How can I hope to fulfill that task? First, I must go to China. Then to undertake whatever actions that the possibilities present. What will be the necessary sum for my support? I will probably have to move often, to carry on relations with various groups, to pay for correspondence, to buy publications appearing in Indochina, to arrange for room and board, etc. etc. After consulting with Chinese colleagues here, I estimate that I will require a budget of approximately US$100 a month, not including the transportation from Russia to China. I have not included taxes.
I hope that this will provide you with a basis for discussion of the subject of my return to the Far East.28
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s aspirations to return to Asia were probably intensified by conversations with the Soviet agent S. A. Dalin, who had just returned from propaganda activities in Guangzhou (then known to Westerners as Canton), where the Chinese patriot Sun Yat-sen had recently established the temporary headquarters of his revolutionary movement. The previous year, Sun had signed an agreement to host a Soviet advisory mission under the Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin in Canton to assist in the reotganization of Sun’s Kuomintang party along Leninist lines. Dalin had been a member of the team that arrived in Canton with Borodin in October. On his return to Moscow, Dalin stayed at the Lux Hotel, where he met Nguyen Ai Quoc and talked to him about conditions in south China. Quoc was undoubtedly delighted to hear that there were a substantial number of Vietnamese émigrés in the area engaged in activities directed at destroying the French colonial regime in Indochina.29
For a variety of reasons, however, Quoc’s departure kept being delayed. In April 1924 he had been sent to Yakutsk, in Soviet Siberia, to escort a Chinese delegation en route to Moscow, Shortly after his return, his patron Dmitri Manuilsky called him in for an interview. “So, comrade,” Manuilsky greeted him, “are you anxious to fight?” Quoc took the occasion to press his point with his friend, arguing that conditions existed for “a party of the Bolshevik type” in Indochina. The workers’ movement was on the rise, and there were many Vietnamese émigrés living in south China. Quoc proposed to organize them into the nucleus of a future Communist Party. Manuilsky gave his assent, but with the proviso that Quoc would also use his experience in assisting other nationalities in the area as well. Shortly after, Nguyen Ai Quoc was appointed as a member of the Far Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern Executive Committee.30
Still, the bureaucratic wheels moved slowly. In a letter to Grigory Voitinsky on September 11, Quoc complained that his trip to China had been delayed “for this and that reason” and “from one week to the next,” and then “from one month to the next.” He was also disappointed to discover that the Dalburo could not provide him with the funds for his trip or with an official position with the Comintern mission in Canton. Original plans called for him to serve in some capacity with the Kuomintang, but when that fell through, the trip was again delayed. Impatient to get under way, Quoc finally offered to seek employment on his own initiative after his arrival in Canton so long as the Dalburo could provide him with travel fare. On September 25, under the urgings of the FCP representative in Moscow, the Dalburo accepted his request: “Comrade Nguyen Ai Quoc needs to go to Guangzhou [Canton]. Expenses will be paid by the Far Eastern Bureau.”31
Nguyen Ai Quoc had finally managed to persuade the Comintern to authorize him to return to Asia to carry on revolutionary work. Still, as he told a friend, the arrangement had its “awkward points,” since he would be forced to operate illegally in Canton, under the watchful eyes of the Sûreté in the French concession in the city (during the nineteenth century, European nations had pressured the Qing government to provide them with concession areas at various points along the coast, where foreigners could carry on their activities under European jurisdiction). He would have to provide for his own expenses in a country that he had never visited, and do so in a language that he could read and write, but not speak. To provide himself with cover and a source of limited funds, he visited the offices of the Soviet news agency ROSTA and agreed to send to Moscow articles on conditions in China.32
Sometime in October, Nguyen Ai Quoc left Moscow by train from Yaroslavskii Station. As had happened before, he left without informing his friends, simply asking Thomas Dombal to let out the word that he was ill, since he would be living in China illegally. To further cover his tracks, he wrote a letter to a French acquaintance, explaining that he was returning to France since he was not permitted to go to Indochina. The letter was duly reported by an agent to the Sûreté.33
