Frustration with the situation brought about a new wave of political activism in the mid-1920s. Leading the charge was a generation of young middle-class intellectuals who had been educated under the French school system. Like their counterparts in the rest of the colonial world, many had a complex relationship with Western culture, admiring much about it but resenting it as well. Many of them read French popular novels and magazines, including periodicals written in quoc ngu such as Phu nu Tan Van (Women’s News) that catered to the Westernized tastes and attitudes of educated youth. But they also resented the condescension with which the French treated their colonial subjects and questioned why the vaunted French concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity, which they had learned in school, could not be applied in Indochina as well.
The first signs of ferment appeared in Saigon, which, of all the cities of Vietnam, had been the most directly affected by the French colonial presence. A high percentage of the European population in Indochina had settled there because Cochin China was a colony, and thus under direct French administration, and because of the opportunity for material profit offered by the rubber, tea, and coffee plantations that had been established in nearby regions. At the same time, there were more factory workers there than in any other part of the country. In Saigon the gap between rich and poor, native and foreign, was most starkly delineated. Here even the most affluent Vietnamese had reason to resent the grip that foreigners possessed over the economy. Overseas Chinese merchants controlled the rice mills and the banks and pawnshops, while Europeans owned most of the larger factories and dominated the import-export trade. The wealthy agronomist Bui Quang Chieu, whom Nguyen Ai Quoc had briefly met during his first voyage to Europe, took the lead in focusing this resentment. An absentee landlord with his residence in Saigon, Chieu was also involved in various other business transactions and founded a journal titled La Tribune Indigène to represent the interests of the local commercial elite. A few years later, he joined with acquaintances in founding the Constitutionalist Party, the first formal political party in French Indochina. While Bui Quang Chieu and his colleagues hoped to press the French to grant a greater role for the Vietnamese people in the political process, an additional goal was to reduce the hold of Chinese merchants over the economy of Cochin China.7
As in many other societies in Southeast Asia, Chinese merchants had long been a dominant force in the urban economies of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The descendants of settlers who had immigrated in past centuries to the area from coastal regions in south China, they were often encouraged to take part in manufacturing and commercial activities by local monarchs who discouraged such practices among the local populace. Usually they were settled in urban ghettos and continued to maintain key components of Chinese culture, including Confucian ethics and the Chinese language. When Bui Quang Chieu and his colleagues focused their attention on reducing the influence of the overseas Chinese rather than on that of the colonial authorities, they were adopting an attitude that was reflected in several other colonies in the region.
A potentially more dangerous adversary than Chieu, from the point of view of the French, was the Paris-trained intellectual Nguyen An Ninh. The son of a Confucian scholar from Cochin China who had connections with the Hanoi Free School and later served in Phan Boi Chau’s movement, Ninh studied law in France, where he claimed to have met Nguyen Ai Quoc and developed an intense interest in politics. On returning to Saigon in the early 1920s, he founded a journal called La Cloche Fêlée (The Cracked Bell) with the aim of arousing the patriotic spirit of the Vietnamese people and spurring the French to grant political reforms. Like Phan Chu Trinh, Nguyen An Ninh was a fervent admirer of Western culture and convinced that it could serve as a corrective to the traditional Confucian system, which he believed had stifled the creativity of his compatriots and contributed to their conquest by the French.
During the early and mid-1920s, the charismatic young journalist was wildly popular among the educated youth of Cochin China; his occasional speeches were eagerly awaited. In an October 1923 address at the Salle d’Enseignement in Saigon, he called on his listeners to launch a new culture unencumbered by the imported ideas of Confucius, Mencius, and Lao-tzu. Like Mahatma Gandhi in India, Ninh argued that the solution to Vietnamese problems was essentially spiritual, and that the answer could only come from within the people.
