摘自大英百科

French rule
The protectorate

French control over Cambodia was an offshoot of French involvement in the neighbouring provinces of Vietnam. France's decision to advance into Cambodia came only when it feared that British and Siamese expansion might threaten its access to the largely unmapped Mekong River, which, it assumed (incorrectly), would provide access to central China. In 1863 French naval officers from Vietnam persuaded Norodom to sign a treaty that gave France control of Cambodia's foreign affairs. The effect of the treaty was to weaken Siamese protection. A French admiral participated in Norodom's coronation, with Siamese acquiescence, in 1864.
For the next 15 years or so, the French were not especially demanding, and Norodom benefited from French military help in putting down a series of rebellions. By the late 1870s, however, French officials in Cambodia were pressing for greater control over internal affairs. Shocked by what they regarded as the ineptitude and barbarity of Norodom's court and anxious to turn a profit in Cambodia, they sought to introduce fiscal and judicial reforms. In doing this, the French knew that Norodom's half brother, Sisowath, who had ambitions for the throne, would cooperate with them. Norodom, however, resisted the reforms, which he correctly perceived as infringements on his power. Exasperated by his intransigence, the French in 1884 forced him at gunpoint to sign a document that virtually transformed Cambodia into a colony. Soon thereafter, provincial officials, feeling threatened, raised guerrilla armies to confront the French.
The rebellion, which lasted until mid-1886, was the only anti-French movement in the kingdom until after World War II. The French succeeded in suppressing it after agreeing to some concessions to the king, but Norodom's apparent victory was hollow. What the French had been unable to achieve by the convention of 1884, they proceeded to gain through piecemeal action. As Norodom's health declined and as senior Cambodian officials came to see their interests increasingly linked with French power, the way was opened for greater French control. In 1897 the French representative in Phnom Penh assumed executive authority, reducing the king's power to a minimum. Norodom died, embittered and overtaken by events, in 1904.
The first 40 years of the French protectorate—whatever French motives may have been—had guaranteed the survival of the Cambodian state and had saved the kingdom from being divided between its two powerful neighbours. Norodom's successor, Sisowath (ruled 1904–27), was more cooperative with the French and presided benignly over the partial modernization of the kingdom. The northwestern provinces of Batdâmbâng and Siemréab were returned to Cambodia by the Siamese in 1907. By the time Sisowath died, 20 years later, hundreds of miles of paved roads had been built, and thousands of acres of rubber plantations had been established by the French. Resistance to French rule, in sharp contrast to what was happening in neighbouring Vietnam, was almost nonexistent.
Sisowath's eldest son, Monivong, who reigned until 1941, was even more of a figurehead than his father had been. During the 1930s a railway opened between Phnom Penh and the Siamese (Thai) border, while the first Cambodian-language newspaper, Nagara Vatta (“Angkor Wat”), affiliated with the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, conveyed a mildly nationalistic message to its readers.