The trip to Vladivostok on the single-track Trans-Siberian Express ordinarily took about three weeks, since the train was forced to stop frequently to add coal or water, and sometimes to remain on a siding for traffic coming from the other direction. From his window, Quoc could see the vast damage caused to Siberian towns and villages by the bitter Civil War between the Bolsheviks and the White forces, which had ended only four years earlier. On several occasions, Red Army units bearing machine guns boarded the train and inspected the passengers in search of counterrevolutionary elements. After a brief stop in Vladivostok, where he stayed at the Lenin Hotel on the main avenue in the city, he boarded a Soviet ship bound for China. The ship docked in Canton on November 11, 1924.34
IV | SONS OF THE DRAGON
The Asia that Nguyen Ai Quoc returned to late in 1924 was different from the Asia that he had left thirteen years earlier. Whereas the colonial system in South and Southeast Asia had survived World War I intact, the situation in China had changed dramatically. In the fall of 1911, a major convulsion had brought about the disintegration of the old imperial system in Beijing. Four months after Nguyen Ai Quoc’s departure from Saigon’s Nha Rong pier that June, an insurrection sparked by members of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary party led in quick succession to the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and the rise of a new government in China. But the partisans of Sun Yat-sen had been unable to take advantage of the situation. Outmaneuvered both politically and militarily by General Yuan Shikai, the commander of the Manchu armed forces, in February 1912 Sun was forced to offer General Yuan the presidency of a new republic to be established in Beijing.
Yuan, who eventually hoped to declare a new dynasty in his own name, tried to restore law and order by relying on traditional autocratic methods of governing. This provoked clashes with Sun’s party, whose members occupied almost half the seats in the newly established parliamentary body, called the National Assembly. In January 1914, Yuan abruptly dissolved the parliament and attempted to rule by fiat. Sun’s party was declared illegal and Sun fled to Japan. But after Yuan died suddenly of illness in 1916, China began to disintegrate, as regional military commanders, popularly known as warlords, seized control in various provinces around the country. Although a fragile government continued to reign in Beijing, social and intellectual ferment began to build throughout the country; in 1919, major student demonstrations erupted in the capital and several other major cities. That same year, Sun Yat-sen successfully established a base for his revolutionary party—now renamed the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party—in Canton, capital of Guangdong province, under the protection of Chen Jiongming, the local warlord. In April 1921, Sun formally declared the establishment of a new national government, with himself as president.
In the two years immediately following the Bolshevik revolution, the new Soviet government in Moscow was in no position to take advantage of the events taking place in China, and it was more concerned with establishing control over the vast territories of the onetime Russian empire in Siberia, now temporarily occupied by a variety of anti-Communist forces. But by the spring of 1920 Soviet rule over the area had been consolidated, and a Far Eastern Secretariat was established in Irkutsk to direct Communist operations throughout the vast region of East Asia and the Pacific. That April, Grigory Voitinsky, then a Comintern agent stationed in Irkutsk, left for Beijing. After a brief stay he went on to Shanghai, where he helped to set up a provisional organization composed of revolutionaries operat
ing in the area. The following summer, radicals from around the country gathered in Shanghai and created a formal Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
One of the first decisions facing the new party was whether to cooperate with Sun Yat-sen’s new revolutionary regime in Canton. Some members, convinced that key members of Sun’s entourage were essentially counterrevolutionary in their instincts, were reluctant to join forces with the Kuomintang. But the Dutch Communist Maring, who had succeeded Voitinsky as chief Comintern representative in China, was insistent; in January 1923, Sun Yat-sen and Soviet representative Adolf Joffe signed an agreement in Shanghai that created a united front between the two parties and arranged for Soviet assistance in completing the reunification of China. The arrangement, described as a “bloc within,” called for members of the CCP to join the Kuomintang, which remained the dominant political force in Canton.1
Beginning in late 1923, the two parties, with the assistance of Mikhail Borodin’s new Comintern mission, started preparations for a northern expedition to depose the rapacious warlord regimes into which China had been divided since the death of Yuan Shikai. While the CCP was the junior partner in the alliance and lacked the following and the prestige of the Kuomintang, it was clearly a new and dynamic force in Chinese politics, a party with a future if not a past.