The impact of Nguyen An Ninh’s activities on the youth of Cochin China was increasingly worrisome to the French authorities; eventually he was summoned to talk with Lieutenant Governor Maurice Cognacq, who warned him that his efforts were closely monitored by the authorities, and that if he persisted in his activities they would use the necessary means to compel him to desist. The Vietnamese people were too simpleminded, Cognacq suggested, to understand Ninh’s message. If Ninh wanted to make intellectuals, he added sarcastically, go to Moscow. Cognacq’s warning, however, was ignored; Nguyen An Ninh resumed his campaign.8
On the day that Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Canton by ship from Vladivostok in mid-November 1924, the city was in turmoil, with thousands jamming the streets near the waterfront to demonstrate their support for Sun Yat-sen’s government and see the president off on a trip to Beijing. Since February 1923, Sun had put into effect the “bloc within” strategy which had been negotiated with the Comintern agent Maring a few months previously. Sun moved the Kuomintang to the left by adding a number of members of the CCP to positions of responsibility. After the arrival of Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin from Moscow in October, the party was reorganized along Leninist lines and a new military academy was established on Whampoa (Huangpu) Island to provide a trained officer corps. Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun Yat-sen’s most trusted young lieutenants, was named commandant of the school, which was located a few miles downriver from the city; Zhou Enlai became the school’s political commissar.
Sun Yat-sen’s move to the left, however, had not come without cost; relations between his government and representatives of European interests in Canton began to deteriorate. To many Western merchants and diplomats in the city, Sun’s decision to establish a formal relationship with Soviet Russia and the CCP provided conclusive evidence that he and his party were fundamentally anti-Western and had become the cat’s-paw of Moscow.
During the next few months, the situation became increasingly tense. In the summer of 1924, strikes against British firms in Canton broke out in response to an incident provoked by the British authorities, who had imposed police controls to suppress street demonstrations on Shamian Island, a European concession area along the banks of West River. Sun’s government declared its support for the strikers. That fall, the Canton Merchants’ Association, dominated by European commercial interests, established a militia to provide the Western community with protection against Sun’s military forces, and clashes broke out between militia units and government troops.
In the meantime, the situation outside Canton suddenly changed, as Wu Peifu, a warlord who had for many years controlled parts of north China, was overthrown by the “Christian general” Feng Yuxiang. Although Feng was a warlord as well, he was viewed in Canton as somewhat more sympathetic to the Chinese revolutionary cause than Wu Peifu; when Feng invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing to negotiate a peace settlement, Sun agreed.
Although Nguyen Ai Quoc had not been sent to China in an official capacity, he was not without contacts. He immediately got in touch with Mikhail Borodin, who invited the new arrival to settle in his own lodgings at the Baogong Guan, a spacious Western-style villa surrounded by a garden across from Kuomintang headquarters in the heart of the city. On the ground floor of the building were offices for the twenty Comintern representatives sent from Moscow. On the second floor was Borodin’s private apartment, where Quoc established his own lodgings. To protect himself against French surveillance or arrest by the local authorities as an illegal alien, Quoc posed as a Chinese named Ly Thuy. Only Borodin and his wife were aware of his true identity.
Borodin had become acquainted w
ith the young Vietnamese revolutionary at the Lux Hotel when both were living in Moscow the previous year. Both spoke English (Borodin had spent some time as a labor organizer in Chicago before World War I), and they shared a common interest in their desire to promote the growth of the revolutionary movement in Asia. As head of the Comintern mission to Sun Yat-sen’s government in Canton, Borodin could be very useful to his younger colleague.9
After getting settled in his new lodgings, Nguyen Ai Quoc was assigned to work at the office of the Soviet news agency ROSTA, which was located on the ground floor at Comintern headquarters at the Baogong Guan. Quoc penned articles for the agency, which were sent back to Moscow and published under the pseudonym Nilovskii; he also served informally as an interpreter and the local representative of the Peasant International. His primary objective, however, was to create the nucleus for a new Vietnamese revolutionary party to be built on the Leninist model. He could then embark on the more long-term goal of putting some order into the Vietnamese resistance movement and transforming it into a force responsive to his wishes.
