For Nguyen Ai Quoc, who had observed with interest the rapid escalation in anticolonial agitation among his compatriots from his own vantage point in Canton, the situation offered opportunity, but also a challenge. How much should his fledgling revolutionary organization cooperate with nationalist elements inside Indochina and abroad? Despite the reservations expressed by M. N. Roy and others in Moscow, who argued that it was dangerous to cooperate with bourgeois nationalist groups, Nguyen Ai Quoc was initially determined to cast a wide net to mobilize support against the colonial regime. In the report he had written in Moscow in 1924, he had remarked that it was the spirit of nationalism that had caused the 1908 revolt in central Vietnam, taught coolies to protest against their conditions, aroused the determination of Vietnamese merchants to compete with Europeans and the overseas Chinese, and provoked students to demonstrate and join Phan Boi Chau’s organization. The torch, he wrote, was now passing from one generation to another. As young Vietnamese began to use the tactics of the West, he believed, their activities could be used for his purposes.51
Nguyen Ai Quoc had turned his attention to the problem of broadening the base of his movement by allying with other anticolonial organizations soon after his arrival in Canton, attempting to establish relations with nationalist elements around Nguyen Hai Than, a follower of Phan Boi Chau who had recently assisted Chau in his effort to transform his old Restoration Society into a new Vietnamese Nationalist Party modeled on Sun Yat-sen’s organization in China. Quoc had also discussed with Lam Duc Thu the possibility of contacting nationalist elements inside the country. In central Vietnam, he sought contacts with what he termed “young and modern types” (presumably the Tan Viet party), but he also wanted to approach moderate elements in Cochin China such as Bui Quang Chieu and Khanh Ky (an old acquaintance from Paris) to see if they would cooperate. His colleagues warned him to be cautious in establishing relations with Chieu until it was clear that Chau was receptive, but Quoc countered that if Chieu agreed to cooperate he might be willing to provide funds.52
For Nguyen Ai Quoc, however, nationalist parties presented a delicate problem. How far should the Revolutionary Youth League cooperate with them? The Second Comintern Congress in 1920 had concluded that such bourgeois liberation movements should be supported “only when they are genuinely revolutionary and when their exponents do not hinder our work of education and organizing the peasantry and the broad mass of the exploited in a revolutionary spirit.” But some leading members of the organization, such as the French Communist Jacques Doriot, had different advice. In a letter to one of the league’s front organizations dated March 4, 1927, Doriot recommended a broader approach. “Although your party should always keep in mind that the fundamental forces of the struggle in Indochina were the working class, the peasantry, and the petty bourgeoisie of the towns,” he noted,
do not forget that under the domination of imperialism, it is all the people (workers, peasants, shopkeepers, intellectuals) with the exception of a tiny minority of profiteers—who have an interest in the struggle against imperialism. Don’t neglect any effort to attract them and organize them every day for the struggle. Don’t refuse any cooperation. On the contrary, do everything to inspire it.53
Nguyen Ai Quoc followed Doriot’s advice, but with caution. In keeping with the Comintern line of cooperating only with those bourgeois nationalist groups that were “truly revolutionary,” under his direction the league became notably cautious about forming alliances. After his initial expression of interest in Bui Quang Chieu, Quoc scorned “national reformist” groups such as Chieu’s Constitutionalist Party, which he described in one report to Moscow as opposed to communism and in favor of cooperation with France. Toward more radical parties, such as the Youth Party in Cochin China and the Tan Viet in central Vietnam, the league was somewhat more conciliatory, sending representatives to negotiate a possible alliance.
But the league’s negotiating position was uniformly hard-line. It rejected the idea of a merger of equals and simply offered rival leaders a subordinate role in the league. While talks were under way, league members actively attempted to lure the delegates of rival parties into their own organization. When members of these rival groups came to Canton to study at the training institute, they were instructed not to resume contacts with their comrades on their return to Vietnam, It is hardly surprising that the leaders of such nationalist parties were put off by such tactics and spurned alliances with the Revolutionarly Youth League on the terms offered.54
Because Nguyen Ai Quoc was compelled to remain in China to avoid capture by the French Sûreté, his involvement in direct negotiations with the leaders of groups inside Vietnam appears to have been minimal. But it is likely that the final decisions were his. Remarks that he made to colleagues and students at the school in Canton suggest that his attitude toward rival parties combined a cautious willingness to cooperate in the cause of resistance with a fundamental suspicion of their ultimate motives. He frequently commented that alliances with such parties could be useful, but for tactical purposes only.55
While promoting efforts to build up the Vietnamese revolutionary movement, Nguyen Ai Quoc also sought to carry out his proletarian duty by cooperating with progressive elements in south China in the Chinese revolution. Before Quoc’s departure from Moscow, Thomas Dombal had asked him to serve as the Peasant International’s representative in Canton and to assist his hosts in mobilizing Chinese peasants. For a while, it appeared that this work could be accomplished with the cooperation of the Kuomintang, whose representatives in Moscow had sought assistance in drafting a peasant program from the Peasant International. Dombal also suggested that Quoc establish peasant unions in all regions of Guangdong province, most of which was by then under the control of the Canton regime.
