，把居所命名為“芥子園”，並開設書舖，編刻圖籍，廣交達官貴人、文壇名流。 著有《凰求鳳》、《玉搔頭》等戲劇，《 肉蒲團 》、《覺世名言十二樓》、《連城壁》（三者合集《無聲戲 》）等小说，與《 閒情偶寄 》等書。

閑情偶寄
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 Viet Minh

Việt Minh ( listen; abbreviated from Việt Nam Ðộc Lập Ðồng Minh Hội, English "League for the Independence of Vietnam") was a communist national independence coalition formed at Pac Bo on May 19, 1941.^[1] The Việt Minh initially formed to seek independence for Vietnam from the French Empire. When the Japanese occupation began, the Việt Minh opposed Japan with support from the United States and the Republic of China. After World War II, the Việt Minh opposed the re-occupation of Vietnam by France and later opposed South Vietnam and the United States in the Vietnam War.

World War II

During World War II, Japan occupied French Indochina. As well as fighting the French, the Việt Minh started a campaign against the Japanese. As of the end of 1944, the Viet Minh claimed a membership of 500,000, of which 200,000 were in Tonkin, 150,000 in Annam, and 150,000 in Cochinchina. Due to their opposition to the Japanese, the Việt Minh received funding from the United States, Soviet Union and the Republic of China. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Japanese handed over control of some public buildings and weapons requisitioned from the French army to the Việt Minh, now led by Hồ Chí Minh, after turning in the Vietnamese nationalist leaders of the Việt Minh to the French colonialists. The Việt Minh also recruited more than 600 of the Japanese soldiers, who fought in the war against France until 1954. After the nationalist organizations proclaimed the independence of Việt Nam, Hồ proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945.

First Indochina War

Main article: First Indochina War

However, within days, the Chinese Kuomintang (Nationalist) Army arrived in Vietnam to supervise the repatriation of the Japanese Imperial Army. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam therefore existed only in theory and effectively controlled no territory. A few months later, the Chinese, Vietnamese and French came to a three-way understanding. The French gave up certain rights in China, the Việt Minh agreed to the return of the French in exchange for promises of independence within the French Union, and the Chinese agreed to leave. Negotiations between the French and Việt Minh broke down quickly. What followed was nearly ten years of war against France. This was known as the First Indochina War or, to the Vietnamese, the French War.

The Việt Minh, who were short on modern military knowledge, created a military school in Tỉnh Quảng Ngãi in June 1946. More than 400 Vietnamese were trained by Japanese soldiers in this school. These soldiers were considered to be students of the Japanese. Later, some of them fought as generals against the United States in the Vietnam War.

French General Jean-Etienne Valluy quickly pushed the Việt Minh out of Hanoi. His French infantry with armored units went through Hanoi, fighting small battles against isolated Việt Minh groups. The French encircled the Việt Minh base, Việt Bắc, in 1947, but failed to defeat the Việt Minh forces, and had to retreat soon after. The campaign is now widely considered a Việt Minh victory over the well-equipped French force.

The Việt Minh continued fighting against the French until 1949, when the border of China and Vietnam was linked together as the result of the campaign called Chiến dịch Biên giới (Borderland Campaign). The newly communist People's Republic of China gave the Việt Minh both sheltered bases and heavy weapons with which to fight the French. With the additional weapons, the Việt Minh were able to take control over many rural areas of the country. Soon after that, they began to advance towards the French occupied areas.

North Vietnam and the end of the Việt Minh

Following their defeat at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, the French began negotiations to leave Vietnam. As a result of peace accords worked out at the Geneva Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Vietnam was divided into North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th Parallel as a temporary measure until unifying elections could take place in 1956. Transfer of civil administration of North Vietnam to the Việt Minh was given on October 11, 1954. Hồ Chí Minh was appointed Prime Minister of North Vietnam, which would be run as a socialist state. Ngô Đình Diệm, who was previously appointed Prime Minister of South Vietnam by Emperor Bảo Đại, eventually assumed control of South Vietnam. In the words of U.S. President Eisenhower:

