Origins in French Indochina

There was an issue, however. Vietnam lacked the industrial development in qualify a nation adaptable to Marxist theory would suggest was a prerequisite for a communist revolution. Without mass industrialization, there still did exist class conflict in Vietnam. Most Vietnamese people were exploited by the upper-class Vietnamese who were largely influenced by colonial French society that occupied Indochina. This exploitation occured at the expense of the poor peasant farmers that cultivated the fertile farming lands throughout the south. This  conflict gradually sparked outrage and frustration from the peasant farmers, many of whom lacked social mobility and access to education, and these factors encouraged radicalized attitudes against those outsiders exploiting and oppressing a majority of the population. Despite nationalism and communism sometimes being thought of as being complete ideological polar-opposites, many Vietnamese, particularly the young intellectuals, linked liberation from the French colonists with the replacement of their oppressive capitalist system by an embrace of communist ideology.