To carry out such duties, after his arrival in Canton, Quoc began to visit the Peasant Movement Institute, a training unit that had been established by the Kuomintang government in 1924 to promote rural revolution against the warlord regimes to the north. The institute was located in an old Buddhist temple not far from the Revolutionary Youth League headquarters in Canton, and Quoc reported on its activities in articles that he sent back to Moscow. In the course of his work on peasant conditions in China, he became acquainted with Peng Pai, a prominent CCP activist and one of the leading cadres at the institute. Peng was a chief promoter of the Hai Lu Feng Soviets, peasant organizations that had been established in 1923 under his urging in two coastal districts east of Canton. Nguyen Ai Quoc was enthusiastic about the experiment, and on one occasion he visited the area and wrote an article on the subject. In return, Peng sometimes lectured at Quoc’s institute.56
Nguyen Ai Quoc had arrived in China at a time when the revolutionary movement there was in a period of rapid flux. During the summer of 1925, massive labor strikes took place in Canton as a response to the so-called May 30 incident in Shanghai in which British police had fired on Chinese demonstrators, killing several of them. Nguyen Ai Quoc took part in the demonstrations, giving speeches of encouragement to the demonstrators and declaring—in heavily accented Cantonese—that the Indochinese people were on their side. He also took part in more formal activities, such as the Second National Congress of the Kuomintang, held in January 1926 at the instigation of left-wing elements to counter the growing influence of anti-Communist forces within the party. Quoc addressed the gathering and described current conditions in Indochina. The French, he declared, were trying desperately to prevent news of the unrest in China from coming to the attention of the Vietnamese people. Still, he promised, his compatriots and all other colonial peoples of Asia were eager to unite with the Chinese people in fighting their common oppressors. That statement, however, was more hyperbole than reality. By now, the Society of Oppressed Peoples of Asia, which he had helped found the previous year, had succumbed to bitter squabbling among various national groups—a reminder to Quoc of his problems with the Intercolonial Union in Paris—and had disintegrated.57
&nbs
p; By the spring of 1927, Nguyen Ai Quoc had been in Canton for over two years. He had become a prominent and respected member of the revolutionary community, and had developed close relationships with such CCP members as Zhou Enlai, the youth organizer Zhang Tailei, and the left-wing Kuomintang leader Liao Zhongkai. His life in south China, at least for the moment, had taken on an air of stability, and (perhaps for that reason) he had given some thought to taking a Chinese wife to help him learn the Chinese language and take care of his domestic needs. To locate a suitable partner, he had apparently discussed the issue with his close colleague Lam Duc Thu, who had lived in China for many years and had a broad range of acquaintances among the local population. Quoc insisted, however, that he did not wish to follow the traditional Chinese marriage custom—he refused to pay for a wife.
Shortly after, Lam Duc Thu introduced Quoc to a young Chinese woman named Tang Tuyet Minh, the daughter of a wealthy Cantonese merchant by his third concubine. Evicted from the house after her father’s death, Tuyet Minh lived in difficult circumstances until she was befriended by Lam Duc Thu’s wife, who in turn introduced her to Nguyen Ai Quoc. The young woman had little education and some of his colleagues opposed the match, but Quoc ignored their advice and decided to propose marriage. After the wedding, the couple lived together in Quoc’s room at Borodin’s villa. Although Tuyet Minh was physically attractive (one acquaintance described her as svelte, with clear skin, shoulder-length black hair, a round face, and a small mouth), she had little interest in national affairs, and after a few unsuccessful attempts, her husband soon gave up the effort to convert her to his political beliefs. There were reports that Quoc had one daughter as a result of the marriage.58
In any event, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s days in Canton were coming to an end. While he was struggling to fan the flames of discontent in Vietnam, the situation in China was in rapid transition. For several years, the CCP had cooperated in an uneasy alliance with Sun’s Nationalist Party in the southern provinces of China. This alliance had been held together primarily by the force of Sun’s own personality and his working relationship with Comintern adviser Mikhail Borodin. But Sun died of liver cancer in March 1925, while in Beijing to negotiate with the warlord Feng Yuxiang, and after a brief power struggle, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun’s military adviser and commander of Whampoa Academy, succeeded him. For tactical reasons, Chiang temporarily maintained the alliance with the CCP, despite growing anti-Communist sentiment within the conservative wing of the Kuomintang. However, Chiang was himself suspicious of the Communists; perhaps because of his visit to the Soviet Union in 1923, he was well aware of Moscow’s long-term goals to use the alliance with his party and then throw it away. On April 12, 1927, in the midst of the jointly sponsored Northern Expedition against the warlord governments in central and northern China, the alliance began to come apart. When the left wing of the Kuomintang called for Chiang Kai-shek’s dismissal, he ordered the massacre of thousands of Communists and sympathizers in Shanghai, China’s largest city, as his troops arrived there.
