Despite the claimed Christian idealism of the civilizing mission, from the start of colonization in 1858, the French exploited the natural resources of Vietnam as inexhaustible and the Vietnamese people as beasts of burden. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the First Indochina War (1946–1954) justified recolonization of Vietnam as a defense of the white West against the "péril jaune" — specifically that the Communist Party of Vietnam were puppets of the People's Republic of China, which is part of the "international communist conspiracy" to conquer the world. Therefore, French anticommunism utilized orientalism to dehumanize the Vietnamese into "the nonwhite Other"; which yellow-peril racism allowed atrocities against Viet Minh prisoners of war during "la sale guerre" ("dirty war"). In that time, yellow-peril racism remained one of the ideological bases for the existence of French Indochina, thus the French news media's racialist misrepresentations of Viet Minh guerrillas being part of the "innombrables masses jaunes" (innumerable yellow hordes); being one of many "vagues hurlantes" (roaring waves) of "masses fanatisées" (fanatical hordes).