Initially it had been decided that the darkly handsome young revolutionary Le Hong Son would be selected to carry out the operation, since he had already assassinated a double agent within the party; because of his intensity he was reportedly feared even by his own colleagues as the organization’s “hit man.” But Le Hong Son was already well-known to the authorities, so the job was eventually assigned to Pham Hong Thai, a young Vietnamese who had recently arrived from Indochina to join the terrorist organization. Son of an official from Nghe An province who had joined Phan Dinh Phung’s Can Vuong movement, Thai studied at a Franco-Vietnamese school in Hanoi as a youth and soon became enamored of revolutionary ideals. After leaving school, he sought employment as a garage mechanic and then worked in a coal mine. In early 1924 he fled to China with his friends Ho Tung Mau and Le Hong Phong; there they all became charter members of the Tam Tam Xa.
Apparently avid for martyrdom, Pham Hong Thai agreed to take responsibility for delivering the bomb to its intended target. On the evening of June 19, French officials in the concession had arranged a banquet at the Hotel Victoria on Shamian Island to welcome Governor-General Merlin and introduce him to prestigious members of the local business community. The banquet was to take place in a large dining hall that was located adjacent to the street. At about 8:30 P.M., just as the soup was about to be served, Thai threw the bomb through a window into the banquet hall. The scene was described by a local newspaper:
The explosion was terrible and was heard throughout Shamian Island; its force was so strong that all the knives and forks on the banquet table were propelled on the assistants, causing a number of horrible wounds.... A witness who was near the hotel at the moment of the attempt and who ran to bring assistance described the scene to us in these simple words: terrifying, simply terrifying. The guests lay on their chairs or simply on the ground with horrible wounds.
Five guests were killed by the blast (three died on the spot, and the others later from injuries) and dozens were wounded. Yet Governor-General Martial Merlin was miraculously spared. In attempting to flee to the mainland, Pham Hong Thai jumped from a bridge into the Pearl River and drowned. Merlin left for Hanoi on a French cruiser the following day to avoid the possibility of a new attack during funeral ceremonies for the young assassin.15
Merlin may have escaped death because of his uncanny resemblance to one of the other guests, who was killed by the bomb. But suspicions were aroused among the plotters that a traitor within their ranks had passed information about the assassination attempt to the French. Their suspicions were fixed on Lam Duc Thu, whose extravagant habits and contacts with French officials made him suspect. Le Quang Dat, one of the members of the Tam Tam Xa, mentioned his fears to Le Hong Son, but Son replied that Lam Duc Thu had used his contacts with the French to obtain funds for the organization’s clandestine activities. For the moment, Thu’s relations with the organization continued.16
The bombing of the Hotel Victoria was the first attempt by Asian revolutionaries to assassinate a senior European colonial official, and it sent shock waves throughout the French community in Indochina. In Hanoi, the colonial press blamed the attack on Soviet agents. But the incident made Pham Hong Thai a martyr to anti-imperialism. Sun Yat-sen’s government erected a tomb for the young Vietnamese patriot at a cemetery in Canton devoted to martyrs of the Chinese revolution; Phan Boi Chau issued a statement implying that Thai was a member of his own organization and declared that the assassination attempt was in retaliation for the brutal acts carried out by the French in Indochina. Was it worse, Chau asked rhetorically, to kill or to oppress? Later he wrote a somewhat fanciful account of Thai’s life.17
Phan Boi Chau also used the publicity aroused by the Shamian incident to revive his own political organization in south China, which had become virtually moribund during his years in prison. In July 1924 he traveled to Canton to take part in the ceremony to erect a tomb for Pham Hong Thai. While there, he talked with some of his followers about replacing his Restoration Society with a new political organization to be known as the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, or VNQDD), in imitation of Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang. Chau returned to Hangzhou in September.
Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Canton five months after the assassination attempt on Shamian Island. A few days later, in the pose of a Chinese reporter named Wang Shan-yi, he contacted the members of the Tam Tam Xa. Their radical activism undoubtedly struck a sympathetic chord with the young revolutionary. The fact that they lacked an ideological focus was all the more convenient, of course, since it left ample room for Marx and Lenin. And it did not hurt that many of the leading members of the group were from his home province. Quoc was apparently impressed with Le Hong Son and Ho Tung Mau, but especially with Le Hong Phong, the stocky and broad-shouldered son of an educated family from Nghe An province whom Phan Boi Chau had personally recruited to study abroad.
