The French reoccupied Indochina after the Second World War. The territory had been part of the Empire of Japan before. The Việt Minh launched a rebellion against the French authority. The first few years of the war involved a low-level rural insurgency against French authority. However, after the Chinese communists reached the Northern border of Vietnam in 1949, the conflict turned into a conventional war between two armies which had modern weapons supplied by the United States and the Soviet Union.