World War II and its aftermath
When Monivong died in 1941, Japanese forces had already occupied the component states of French Indochina, while leaving the French in administrative control. In these difficult circumstances, the French governor-general, Jean Decoux, placed Monivong's grandson, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, on the Cambodian throne. Decoux was guided by the expectation that Sihanouk, then only 18 years old, could be easily controlled. In the long run, the French underestimated Sihanouk's political skills, but for the remainder of World War II he was a pliable instrument in their hands.
The effect of the Japanese occupation was less profound in Cambodia than it was elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but the overthrow of the French administration by the Japanese in March 1945, when the war was nearing its end, provided Cambodians with some opportunities for greater political autonomy. Pressed by the Japanese to do so, Sihanouk declared his country's independence, and for several months the government was led by Son Ngoc Thanh, a former editor of Nagara Vatta, who had been forced into exile in Japan in 1942.
In October 1945, after the war was over, the French returned to Indochina, arrested Son Ngoc Thanh, and reestablished their control. Cambodia soon became an “autonomous state within the French Union,” with its own constitution and a handful of political parties, but real power remained in French hands. There were, however, several significant political developments between 1945 and the achievement of complete independence in 1953, the most important of which was the confrontation between Sihanouk and his advisers on the one hand and the leaders of the pro-independence Democratic Party, which dominated the National Assembly, on the other. Cambodia was poorly prepared for parliamentary democracy, and the French were unwilling to give the National Assembly genuine power. The Democrats, for their part, suffered from internal dissension. The death in 1947 of their leader, Prince Yuthevong, was a severe blow, exacerbated by the assassination of Yuthevong's heir apparent, Ieu Koeuss, in early 1950. Outside Parliament, Son Ngoc Thanh, released from exile in France in 1951, formed a dissident movement, the Khmer Serei (“Free Khmer”), that opposed both Sihanouk and the French.
In June 1952 Sihanouk assumed control of the government. Many Cambodian students in France, among them Saloth Sar (who would become the future communist dictator Pol Pot), objected to Sihanouk's move, but inside Cambodia the king remained extremely popular. His self-styled “Royal Crusade,” consisting of a tour of several countries to elicit their support, wrested political independence from the French, who by the end of 1953 were anxious to compromise. Sihanouk's success discredited the communist-dominated guerrilla movement in Cambodia—associated with the Viet Minh of Vietnam—and Son Ngoc Thanh's anticommunist Khmer Serei.

Independence
Sihanouk's government was recognized as the sole legitimate authority within Cambodia at the Geneva Conference convened in 1954 to reach a political settlement to the First Indochina War. This decision prevented the Viet Minh from gaining any regional power in Cambodia, as they did in Laos.
While Democrats and communists alike recognized Sihanouk's role in gaining Cambodia's independence, they opposed his increasing authoritarianism. Sihanouk abdicated the throne in March 1955 in favour of his father, Norodom Suramarit, and formed a mass political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (“People's Socialist Community”), whose members were forbidden to belong to other political parties. The effect of the move was to draw thousands of people away from the Democrats, who had expected to win the national elections scheduled for later in the year. When the elections took place, amid widely reported abuses by Sihanouk's police, the Sangkum won every seat in the National Assembly. Sihanouk became the central figure in Cambodian politics from then until his overthrow in 1970, as prime minister and—after his father's death in 1960, when no new monarch was named—as head of state. Overt political life was strictly controlled by the prince, his colleagues, and the police; Cambodian communists, a marginal group of fewer than a thousand members, operated clandestinely and enjoyed little success. In 1963 Saloth Sar, a schoolteacher who was also secretary of the communist party, fled Phnom Penh and took refuge in the forests along the Vietnamese border; from there he built the organization that later would be known as the Khmer Rouge.
Sihanouk was widely revered in Cambodia until the late 1960s, when opposition to his rule intensified. He saw Thailand and what was then South Vietnam as the greatest threats to Cambodia's survival. Those two countries were allied with the United States, which the prince disliked. At the same time, Sihanouk feared the eventual success of the Vietnamese communists in their war against South Vietnam and the United States, and he dreaded the prospect of a unified Vietnam under communist control. To gain some freedom to maneuver, he proclaimed a policy of neutrality in international affairs. Sihanouk broke off relations with the United States in 1965, convinced of American involvement in two South Vietnamese-backed plots against the Cambodian state in 1959 and encouraged in his anti-Americanism by the French president, Charles de Gaulle, whom he idolized. Soon afterward he concluded secret agreements with the Vietnamese communists, who were allowed to station troops on Cambodian territory in outlying districts as long as they did not interfere with Cambodian civilians. The secret agreement protected Sihanouk's army from attacks by the Vietnamese but compromised his neutralist policies. After 1965, when the war in Vietnam intensified, he also edged toward an alliance with China.
Cambodia's internal politics after 1965 developed in a complex fashion. Elections in 1966, the first since 1951 not to be stage-managed by the prince, brought in a majority of National Assembly members who owed little or nothing to Sihanouk himself. Although the prince was still a revered figure among the rural populace, he became increasingly unpopular with the educated elite. Conservatives resented his break with the United States and his seemingly procommunist foreign policy, while Cambodian radicals opposed his internal policies, which were economically conservative and intolerant of dissent. A rebellion in Batdâmbâng province in 1967, manipulated by local communists, convinced the prince that the greatest threat to his regime came from the radical sector, and without hesitation he began using severe measures—including imprisonment without trial, assassinations, and the burning of villages—to impose his will.
By 1969 Sihanouk's grip on Cambodian politics had loosened, and conflict between his army and communist guerrillas, especially in the northeast, had increased. Some anticommunist ministers led by Prince Sirik Matak and Gen. Lon Nol plotted to depose Sihanouk, whose credibility with radicals had evaporated following his renewal of diplomatic relations with the United States. Sihanouk's elaborate policy of juggling major powers against each other had failed. Matak and Lon Nol worked closely with anticommunists in South Vietnam, including Son Ngoc Thanh, whose Khmer Serei movement had gained recruits among the Khmer-speaking minority in Vietnam.