It apparently did not take Quoc long to convert the others to his views. In a letter to the Comintern headquarters in Moscow dated December 18, 1924, he reported that he was already in touch with some Vietnamese “national revolutionaries” and had begun to cooperate with them. By February of the following year, he had formed a secret group composed of nine members and labeled the Indochinese Nationalist Party (Quoc Dan Dang Dong Duong). Some had already been sent back to Indochina to find additional recruits, while others had joined Sun Yat-sen’s army or applied for membership in the CCP. Five of them he described as candidate members of a future Communist Party. He emphasized, though, that he badly needed additional funds and propaganda materials to carry out additional activities.18
It was probably through the members of the Tam Tam Xa that Nguyen Ai Quoc was able to get in touch with Phan Boi Chau. Although Quoc did not approve of the old rebel’s methods, he probably saw him as a useful tool in building up his own organization. For his part, Chau had undoubtedly heard of the remarkable exploits of the mysterious Nguyen Ai Quoc while he was living in Hangzhou, although he was presumably not immediately aware of Quoc’s real identity as the son of his old friend Nguyen Sinh Sac. Moreover, Chau had recently become interested in socialism and the ideas of Karl Marx, although by all accounts his understanding of Marxist ideology was quite rudimentary.19
Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Canton two months after Phan Boi Chau’s departure for Hangzhou in September, but undoubtedly learned of his address from members of the Tam Tam Xa. According to French intelligence sources, Nguyen Ai Quoc traveled to Shanghai in January 1925 in an effort to meet Chau. The Sûreté, however, reported that no contact between the two took place at that time.
By then, Chau had become aware of the real identity of Ly Thuy, for sometime in February or March he wrote Quoc a letter from Hangzhou, praising the latter’s work and reminding him of their earlier meeting in Kim Lien village two decades previously. Chau also expressed a desire to collaborate with his younger compatriot and offered to come to Canton to meet with him. In his response, Quoc attempted to explain the need for a reorganization of Chau’s party, and presented his own strategy and the Leninist doctrine that lay behind it. Chau agreed to cooperate and provided the younger man with a list of the members of his organization.20
But Nguyen Ai Quoc quickly recognized that Phan Boi Chau and many of his older colleagues could not serve as the basis for the new revolutionary movement that he envisioned. He soon concentrated all his efforts on transforming the Tam Tam Xa into a new Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization. His first step was to set up a nucleus of dedicated followers into a new Communist Group (Cong san Doan), which operated under cover of the larger organization he had just created. Among the charter members were five key figures from the Indochinese Nationalist Party including Le Hong Son, Le Hong Phong, and Ho Tung Mau. Together they drew up a list of individuals from five different provinces inside Indochina who could serve as the basis for a revolutionary organization inside the country. Envoys were to be sent from Canton to escort them to China for training in organization
al methods; afterward, the recruits would return to their home provinces. Other promising members of the movement would be sent to Moscow for indoctrination in revolutionary theory and practice at the Stalin School. Quoc also initiated steps to establish a revolutionary base in Siam, as well as in several cities elsewhere in south China, which would serve as a possible temporary headquarters in case of a disruption of operations in Canton. Finally, he planned to recruit members from among the Vietnamese sailors serving on vessels sailing up and down the coast of the South China Sea to provide a reliable means of communication between the headquarters and various units inside Indochina.21
The sudden appearance of this energetic young stranger at Comintern headquarters did not fail to come to the attention of French authorities in Canton, and in Indochina as well. By mid-February of 1925, reports that the new arrival who called himself Ly Thuy was in contact with radical elements among the Vietnamese exile community in south China led to nervous appeals from French authorities in Hanoi and Canton to the Ministry of Colonies to verify the current location of Nguyen Ai Quoc. At first, Paris reported that Quoc was still in Moscow, but within weeks French authorities began to suspect that the mysterious Ly Thuy was indeed Nguyen Ai Quoc in a new incarnation. In Canton, a newly arrived French police official with the code name “Noel” urged his agents to confirm the stranger’s identity.