The revolutionary strategy that had been drawn up by the Comintern at the Second Congress in Moscow provided him with general guidelines for setting the process in motion. One of the provisions was that some measure of cooperation should be realized with existing non-Communist nationalist groups operating in the vicinity, an objective that he had set forth in his reports to Comintern leaders in Moscow. But Nguyen Ai Quoc was already aware that these guidelines were not fully adequate to meet his own needs. At a meeting held to discuss the colonial question at the Fifth Comintern Congress in the summer of 1924, he had asked Dmitri Manuilsky, the Comintern’s reigning colonial expert, what Asian Communist operatives should do where no mass nationalist party existed. It is doubtful that Manuilsky, who had little experience in Asian affairs, had ever thought about the question. Still, he did attempt an impromptu elaboration of Leninist “united front” strategy, suggesting that where no mass nationalist movement was already in existence, the local Communist party should take the initiative to form one under its own leadership.10
It would not be easy to carry out Manuilsky’s suggestion in Indochina. As Nguyen Ai Quoc had reported to Comintern colleagues while he was still living in Moscow, the Vietnamese working class, presumably the leading force in a future Marxist-Leninist party, was still at an embryonic stage, numbering only about 2 percent of the population, including coal miners, who were scattered widely throughout the three territories of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China. In political awareness, Vietnamese workers were well behind their counterparts in neighboring China and manifestly lacked the capacity to take the lead in waging a popular uprising against French colonial rule.
Nguyen Ai Quoc had noted in Moscow that it was the patriotic intellectuals who had led the initial Vietnamese resistance to the colonial system. Unfortunately, few had any awareness of Marxist ideology. In France, the presence of socially radical views among the intelligentsia dated back at least to the revolution of 1789; in Russia, they had sprouted during the middle of the nineteenth century with the Narodniks; even in China, radical ideologies from the West like anarchism and communism had become familiar to leading members of the progressive movement by the turn of the twentieth century. But in Vietnam, shielded as it was from dangerous foreign ideas by rigid French censorship, such revolutionary ideas began to penetrate only in the years following the First World War. Even then, when Vietnamese intellectuals began to hear about the Bolshevik revolution, it was mainly in negative terms, through news reports that were heavily distorted by French censorship. Books about Karl Marx or Soviet Russia were prohibited in Indochina, while articles in local newspapers and periodicals that mentioned such subjects were routinely confiscated by French officials. Only those fortunate enough to obtain furtively circulated copies of Karl Marx’s works or Nguyen Ai Quoc’s journal Le Paria were able to read about the other side of the issue.
The lack of detailed knowledge about Marxism prevented the average Vietnamese from learning about the Bolshevik revolution. And the social composition and the world perspective of the Vietnamese elite made it difficult for Marxist ideas to win serious acceptance once these ideas became more familiar. For most Vietnamese intellectuals, urban life was a relatively new experience. Indoctrinated in Confucian ideology, which harbored a built-in bias against such urban pursuits as commerce and industry, they were not likely to see the relevance of Marxist doctrine to the problems of predominantly rural Vietnam. Still, Marxism found a receptive attitude among those who were looking for a persuasive alternative to the Confucian worldview; it did not hurt that Marxists harbored a profound antipathy to Western imperialism. As one Vietnamese nationalist said, “We will not go to communism, but to the Communists, for here, as in other countries, since the Communists promise to bring self-determination to all peoples, they will be awaited as saviors.” But as a rule, their attitude was fairly naïve. Another Vietnamese patriot was quoted as saying: “If the West hates them, the Russians and Communists must be good.”11
Nguyen Ai Quoc was aware of the problem. In 1922, he had commented in an article written in Paris that only a few intellectuals in colonies such as Vietnam understood the meaning of communism, and most of those who did were members of the native bourgeoisie and preferred to “bear the mark of the collar and to have their piece of bone.” To most people in the colonies, he noted, Bolshevism “means either the destruction of everything or emancipation from the foreign yoke. The first sense given to the word drives the ignorant and timorous masses away from us; the second leads them to nationalism. Both senses are equally dangerous.”12
The implication was that Vietnam was not yet ready for the formation of a Communist Party, The masses “are thoroughly rebellious, but completely ignorant. They want to free themselves, but do not know how to go about doing so.” The educated elite was restive but not ready for Karl Marx. Time was needed so that the Vietnamese people could be brought gradually to realize that social revolution was the answer to their problems. In the meantime, a political party should be formed that could represent, in embryonic form, the ideals of Marx and Lenin but that could appeal to the public on the basis of the one major issue that could elicit a favorable response: national independence.
