A Surviving "French" Indochina

Is there any way that Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, collectively known as French Indochina while under colonial rule, could stay together after independence? According to an unsourced statement on Wiki, French Indochina would have a population of slightly over 100 million and a GDP of over 280 billion if it had stayed unified, so I could see a unified Indochina having a big affect on Asian politics.

What PODs are needed? Do the French need to be less aggressive in going to war with Ho Chi Minh, or was war the only viable option? Is there any possibility of France keeping Indochina as a commonwealth, perhaps something like the British system? If Indochina becomes independent in its totality, would that automatically be the doom of a unified nation?
 
Is there any way that Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, collectively known as French Indochina while under colonial rule, could stay together after independence? According to an unsourced statement on Wiki, French Indochina would have a population of slightly over 100 million and a GDP of over 280 billion if it had stayed unified, so I could see a unified Indochina having a big affect on Asian politics.

What PODs are needed? Do the French need to be less aggressive in going to war with Ho Chi Minh, or was war the only viable option? Is there any possibility of France keeping Indochina as a commonwealth, perhaps something like the British system? If Indochina becomes independent in its totality, would that automatically be the doom of a unified nation?

I don't think war was completely inevitable between the Vietminh and the French. The overall military commander in Indochina after WWII, General Leclerc, was in favor of a negotiated solution to the problem and he sought talks with the Vietminh. However, the High Commisioner Admiral d'Argenlieu did not favor talks, favoring a military solution. Ultimately, in France, internal pressure by the right-wing opposition forced the government into a military solution.

Possibly if a different High Commisioner is sent or if the internal politcal climate in France is different, a political solution can be achieved.
 
I think the first major split (except the racial and historical differences, of course) was when Japan split the former French Indo-China into separate puppet countries during WWII. These became the basis for the modern countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, as they "rediscovered" their traditional heritage and such or not being under foreign rule (arguably one good thing about Imperial Japan, out of thousands of bad things)

So an possible pod after 1900's would be to have Japan not get Indo-China (unlikely), or have Japan keep Indo-China in a single puppet state (probable).
 
You would have to remove the huge ethnic tensions between Vietnamese and the rest of Indochina if you wanted any sort of fair union to take place. Prior to France owning Vietnam, all of the states which composed French Indochina were nominally hostile to each other, even within the Vietnamese camp.

The actual region of Indochina, apart from the French has never been united- and even then, each region was administered largely independently from one another. Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam have never really been in harmony; South Vietnam had only been recently colonized (largely through ethnic clensing) and the region known as Cochinchina had been wrestled from the Cambodians, who were nominal vassals to Siam (Thailand) at the time.

It would be very hard to foster a union between the peoples due to the decentralized policy of colonization in Indochina. Indochina was never actually regarded as one centralized unit; which seems silly considering the French themselves were very much the opposite. French Indochina composed of protectorates Annam, Tonkin, Laos and Cambodia- and one directly ruled colony "Cochinchina"; which, despite being controlled by the French were in the affairs of themselves and their cultural development, almost wholly independent of one another (except in CC/Annam/Tonkin, all partitioned regions of Vietnam).

The problem is, a united Indochina would have to remove all the traditional cultural leaders in place and would have to really give the people in the region a sense of unity. This is not to say the unity would be good- it's not like the countries ever had any relations which were positive, and their dealings were almost only respective to trade. You would have to make the whole region a colony and would have to devote alot of French efforts into controlling the region. I suppose, French Indochina is much similar to the former Yugoslavia, being that although the ethnic groups are related (less so then the pan-slavic nation of Yugoslavia) they don't speak the same language, don't have the same culture, don't have the same history and they most certianly don't get along.

Toughie with this one.
 
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