Against the Ages - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 15

ina. As a derisive colonialist saying had it, “the Vietnamese grow the rice; the Khmers
watch it grow; the Laotians listen to it grow.”
The French attitude was largely self-fulfilling. French rule did little to prepare Cam-
bodia for the modern world. Life for most of the population remained much the same as it
had been since Angkorian times, revolving around the cycles of subsistence agriculture.
Instead of employing Khmers, the French brought in Vietnamese to staff the civil service
and work the colonial rubber plantations. 6 Electricity and running water were rare outside
Phnom Penh. Until the 1930s, practically nothing was spent on schooling. The country's
first high school, the Lycée Sisowath, only opened its doors in 1936, and the number of
Cambodian university graduates to that point was barely enough to fill a small seminar
room.
Most education took place, as it had for centuries, in the country's Buddhist wats ,
where monks instructed boys in part through the use of religious treatises known as
chbap —a series of moral aphorisms and tenets that provided students with a rigid code of
worldly conduct. The chbap counseled passivity and acceptance and enforced strict social
relationships between men and women, parents and children, rulers and ruled. In contrast
with Confucian conceptions of social hierarchy, these were seen to flow from the moral
worldview of Theravada Buddhism, by which a person's present fate depended on merit
earned by good deeds in past lives. In the world of the chbap , deference and fatalism took
precedence over the pursuit of social or economic justice. 7
Slowly the modern nation of Cambodia came into relief. By 1927 the French had laid
down 9,000 kilometers of roads, and a rail line linking Phnom Penh and Battambang
began operations in 1932. 8 But these developments relied on a harsh system of taxes
and forced labor that prompted a series of small-scale revolts in the early twentieth cen-
tury. In 1925 villagers in Kampong Chhnang attacked and beat to death a French résident
collecting unpaid taxes. The injustice of colonial rule raised hackles among Cambodia's
tiny French-educated elite. In 1936, as resistance to French rule mounted in neighboring
Vietnam, anticolonialists founded the country's first newspaper, Nagaravatta (“Angkor
Wat”), which peddled a discreet anti-Vietnamese and anticolonial line. Cambodia was
starting to awaken.
In 1941 King Sisowath Monivong died and the French chose as his successor Norodom
Sihanouk, an 18-year-old prince who they expected would be pliable and subservient to
their interests. For the time being he was. At first, the inexperienced Sihanouk could do
little but look on as his country was swept up in the tumult of the Second World War.
After France's surrender to Hitler's armies in 1940, the French hold on Cambodia grew
weak. Indochina was placed under a Vichy French administration, which allowed imper-
ial Japan to garrison thousands of troops in the country. Then, in March 1945, six months
after the fall of Vichy France, Japanese imperial troops swept in and seized direct control