The most famous Vietnamese dissident then living in China was Phan Boi Chau. After his release from jail in 1917 and his brief flirtation with the idea of an accommodation with the French, Chau had returned to the anti-French views that he had held prior to his arrest. Now aging but still physically robust, with a brown beard and glasses, the fifty-five-year-old warrior settled in Hangzhou, a scenic resort southwest of Shanghai, at the home of Ho Hoc Lam, a supporter who later played a key role in the movement during World War II. Although Phan Boi Chau no longer possessed the nucleus of a patriotic anticolonial organization inside Indochina, his name still exerted a charismatic appeal; during the early 1920s a number of ambitious young Vietnamese patriots fled to south China to join the ranks of his followers. Most prominent among them were Le Hong Phong, Le Van Phan (better known within the revolutionary movement as Le Hong Son), Le Quang Dat, and Truong Van Lenh—all of them eventually to become founding members of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s first revolutionary organization.13
Once in south China, these young firebrands quickly became impatient with the inefficiency of Phan Boi Chau’s organization; in March 1924, eight months prior to the arrival of Nguyen Ai Quoc in Canton, they decided to branch out on their own, forming a new party called the Tam Tam Xa (the Association of Like Minds, but literally the Society of Beating Hearts). As in the case of most patriotic organizations established in Vietnam early in the twentieth century, the leaders of the new party were members of the traditional scholar-gentry elite. Radicalized by the student demonstrations that erupted in the mid-1920s, they had decided to drop out of school to take part in anticolonial activities. Several of them had worked as manual laborers before deciding to emigrate abroad. Virtually all of them were natives of
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s home province of Nghe An.
Activist in temperament and hasty in inclination, the members of the new organization scorned ideology as irrelevant to the immediate need for revolution. Their philosophy was a Vietnamese equivalent to that of Auguste Blanqui’s insurrectionist movement in nineteenth-century Europe, which had sought—usually without success—to promote uprisings in France, Italy, and Spain. Their ultimate goal was to use propaganda and acts of terrorism to arouse a popular upheaval to overthrow French colonial rule in Indochina.14
One of the first projects envisaged by the new party was the assassination of the French governor-general of Indochina, Martial Merlin, on the occasion of his visit to Canton after an official tour of several cities in East Asia in mid-June of 1924. With advice and financial assistance from Lam Duc Thu, a thirty-six-year-old native of Tonkin who had come to Canton to meet Phan Boi Chau a few years earlier, the group launched plans to kill Merlin by exploding a bomb during ceremonies in the European concession area of Shamian Island. Although married to a rich wife and a good deal older than his colleagues, the heavyset Thu (real name Nguyen Cong Vien) was seen as a useful member of the organization because of his apparent ability to raise funds and his contacts with the French. Because he came from a family that had resisted the French conquest, his loyalty to the cause of anticolonialism was not questioned. The headquarters of the organization was located in medical shop run by Thu and his wife in a small alley off De Zheng Road and not far from Comintern headquarters.
Ho Chi Minh Page 17
