The colonial economy
drew Tonkinese and Annamese laborers onto Cambodian rubber plantations,
and trade along the Mekong tightened connections between Saigon and thousands of Lao- and Khmer-speaking rice farmers in the hinterlands. Small
wonder that Ho Chi Minh and his fellow revolutionaries had founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, and that as late as 1945 there was still much
debate over alternative—Indochinese versus Vietnamese—understandings of
the ultimate goals of the independence struggle.