In French Indochina, changes were also taking place, although not at the same pace as in China. The population of the three zones was increasing rapidly. From about 7 million in 1880, it rose to approximately 16 million in 1926, with 6 million in Tonkin, 5 million in Annam, and about 4 million in Cochin China. Although well over three quarters of the population still lived in the countryside, there was a steady increase in the size of the urban population, which reached the level of about 1 million people in the mid-1920s. Most of them lived in the metropolitan cities of Saigon and Hanoi.
In the thirteen years since Nguyen Ai Quoc left Saigon, the movement to restore Vietnamese independence had lost ground. With the arrest and eventual exile of Phan Chu Trinh to France, the most prominent advocate of nonviolent reform had been at least temporarily silenced. In the meantime, Phan Boi Chau’s once promising organization, which had enlisted the support of many of Vietnam’s most prominent patriots, had gradually faded in importance after several abortive uprisings and then the arrest and imprisonment in south China of the nationalist leader himself.
On hearing the news of the 1911 revolution in China, Chau had dropped his plan to institute a constitutional monarchy and instead established a new political party—called the Restoration Society, or Quang Phuc Hoi—aimed at creating an independent republic on the Sun Yat-sen model. Clearly Chau hoped for Chinese assistance in overthrowing the French; during a meeting with Sun Yat-sen in Canton sometime in early 1912, Sun had promised him that Vietnam would be the first to receive Chinese assistance once the revolutionaries consolidated their power in China. Shortly after, however, Phan Boi Chau was arrested by a local warlord on the charge of carrying out subversive activities. By the time Chau emerged from prison in 1917, Sun Yat-sen’s party had fallen from power and Sun himself was in Japan. With his hopes for foreign assistance once again dashed, Phan Boi Chau appeared to lose his bearings. In despair, he even offered to cooperate with the French, provided that they lived up to their promises to carry out political and economic reforms in Indochina. By the early 1920s, his revolutionary apparatus in Vietnam had virtually disintegrated. He remained in exile in China, surrounded by a small coterie of loyal followers, a figure of increasing irrelevance. The era of Phan Boi Chau had clearly come to an end.2
The collapse of Phan Boi Chau’s movement and the exile of Phan Chu Trinh were indicative of broader changes taking place in Vietnamese society; the passing of the era of the two Phans coincided with the decline of the traditional scholar-gentry class, which had dominated Vietnamese politics for centuries. Although, under the urging of such patriotic figures as Chau and Trinh, many members of the Confucian elite had cast off their old beliefs and attempted to involve themselves in mass politics, as a class they were never truly comfortable in such a role; many found it difficult to acclimate themselves to the changing conditions created under French colonial rule. Phan Boi Chau enthused in print over a movement comprising “ten thousand nameless heroes” who would drive the French into the sea, but to the end his party was composed primarily of the well-born and the well-educated, and few peasants took part. Although his movement attempted to promote commerce and industry as a means of enriching Vietnamese society, its senior members were representative of the traditional landed aristocracy. Well-meaning patriotic scholars in flowing robes opened shops to raise funds and encourage local commerce and then alienated customers with their condescending ways.3
By the end of World War I, the influence of the scholar-gentry class (which had about 20,000 people at the end of the previous century) within Vietnamese society was beginning to wane. The Confucian civil service examinations had been abolished in all three territories and was replaced by a new educational system imposed by the French. Quoc ngu, the transliteration of spoken Vietnamese into the Roman alphabet, was now being actively promoted by both Christian missionaries in Cochin China and reformist intellectuals in Tonkin and Annam and was increasingly accepted as a useful replacement for the cumbersome system of Chinese characters. While most young Vietnamese continued to receive a traditional education in their rural villages, the children of many scholar-gentry elites, now deprived of the Confucian road to upward mobility, were trained in new Franco-Vietnamese schools such as the National Academy in Hué, where instruction was given in the French language. Many went to France to complete their schooling.
