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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〔Different dates have been proposed. Please refer to "Discrepancies in the dates of events" for more information〕 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. ==Background== 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. Rubber was very profitable to both colonial government and large French metropolitan companies given that the latter's combined output was nearly equivalent to the total latex output in Indochina. As a result, the government was very involved in economic activity "()rom the control of goods prices and financial or fiscal support... to the policing of worker dissent" to safeguard this very profitable export industry. Hence, while rubber planters and colonial administrators did not always agree on matters relating to the rubber industry, these large European plantations were the main sources of revenue in inter-war Vietnam, and were powerful symbols of the intricate symbiotic relationship between the colonial government and French commercial interests. By the time Phu Rieng Do broke up in 1930, the largest rubber plantations had formed the ''Section autonome de l'Union des planteurs de Caoutchouc de l'Indochine'' (Indochina Rubber Planters' Union) to further their interests. Given their close relationship, one area of cooperation between government and planter was in labour procurement. With the increase in rubber demand after the First World War, large European plantations began to expand from their original sites of an arc 300 km long and about 40 km wide southeast to northwest of Saigon, to areas further north. This expansion depleted local labour supplies and resulted in a severe labour shortage by mid-1920s. In response, the director of labour recruitment, Herve Bazin, provided thousands of coolies to these large rubber plantations from "the overcrowded villages of the Red River Delta in Tonkin and the coastal lowlands of Annam", swelling the ranks of these poor migrant workers from 3,242 in 1922 to 41,750 in 1928. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Phu Rieng Do」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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