It was generally conceded that had an election been held, Hồ Chí Minh would have been elected Premier. Unhappily, the situation was exacerbated by the almost total lack of leadership displayed by the Vietnamese Chief of State, Bảo Đại, who, while nominally the head of that nation, chose to spend the bulk of his time in the spas of Europe rather than in his own land leading his armies against those of Communism.^[2]

South Vietnam and its chief supporter, the United States, were not signatories to the 1954 agreement but did agree to respect its conditions. However, South Vietnam, with the backing of the United States, refused to hold unifying elections, claiming that Hồ Chí Minh could not be trusted due to his affiliation with Communism. This gave the Viet Minh the opportunity to march south to reunify the country by force. However, the Viet Minh were not in a position to do this, having instituted a party purge of 'disloyal' Communists as well as a highly disruptive land reform program

in the two years since the Geneva agreement. Poorly trained cadres were sent into the countryside accusing thousands of loyal party members of being counter-revolutionaries. As a result the Viet Minh lost so much popularity as a party and revolutionary movement that it had no time to run an effective government in the North nor a guerrilla campaign in the South. Its reputation in ruins, the Viet Minh gradually faded away as a revolutionary movement and party. In 1960 it was replaced by the National Liberation Front (NLF), more commonly known as the Viet Cong, established by South Vietnamese communists to lead the guerrilla war against Diem.

The Khmer Viet Minh

Khmer Viet Minh were the 3,000 to 5,000 Cambodian communist cadres, left-wing members of the Khmer Issarak movement regrouped in the United Issarak Front after 1950, most of whom lived in exile in North Vietnam after the 1954 Geneva Conference. It was a derogatory term used by Norodom Sihanouk, dismissing the Cambodian leftists who had been organizing pro-independence agitations in alliance with the Vietnamese.^[3] Sihanouk's public criticism and mockery of the Khmer Viet Minh had the damaging effect of increasing the power of the hardline, anti-Vietnamese, but also anti-monarchist, members of the CPK, led by Pol Pot.^[4]
The Khmer Viet Minh were instrumental in the foundation of the Cambodian Salvation Front (FUNSK) in 1978. The FUNSK invaded Cambodia along with the Vietnamese Army and overthrew the Democratic Kampuchea Pol Pot state. Many of the Khmer Viet Minh had married Vietnamese women during their long exile in Vietnam.^[5]

Note

The Việt Nam Ðộc Lập Ðồng Minh Hội is not to be confused with the Việt Nam Cách Mạng Ðồng Minh Hội (League for the Vietnamese Revolution, abbreviated as Việt Cách) which was founded by Nguyễn Hai Than and Hồ Ngoc Lam, and which later joined the Vietnamese National Coalition in 1946.

Viet Minh take control in the north

The Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh (Vietnam Independence League), or Viet Minh as it would become known to the world, was a Communist front organization founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 to organize resistance against French colonial rule and occupying Japanese forces.
With the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, the French attempted to reimpose colonial rule. The Viet Minh launched a long and bloody guerrilla war against French colonial forces in what came to be known as the First Indochina War. Ultimately, the Viet Minh, under the leadership of General Vo Nguyen Giap, decisively defeated the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. On August 1, the armistice ending the war went into effect. The triumphant Viet Minh marched into Hanoi as the French prepared to withdraw their forces.
Under the provisions of the agreement signed at the Geneva Conference in July, Vietnam was to be temporarily split into approximately equal halves. The two halves were to be separated by a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) running along the 17th parallel. The northern half was to be governed by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which had been proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh, and the southern half would be governed by the noncommunist State of Vietnam until 1956, at which time the two zones were to be reunified following internationally supervised elections. Ngo Dinh Diem, who had become premier of the State of Vietnam in June, was a Catholic and staunchly anticommunist. Diem disliked the Geneva Accords and set about to consolidate his power in the south. By the middle of 1955, Diem had effectively gained control of most of South Vietnam, and in July of that year, he declared his refusal to permit the elections called for at Geneva. This announcement led to a stepped-up insurgency in the south and ultimately to the Second Indochina War, when North Vietnamese regular units were committed in the south and U.S. forces arrived. Vietnam was not reunited until April 1975, when North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon.