At the same time, a new and more Westernized Vietnamese middle class emerged. Some had established commercial or manufacturing companies to cater to the needs and desires of wealthy families living in the major cities. Others worked for European firms, entered the professions, or obtained a position in the bureaucracy. Although many members of this new urban elite admired Phan Boi Chau and his followers for their patriotism, they privately ridiculed their elders for their conservative, old-fashioned ways. Equally committed to the cause of national independence, the members of this new generation were uprooted from their past and more sophisticated in their knowledge of the West. Many wore Western-style clothing, drank French wines, and conversed in the French language. As the French journalist Paul Monet wrote, members of this new generation were “the prototypes of our [French] culture, deprived of traditional beliefs and uprooted from ancestral soil, totally ignorant of Confucian morality, which they despise because they don’t understand it.”4 French officials frequently referred to such developments as a sign that the civilizing mission was succeeding, but they would soon find out that this generation would represent a more formidable challenge than its parents’.
Senior French administrators had inadvertently contributed to the growth of Vietnamese frustration at the consequences of colonial rule. In 1919, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s future adversary Albert Sarraut, then serving as governor-general of Indochina, had quickened Vietnamese hearts with his promise of a new era of reform. “I will treat you like an older to a younger brother,” he had told his charges, “and slowly give you the dignity of a man.”5 Such words inspired hope in Vietnam and even earned the temporary admiration of Nguyen Ai Quoc in Paris, who still harbored a lingering admiration for the culture that had produced the revolutionary slogan of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
After Sarraut left Hanoi for Paris to become minister of colonies, however, his promises of reform remained unfulfilled. The new educational system, for example, received little funding from the colonial administration and consequently had only a limited impact on the local population. Village schools were particularly underfunded, and the majority of young Vietnamese received less than four years of education. In the mid-1920s, only about 5,000 students throughout the entire country had received the equivalent of a high school education. Such statistics underlined the hypocrisy
of the French claim that they were carrying out a civilizing mission in Indochina; whereas under the traditional system about a quarter of the population was able to decipher texts written in Chinese characters, in the decade following World War I the literacy rate in either quoc ngu or the traditional characters has been estimated at only about 5 percent of the population.
In the meantime, although many Vietnamese had contributed to the French cause during World War I, the colonial authorities still refused to grant their subjects the right to take an active role in the political process in their own country. The approximately 10,000 colonial officials in Indochina were still paid substantially more than their Vietnamese counterparts for equal work. Many among the 40,000 Europeans who lived and worked in Indochina—some of whom had arrived with little more than the shirts on their backs—all too often behaved with arrogance and condescension toward the local population. Foreigners, including over 200,000 overseas Chinese who had settled predominantly in the cities and market towns, continued to dominate the urban economy. In disgust, one French writer declared Sarraut’s reformist policies—which were sometimes described as the “politics of collaboration”—a fraud, while French President Raymond Poincaré admitted that they had been implemented solely for form’s sake.6
In the meantime, the mass of the population was suffering from increased taxes and the government monopolies on the manufacture and sale of opium, salt, and alcohol, which had increased the retail prices of all three products. In Cochin China, absentee landlords who had purchased virgin lands in the Mekong delta charged exorbitant rates of interest to their new tenants, sometimes over 50 percent of the annual crop, while maintaining their own residences in Saigon. Throughout the entire country, there were over half a million landless peasants, as compared with about fifty thousand landlords. In a book titled Forceries humaines that he wrote at mid-decade, the author Georges Garros remarked that under similar provocations the French people would have revolted. Truly, as Nguyen Ai Quoc had remarked in frustration to the journalist Ossip Mandelstam during his 1923 interview in Moscow, Vietnam was “a nation plunged into darkness.”
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