The most valuable of Noel’s agents was Nguyen Ai Quoc’s colleague Lam Duc Thu, who, despite his patriotic credentials, had agreed to serve as an informant for the French. Under the code name “Pinot,” Thu would provide the French with useful information on the activities of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement for the remainder of the decade. At first, Thu was frustrated in his effort to obtain clues to the real identity of the new arrival. Ly Thuy, he reported, was very cautious and refused to have his photograph taken. But in March he was able to obtain a photograph of Ly Thuy as part of a large group of people in front of Kuomintang headquarters. Sûreté agents confirmed from it that Ly Thuy was indeed Nguyen Ai Quoc.22
By late spring, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s attempt to create a new revolutionary organization based on Marxist-Leninist principles and under the guidance of the Comintern was well under way. According to the recollection of one of the primary participants, a formal decision to create a new revolutionary party was reached sometime in early June. A few days later, the first meeting of the organization was held at Lam Duc Thu’s house in downtown Canton. Included as founding members were the core members of Quoc’s Communist Group. Although the formal name of the new organization was still under discussion, it would soon come to be known as the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League (Hoi Viet Nam Cach Mang Thanh Nien).
Nguyen Ai Quoc also began publication of a journal—Thanh Nien (Youth)—to publicize the league’s ideas; a training institute was established in downtown Canton to provide a school for the indoctrination of new recruits. Quoc also imitated the tactic that he had used with some success in Paris by founding a broader alliance of radical activists from several colonial and semicolonial countries of Asia. Working with the Indian Comintern agent M. N. Roy and the Kuomintang leftist leader Liao Zhongkai, in late June he collaborated in the formation of the Society of Oppressed Peoples of Asia (Hoi Lien hiep cac Dan toe bi Ap buc). Liao Zhongkai chaired the organization, and Nguyen Ai Quoc served as general secretary and treasurer. Composed of members from Korea, India, China, and the Dutch East Indies (many of whom had been attracted to Canton, known popularly as “Moscow East” because of Sun Yat-sen’s relationship with the Comintern), as well as from Indochina, the society held its first meeting in Canton in mid-July. A proclamation issued on the occasion consisted of a blistering denunciation of the evils of imperialism and an appeal to the oppressed masses to support world revolution.23
The league was Nguyen Ai Quoc’s main enterprise during his brief stay in Canton. It was skillfully crafted to address his assessment of the prevailing situation in Indochina. The immediate need was to attract patriotic intellectuals and other national revolutionary elements to the cause in order to provide key personnel for the creation of a formal Communist Party. For practical reasons, the primary basis for that appeal would be the struggle for national independence. Yet it was also necessary to win the support of oppressed workers and peasants, for whom national independence had little relevance compared to the desperate struggle to survive in their daily lives. The league would also need to lay the foundations for the second stage of socialist revolution. Items in the Thanh Nien—many of them written by Nguyen Ai Quoc himself—carefully laid the groundwork for a new vision that would transcend the issue of national independence and incorporate a broader objective of world revolution.
The program of the Revolutionary Youth League was thus focused on the twin pillars of nationalism and social revolution. In linking these two issues, Nguyen Ai Quoc was adhering to the Leninist model that had been approved by the Second Comintern Congress in 1920. But where Lenin had seen the reference to nationalist sentiment primarily as a tactical maneuver to win the support of nationalist elements against the common adversary of world imperialism, the program of the league and many of the articles in its journal appeared to assign an equal if not greater importance to the issue of nationalism than to that of the future world revolution.
The strong emphasis on nationalism in the league’s program, a characteristic that would henceforth become an integral part of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s image as a patriot and a revolutionary, is one among several factors that over the years have led some observers to question his dedication to Marxist ideology and the struggle to build a Communist Utopia. Indeed, during the late 1920s doubts about his dedication to Marxist doctrine even surfaced in Moscow and among some members of his own organization; as we shall see, a few years later such criticisms would begin to appear in print.