Civil war
In March 1970, while Prince Sihanouk was visiting the Soviet Union, the National Assembly voted to remove him from office as head of state. Lon Nol subsequently took control of the government. Confused and hurt, Sihanouk traveled to Beijing and accepted Chinese advice to resist the coup by taking charge of a united front government-in-exile. This government was to be allied with China and North Vietnam and was to use the Cambodian communist forces led by Saloth Sar, which only a few days before had been fighting against Sihanouk's army.
In Phnom Penh, Lon Nol's new government was initially popular, particularly for his quixotic pledge to rid Cambodia of Vietnamese communist troops. In fact, the resulting confrontation dragged Cambodia fully into the Vietnam conflict. In May 1970 an American and South Vietnamese task force invaded eastern Cambodia, but communist forces had already retreated to the west. Two offensives launched by Lon Nol—named for the semimythical Cambodian kingdom of Chenla—were smashed by the Vietnamese, and thereafter his troops assumed a defensive stance. North Vietnamese support for the Cambodian communists diminished in 1973, following a cease-fire agreement reached in Paris with the Americans. The Cambodian communists, however, refused to adhere to the agreements, and in 1973 they were subjected to a massive American aerial bombardment, although the United States and Cambodia were not at war and no American troops were endangered by Cambodia. The bombing slowed communist attacks on Phnom Penh and wreaked havoc in the heavily populated countryside around the capital. The civil war lasted two more years, but already by the end of 1973 the Lon Nol government controlled only Phnom Penh, the northwest, and a handful of provincial towns.
In the meantime, Sihanouk declined in importance. By the end of 1973 the Cambodian communists dominated every element of the resistance, although they still claimed Sihanouk as a figurehead. Lon Nol's isolated regime in Phnom Penh continued to receive large infusions of American aid, increasing opportunities for corruption.
In April 1975 the Lon Nol government collapsed. Communist forces quickly entered Phnom Penh and immediately ordered its inhabitants to abandon the city and take up life in rural areas. Phnom Penh and other cities and towns throughout the country were emptied in less than a week. Thousands of city dwellers died on the forced marches, and in subsequent years conditions worsened.

