Word: indo
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...Bidault tried to extract a policy out of the paradox of a war France could find no way to win yet dared not lose. The Geneva Conference was not far off. The National Assembly demanded to know how the government proposed to stand when the diplomats at Geneva discussed Indo-China...
Then Laniel ticked off France's conditions for an Indo-Chinese ceasefire: 1) evacuation of all Reds from the states of Laos and Cambodia; 2) creation of an agreed no man's land around the perimeter of the vital Red River Delta; 3) withdrawal of scattered Communist units in central Viet Nam into predesignated "standing zones" from which they could not move; 4) disarming or evacuation of Viet Minh rebels in south Viet Nam; 5) guarantees against "reinforcements"-presumably war supplies from Communist China...
...October 1945, the French returned to Indo-China, their "marvelous balcony on the Pacific." The Japanese had surrendered, the British and the Nationalist Chinese were in merely nominal occupation-by order of the Big Three at Potsdam-and would soon be gone. "My mission," proclaimed the new High Commissioner, "is to re-establish French sovereignty," and the French could see no wrong in that. In 80 years before World War II, they had invested $2 billion in Indo-China, 28% of it for such public works as 900 health institutions, 12,600 schools. The French reduced infant mortality...
...government as a "free" state within the French Union, and Ho let the French army into his capital, Hanoi (pop. 237,000). The French invited Ho to Fontainebleau as a chief of state to work out details of the agreement. By November, Ho was back in Indo-China, offering to work "in loyal cooperation" with the French. But the French soon learned, as others have painfully since, that Communist "interpretations" always differed from theirs...
Through 1947 and 1948 the Indo-China war indeed seemed to be little more than another colonial war. In February 1947, the French drove the Communists away from Hanoi. In May, they demanded that Ho lay down his arms. In October, the French moved out from Hanoi towards the 500-mile China frontier. But they could not bring Ho to battle...