Phu Rieng Do

Phú Riềng Đỏ or the Red Phú Riềng was a communist-instigated strike that took place in Michelin's Thuân-Loï rubber plantation near Phú Riềng in the Biên Hòa Province of Cochinchina on 4 February 1930. Most of the plantation labourers were peasants from Tonkin and Annam driven by poverty to seek livelihood in southern Vietnam. Working and living conditions on the plantations, however, were harsh and this situation was capitalised by the communists to launch the strike. Although the strike lasted only about a week, the unfolding of events at Phú Riềng Đỏ was significant as it served as a harbinger for important tactical and strategic considerations for other communist-led uprisings that followed later in the year. Hence, while the communists may not seem to have achieved much from Phú Riềng Đỏ, it actually offered them some valuable first lessons in their anti-colonial struggle.

Rubber production began in Cochinchina after 1907 when the French wanted a share of the profits that rubber brought to British Malaya. The colonial government encouraged investment from metropolitan France by granting large tracts of land to cultivate rubber on an industrial scale. Soon, both labour and infrastructure were harnessed in earnest as the virgin rainforests in eastern Cochinchina, the highly fertile 'red lands', were cleared for rubber plantations.

In fact by 1921, about 29,000 hectares of Cochinchinese land had turned into rubber plantations, and Biên Hòa, where Phu Rieng Do took place, was one of the most heavily cultivated provinces. French colonial earnings from rubber export were given a further boost with the implementation of the Stevenson Plan in 1922, which mandated the reduction of rubber production from the British colonies of Malaya and Ceylon "precisely at the time when the astronomical growth of automobile production created upward pressure on demand." Consequently, in the whole of Indochina, 90,225 hectares of land had already been cleared for rubber plantations by 1929.

Rubber cultivation was practiced by both French and native Vietnamese planters. However, each had a very different experience of “heveaculture”, with the French plantations being much larger and having more access to resources from the colonial government and to cultivation techniques. Even so, the working conditions on these large French plantations were not conducive. On the other hand, smaller Vietnamese plantations invested little to improve their production processes because to them, scientific knowledge and advanced technology was the conduit through which new ideas could be harnessed to modernise Vietnam. In other words, while the French were profit-driven, the Vietnamese put nationalism before production, and the net effect was overall hardship for rubber plantation workers.

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Wikipedia