Democratic Kampuchea
Over the next six months, following the directives of a still-concealed Communist Party of Kampuchea, Cambodia experienced the most rapid and radical social transformation in its history. Money, markets, and private property were abolished. Schools, hospitals, shops, offices, and monasteries were closed. Nothing was published, no one could travel without permission, and everyone was ordered to wear peasant work clothes. As in Mao Zedong's China, the poorest peasants were favoured at everyone else's expense. A handful of party leaders controlled everything in the country, but they remained in hiding and explained few of their decisions. Instead, they urged everyone to “build and defend” the country. In April 1976 Sihanouk resigned as head of state, soon after a new constitution had renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea. A soft-spoken and unknown figure named Pol Pot became prime minister, and more than a year passed before observers outside the country were able to identify him as Saloth Sar.
In 1976–77 the new regime, following the lead of Maoist China, sought to collectivize Cambodia totally, mobilizing its population into an unpaid labour force and seeking to double the average prerevolutionary yields of rice immediately and on a national scale. The human costs of this ill-conceived experiment were enormous, and the Khmer Rouge were widely condemned by the international community once the magnitude of their crimes became known, most notably through the release in 1984 of The Killing Fields, a film adaptation of the Khmer Rouge story. Conservative estimates are that between April 1975 and early 1979, when the regime was overthrown, at least 1.5 million Cambodians—about 20 percent of the total population—died from overwork, starvation, disease, or execution. Parallels have been drawn between these events and Josef Stalin's collectivization of Ukrainian agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, Mao's Great Leap Forward in China in the late 1950s, and the massacres in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. The Soviet and Chinese experiments appear to have been models for the Khmer Rouge, although the proportion of the population killed in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was greater than it had been in China or the Soviet Union. The number of deaths stemmed from the literalism with which plans were carried out (Pol Pot's supporters were told to “smash” the enemy), the cruelty of the inexperienced communist cadres, and—as far as executions were concerned—the suspicions of the leadership that the failure of their experiment could be traced to “traitors” in the pay of foreign powers. The Communist Party's interrogation centre in Phnom Penh, a prison code-named “S-21,” was the site of more than 15,000 such executions. Those tortured and put to death included men and women who had served the party faithfully for years—victims of the extreme paranoia of Pol Pot and his colleagues.

Vietnamese intervention
The Khmer Rouge initially had been trained by the Vietnamese, but from the early 1970s they had been resentful and suspicious of Vietnam and Vietnamese intentions. Scattered skirmishes between the two sides in 1975 had escalated into open warfare by the end of 1977. The Cambodians were no match for the Vietnamese forces, despite continuing infusions of Chinese aid. In December 1978 a large Vietnamese army moved into Cambodia, brushing aside the Democratic Kampuchean forces. Within two weeks the government had fled Phnom Penh for Thailand, and the Vietnamese had installed a puppet regime—called the People's Republic of Kampuchea—consisting largely of Cambodian communists who had deserted Pol Pot in 1977–78.
Over the next decade, under the relatively benign tutelage of the Vietnamese, Cambodia struggled back to its feet. Private property was restored, schools reopened and some Buddhist practices were reintroduced, cities were repopulated, and, with freedom of movement, internal trade flourished. At the same time, at least 500,000 Cambodians, including some 100,000 associated with the communists, fled to Thailand in the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea's fall and because of the hardship, uncertainty, and disorder that accompanied the installation of the new regime. Of these, perhaps 200,000 people, including most of the surviving members of Cambodia's educated elite, sought refuge in other countries, while the rest came under the control of three resistance groups camped along the Thai-Cambodian border: Norodom Sihanouk and his followers, the Khmer Rouge, and the noncommunist Khmer People's National Liberation Front (renamed the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party in 1992) under the leadership of Son Sann (a former prime minister). These groups were supported financially by foreign powers, including the United States, who were anxious to oppose Vietnam. Thousands of Cambodians continued to enter Thailand in the 1980s, and by the end of the decade those in refugee camps were thought to exceed 300,000.
In 1982 an uneasy alliance was reached among the three groups opposing the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh, and a government-in-exile was established with Sihanouk as president and Son Sann as prime minister. This government, despite UN recognition, received little support from Cambodians inside the country and was largely ineffectual. The member groups of the coalition continued independently to resist the Phnom Penh regime, the larger and better-equipped forces of the Khmer Rouge being the most effective.

