Assassination of the recruiter Bazin The assassination of Bazin , a French labour recruiter in Hanoi , on February 9 , 1929 , marked a turning point and the beginning of the demise of the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng ( VNQDD ) , the Vietnamese Nationalist Party , which perpetrated the killing . The resulting French retribution severely weakened the fledging Vietnamese revolutionary movement and hampered its ability to undermine French rule . Biography . The first name of this " un certain Bazin " is not recorded in the first account of the affair , Paul Monet ' s " Les Jauniers : Histoire Vraie " ( Paris , 1930 ) . Monet was a wounded French war veteran who visited Vietnam and became incensed by the treatment of workers by his countrymen . He coined the contemptuous term " jaunier " ( Yellow - slave - trader ) from " négrier " , African slave - trader . According to Monet Bazin was a graduate of the École coloniale in Paris , who had served as a colonial official before becoming a supervisor of labour recruitment in French Indochina . Since 1884 , Vietnam had been a colony of France , and along with Laos and Cambodia , was part of French Indochina . Under the direction of Bazin , Vietnamese foremen were hired to recruit Vietnamese labourers to work on plantations . In some cases , the hired work - force would be utilised in southern Vietnam , which the French ruled as the colony of Cochinchina . Others were sent to distant French colonies such as the New Hebrides . The working conditions in which the Vietnamese were placed generated indignation . The methods of recruitment often included beating or coercion , as the foreman received a commission for each recruit . The living conditions were poor and the remuneration was low . Among the Vietnamese population , the perception was that those recruited would never set eyes on their homeland again . The French colonial authorities refused to intervene , claiming on the one hand that recruitment " had no official character " and on the other hand that recruitment was beneficial to the Vietnamese , since it eased the population pressure on the crowded Red River Delta in northern Vietnam . Death . Bazin ( referred to as Hervé Bazin in some sources ) had come to symbolise the abuses of the recruitment system amongst the Annamite workers involved . A group approached the VNQDD , which had then been in existence for two years , to suggest that he be assassinated . Nguyễn Thái Học , the leader of the VNQDD , felt that the killing of individuals was pointless and that it would only prompt a crackdown by the French Sûreté Générale that would weaken the party . He felt that it was better to work towards the overthrow of the French colonial system of which Bazin was merely a minor tool . Having been turned down by the VNQDD leaders , one of the workers proposing assassination made his own plan . With the help of an accomplice , this individual shot and killed Bazin as he was leaving the home of his mistress on February 9 , 1929 . Although the status of the assassins within the VNQDD was uncertain , the killing of Bazin was seen as the first major attack carried out by the movement . French reaction . The French authorities reacted by apprehending all known members of the VNQDD that they could track down , including a young naturalised Frenchman named Leon Sanh . Sanh confessed to the crime , but he later retracted it , claiming only to be a bystander . He later implicated an alleged accomplice , Nguyen Van Vien . Vien was then captured and died in prison . The sources disagree , but between three and four hundred men were rounded up . Of those seized , 36 were government clerks , 13 were officials in the French government , 36 were schoolteachers , 39 were merchants , 37 were landowners and 40 were military personnel . Eventually 78 men were convicted and sentenced to between five and twenty years in prison . Leon Sanh himself was acquitted . As a result of the arrests , the VNQDD leadership was severely depleted . Most of the Central Committee were captured , and Hoc and Nguyen Khac Nhu were among the few who managed to escape from the hideout at the Vietnam Hotel . The pressure under which the VNQDD was placed eventually led it to engage in overt violent struggle . This culminated in the Yen Bai mutiny of 1930 , which resulted in a large section of the party being executed by the French authorities , decapacitating it as a major threat to the colonial order .