There are valid reasons for the argument that Nguyen Ai Quoc was above all a patriot. In 1960 he himself conceded in the shorr article “My Path to Leninism” that it was the desire for Vietnamese independence that had drawn him to Marxism in the first place. And where his mentor Lenin appeared to view relations between Communists and bourgeois nationalists as a tactical maneuver to strengthen Communist parties in societies with a small working class, Nguyen Ai Quoc often appeared to view the issue of national independence almost as an end in itself, with the Communist Utopia a mere afterthought that could be postponed to the indefinite future. The socialist revolution in Vietnam, he often remarked, would take place in due time.
Yet there is also persuasive evidence that the young Nguyen Ai Quoc viewed Marxism-Leninism as more than just a tool to drive out the French. Although he rarely referred to Marxist doctrine in his writings, during his years in Paris and his ensuing period of training in Moscow an increasing fervency appeared in his comments about the future world revolution, which, in his mind, would bring to a definitive end the exploitative system of world capitalism. Quoc believed that the struggle against the forces of imperialism throughout Asia would culminate in a global revolution. In an interview with a Soviet journalist just before his death, Ho Chi Minh conceded that his youthful revolutionary zeal might have been excessive, remarking ruefully that on one occasion while he was living in the USSR, he had scolded a young woman for wearing a silk dress and high-heeled shoes. As he recalled, she responded spiritedly that she had made everything with her own hands. “Is it really so bad,” she asked, “that young people now have the chance to eat and dress well?”24 After decades, her comment still remained in his memory.
If it is fair to say that he was both a nationalist and a Marxist at this time, how did he reconcile patriotism with the demands of Marxist internationalism? The answer can be found in Lenin, In defining the concept of a two-stage revolution in his “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” Lenin had set forth the concept of a “federation” to serve as a period of transition between national independence and the final stage of communism, when there would be “complete unity of the working peo
ple of different nations.” Lenin viewed federations created in the early 1920s between revolutionary Russia and Finland, Hungary, and Latvia, and between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as possible models for other countries to follow. Eventually the Comintern posited the creation of a network combining independent states and “federated unions” as an example of how such alliances might be established during a transitional period to global communism in the distant future. Nguyen Ai Quoc undoubtedly became aware of such theories while he was living in the Soviet Union in 1923–1924, and he referred to the concept in a letter to the Comintern Executive Committee in May 1924, when he attempted to justify a proposal for expanding the recruitment of Asian revolutionaries to the Stalin School as laying “the basis on which a Communist Federation of the East will be founded.”25
A second reference by Nguyen Ai Quoc to the issue of a transitional federation appeared in a document that has recently been discovered in the archives in Moscow. While the author of the document is identified only as “Nguyen,” it is almost certain that it was written by Quoc sometime in 1924. In the report, “Nguyen” discussed the idea of a future Vietnamese Communist Party and declared that, given the importance of the national issue there, it was crucial to “raise the banner of indigenous nationalism in the name of the Comintern.” To a bourgeois observer, he noted, this would appear to be “an audacious paradox,” but it was actually “marvelously realistic.” For the moment, he argued, it was impossible to come to the assistance of the Vietnamese people without deferring to the fundamental fact of their unique social experience. By the time their struggle for national independence had triumphed, he predicted, “the bulk of the world will long since have been sovietized, and thus inevitably this nationalism will be transformed into internationalism.”26
After his arrival in Canton, Nguyen Ai Quoc referred to this concept once again in a draft program for the future Revolutionary Youth League, which was written in February 1925. The draft contained a pledge to be taken by all candidates for the new organization: first, to take part in the struggle to overthrow imperialism and reestablish national independence; then, to turn attention to the struggle to erase class distinctions and participate in the world revolution, “the final goal for which we are fighting.” The pledge appeared in the program of the league as finally promulgated in June and was mentioned in an early article published in Thanh Nien in July: “After the political and social revolution, there will still remain oppressed peoples. There will still be differences between nations. It is then necessary to have a world revolution. After that the peoples of the four corners of the earth will befriend one another. It will be the age of world fraternity.”27
Ho Chi Minh Page 18