French fall to Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu
Dien Bien Phu falls to the Viet Minh. In March, a force of 40,000 Viet Minh troops with heavy artillery had surrounded 15,000 French soldiers, holding the French position under siege. The Viet Minh guerrillas had been fighting a long and bloody war with French colonial interests for control of Vietnam since 1946. In an attempt to score a decisive victory, French General Henri Navarre had positioned the large French force 200 miles behind enemy lines in a remote area adjacent to the Laotian border. He had planned to draw the communists into a set-piece battle in which he hoped superior French firepower would destroy the enemy, but he vastly underestimated his foe.
Viet Minh General Vo Nguyen Giap entrenched artillery in the surrounding mountains and massed five divisions around the French positions. The battle, which far exceeded the size and scope of anything to date in the war between the French and the Viet Minh, began with a massive Viet Minh artillery barrage and was followed by an infantry assault. The tide of the battle quickly turned against the French.
U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and other members of the Eisenhower administration were stunned at the turn of events and discussions were held to decide on a course of action. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Arthur Radford proposed the use of nuclear strikes against the Viet Minh. Other options included massive conventional air strikes, paratrooper drops, and the mining of Haiphong Harbor. In the end, President Eisenhower decided that the situation was too far gone and ordered no action to be taken to aid the French.
Fierce fighting continued to rage until this day, when the Viet Minh overran the last French positions. During the siege, 1,600 French troops were killed, 4,800 were wounded, and 1,600 missing. The Viet Minh captured 8,000 French and marched them off on foot on a 500-mile trek to prison camps; fewer than half survived the march. Viet Minh casualties were estimated at approximately 7,900 killed and 15,000 wounded.
The battle of Dien Bien Phu marked the end of the French involvement in Southeast Asia. France had lost more than 35,000 men and 48,000 had been wounded in a war that was considered financially and militarily humiliating. The shock of the defeat at Dien Bien Phu led the French government, already plagued by public opposition to the war, to agree to the independence of Vietnam at the Geneva Conference in 1954.


The Emergence of the Viet Minh
The big chance for the Vietnamese came during the Second World War, when Germany conquered France, and Germany's ally Japan moved into Vietnam. For most of the war Germany dominated France, and French colonial officials ruled Vietnam under Japanese supervision. In 1944, however, the US and allied armies landed in Normandy; a government friendly to the Allies was soon restored to power in Paris. The French officials and soldiers in Vietnam then began plotting to switch sides and attack the Japanese. Their plotting was very inept; in March 1945 the Japanese attacked and crushed them. Most of the Frenchmen in Vietnam either fled to China or were imprisoned.
Japan did not have the manpower to replace the French colonial administrators, so the destruction of the French administration left the Vietnamese less tightly controlled than they had been in many decades. This opened the way for Vietnamese nationalism.
The most effective of the nationalist organizations was the Viet Minh, or League for the Independence of Vietnam. It had been founded by Ho Chi Minh, and most of its leaders were members of the Indochinese Communist Party. However, its immediate program was more concerned with national independence than with Communism. As Ho Chi Minh said, before one could practice Communism one had to have a country to practice it in. The Viet Minh invited Vietnamese of any political persuasion to join in the struggle against foreign rule.
The Viet Minh also did everything in its power to make friends with the US, and cooperated with the US in the struggle against Japan. However, while Ho Chi Minh established a good relationship with some individual US representatives in Asia, who even gave him some arms and equipment, he never succeeded in making contact with Washington. The US government was committed to a policy of alliance with France, and in the long run this policy precluded friendship with the Viet Minh.
The Viet Minh had been establishing guerrilla groups and underground organizations in some parts of northern Vietnam since the early 1940's. After the Japanese eliminated the French administration in March 1945, the Viet Minh was able to operate more freely, and it expanded very rapidly.
By the time Japan surrendered to the US in August, the Viet Minh had strong organizations in much of Tonkin and Annam, and significant support in Cochinchina. In the weeks following the Japanese surrender, the Viet Minh siezed local authority in most of Vietnam, and declared the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
By the end of 1945, the French were coming back to Vietnam. Negotiations between France and the Viet Minh went on for about a year, but produced no effective compromise. The Viet Minh wanted Vietnam to have independence, or at least something very close to full independence. The French wanted to regain effective control of the country. By December 1946, all efforts at a peaceful settlement had failed; the French and the Viet Minh were at war.