structural:expansion, linguistic:translation
Expansion of the security apparatus

As Sarraut was determined to secure French rule over the country he created a strong political surveillance apparatus that functioned throughout French Indochina. He centralised all local police forces and developed an intelligence service, these policies would lead to the creation of the Sûreté générale indochinoise, which sought to monitor and police anti-French activities both inside and outside of French Indochina.

French security was expanded because of fears of German involvement with their enemies in the Far East, Gaston Ernest Liébert, the French consul in Hong Kong and a major player for the intelligence services coordinated by the political affairs bureau of French Indochina, noted that Vietnamese revolutionaries and Germany both shared the same interest (the defeat of the French). Liébert argued that French Indochinese who rebelled should be treated according or as traitors to France. Another reason for the expansion of the security state was that the French feared that such a large expulsion of French soldiers to fight against the Germans would inspire a general uprising similar to what the British experienced in Egypt.

In April 1916 the administrator of civil services at the Political Affairs Bureau in Hanoi launched two voluminous reports that went into great detail about the parallel histories of what he referred to as the "Annamese Revolutionary Party" (how he called the Duy Tân Hội) and of the secret societies of French Cochinchina. These two reports proved to be very important to the Political Affairs Bureau as they would trigger a full-scale reform of the organisation making it into an umbrella organisation. The reform policies were enacted to help control the narrative around French rule through policing and surveillance. The colonial police forces were connected with "the general control of Indochinese workers and riflemen" (Contrôle général des travailleurs et tirailleurs indochinois), a political police force, as the military presence was reduced to allocate more soldiers to the home front. In Metropolitan France these nascent surveillance organisations were put in charge of policing the 100,000 French Indochinese present to help fight the Central Powers.

Following the communist victory in the October Revolution the security apparatus of French Indochina was strengthened to fight the "Bolshevik danger" in the colonies. While the Sûreté générale was created during World War I, in 1922 it was expanded to become a better instrument to surveil and repress any potential Bolshevik elements, first in Metropolitan France and later in French Indochina. The activities of the Sûreté générale indochinoise were managed by the newly created Department of Political Affairs. The Sûreté générale indochinoise would be used as the paramount tool to gather intelligence of subversive elements within French Indochinese society and to conduct large-scale union-wide registration by the colonial police forces of suspects and convicts.

The increase in surveillance and repression was accompanied with a propaganda campaign aimed to convince the indigenous populations of the "enlightenment" of French colonialism. Both the indigenous peasantry and the elites had to be won over by being told of the many "advantages of colonialism". The Political Affairs Bureau assembled a umber of Vietnamese elites belonging to the indigenous intelligentsia through the French School of the Far East to aid in the pro-French propaganda effort.

While the French hoped to isolate political dissidents by locking them up in prisons, these prisons would ironically turn into "schools" for nationalism and Communism as concentrating a large number of political enemies together would allow them to communicate with each other, which contributed to the growth of Communism within French Indochina.