Cambodia since 1990
The political stalemate that developed among the four groups vying for power was broken in the late 1980s, when international political pressure, an economic boycott of Cambodia led by the United States, and a reduction in aid from the Soviet Union contributed to Vietnam's decision to withdraw its forces from Cambodia, which was completed in 1989. Freed from Vietnamese tutelage, the Phnom Penh government took two initiatives that sharply increased its popularity. It legalized property ownership, which created a real estate boom in Phnom Penh. More significantly, it openly encouraged the practice of Buddhism, and hundreds of Buddhist monasteries were restored, often with funds provided by Cambodians living overseas. One result of the resurgence of Buddhism was that thousands of young Cambodian males became Buddhist monks, even if only for a brief time, as in most cases. The withdrawal of the Vietnamese also allowed the resistance factions to seek through negotiation the political objectives that they had been unable to obtain by military action against the Phnom Penh government; they were encouraged in this endeavour by their foreign patrons.
These negotiations, which had been conducted for some time and which had intensified after 1989, led in 1991 to two significant results. The first was the creation of a largely ceremonial coalition government under a Supreme National Council (SNC) chaired by Sihanouk and composed of representatives of the government and the three factions. Although the SNC was recognized by the United Nations, effective control in most of Cambodia remained in the hands of the Phnom Penh regime. The second and more important result was the conclusion of a peace agreement among the factions that also provided for a popularly elected government. The UN Security Council, with the backing of the factions, endorsed this treaty and agreed to establish in the country a peacekeeping operation consisting of both soldiers and civil servants under the control of a United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia which would monitor progress toward conducting elections, temporarily run several government ministries, and safeguard human rights.
The operation, inaugurated in January 1992, was difficult to implement, notably because the Khmer Rouge refused to disarm and cooperate, the UN machinery for such an innovative mission was cumbersome, and the ruling party in Phnom Penh was unwilling to cede day-to-day political power to the UN. Nonetheless, more than 300,000 refugees were repatriated from Thailand under UN auspices in 1992–93, and in July 1993 national elections were held under UN supervision. These were arguably the first free and fair elections in Cambodian history. More than 90 percent of the registered voters went to the polls, and by a clear majority they chose candidates from a royalist political faction sponsored by Prince Sihanouk, who had returned home in 1992 after 12 years of residence in China and North Korea. The incumbent Cambodian People's Party (CPP) and the former prime minister, Hun Sen, refused to accept the results of the election. In a deal brokered by Prince Sihanouk and approved by the UN, the victorious royalists, led by Sihanouk's son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, agreed to form a coalition with the CPP, with Ranariddh as first prime minister and Hun Sen as second prime minister. Under the new constitution, Cambodia became a kingdom again, and Sihanouk became its monarch for the second time.
Because the CPP controlled the army, judiciary, and police, it soon dominated the coalition, and Prince Ranariddh, despite his position, was unable to influence events. The Khmer Rouge movement collapsed in the mid-1990s, as it lost foreign backing, its leaders quarreled among themselves, and thousands of supporters defected to the government and were offered positions in the Cambodian army. In 1997 Hun Sen staged a coup against his coalition partners and tightened his control over the country. The brutality of the coup alarmed foreign donors and delayed Cambodia's entry into ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).
By 1998 Pol Pot was dead, the Khmer Rouge movement had fallen apart, and for the first time in 30 years Cambodia was at peace. In July, after internationally monitored elections that were relatively free and fair, Hun Sen returned as prime minister to form a second coalition government; Ranariddh became chairman of the National Assembly. Cambodia continued to face enormous problems: a runaway birth rate, an AIDS epidemic, a stagnant economy, widespread deforestation, a climate of violence exacerbated by the ruling party's unwillingness to abide by the rule of law, impatience among donors at the government's slowness in introducing reforms, and human rights abuses often traceable to members of the ruling party.
Over the next few years, the country began to stabilize. Cambodia was officially admitted to ASEAN in 1999, which meant that it was constructively linked, perhaps for the first time in its history, to the rest of Southeast Asia. By the early 21st century, Cambodia had joined the WTO (2004), begun to bring a serious AIDS epidemic under control, reined in the country's birth rate to approach the world average, reduced its dependence on logging, begun to realize the economic benefits of strong garment-manufacturing and tourist sectors, and regained the confidence of foreign investors and aid organizations. Sihanouk resigned as king in 2004, and his youngest son, Norodom Sihamoni, became king in his place.


David P. Chandler