Chiang’s actions were immediately echoed in Canton. The following day, military units commanded by the Nationalist commander Li Jishen rounded up two thousand suspected Communists throughout Guangdong province. The Whampoa Academy was occupied and hundreds of suspected leftists, some of them Vietnamese students associated with the Revolutionary Youth League, were rounded up and shot. Nguyen Ai Quoc’s friend Zhang Tailei was one of the victims. When Li’s troops blockaded the houses of officials working at the Soviet consulate, Mikhail Borodin and several of his advisers left for Wuhan, where the Canton government had moved its headquarters during the previous winter.
At first, French authorities thought that Nguyen Ai Quoc had followed Borodin and his entourage to central China. In actuality, Quoc had remained in Canton, perhaps in the conviction that as a Vietnamese who had good relations with many Kuomintang officials he would be safe from arrest. To help ensure his security, he took refuge in a secret location and supported himself by selling newspapers. But sometime in late April or early May, he was alerted by Truong Van Lenh, one of his close collaborators from the Tam Tam Xa and now an official with the local municipal guard, that he might soon be arrested. Lenh advised him to flee Canton as soon as possible.59
Ironically, it was one of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s presumed allies within the Vietnamese exile community who had identified him as a Communist to Li Jishen’s police. Since his arrival in Canton, Quoc had sought to establish cooperative relations with Nguyen Hai Than and other veteran members of Phan Boi Chau’s VNQDD. Than was a close friend of Lam Duc Thu, and once lived at his house. By the spring of 1926, Quoc’s relations with Than had become strained, because Than had become increasingly critical of the Revolutionary Youth League’s Communist orientation; Quoc was also angry about Than’s alleged efforts to weaken or absorb his own organization. In late 1926, Truong Boi Cong, one of the leading members of the Kuomintang, arrived in Canton from Beijing to exhort Nguyen Hai Than to form a new political party to focus on national independence and combat the influence of the league. The split between the two Vietnamese groups widened, and it was allegedly Nguyen Hai Than who alerted Chinese authorities to Nguyen Ai Quoc’s presence in early May.
Curiously, Lam Duc Thu himself, although a regular informant on league activities for the Sûreté, never betrayed Nguyen Ai Quoc to the French, perhaps because of the risks involved if his role as an agent were to be divulged. He did arrange to have photographs of key members of the league taken, however. Once he managed to deliver them to the French consulate, these photos (they are now located in the French archives) undoubtedly aided the colonial authorities in identifying Nguyen Ai Quoc’s colleagues. Quoc’s carelessness in allowing such photos to be taken and his apparent trust in Lam Duc Thu were later sharply criticized by some of his colleagues.60
On May 5, 1927, Nguyen Ai Quoc left his secret location and caught a train to Hong Kong, leaving his wife in Canton. On the same day, his residence was raided by Chinese officials. Once again he was on the move.61
V | THE MAGIC SWORD
As he looked out the window of his railway car at the rice fields, newly green with the first shoots of the spring rice harvest, Nguyen Ai Quoc, en route to Hong Kong, most likely had mixed feelings with regard to his current situation. The results of the last two years of work in Canton had undoubtedly been gratifying in some respects. He had created a solid foundation for a future Communist party in Indochina and had trained nearly a hundred dedicated militants, some of whom had already returned to all three regions of Vietnam to build up a revolutionary network. However, Chiang Kai-shek’s preemptive attack on the CCP in Canton was a severe setback for the young organization. Continued operations by the Revolutionary Youth League in south China were now difficult, and its headquarters would have to be moved. He himself was embarked on a journey into the unknown, and his own contacts with his colleagues might be severed, perhaps for many years.
Nguyen Ai Quoc (still operating as Ly Thuy) may initially have hoped to remain in the British crown colony of Hong Kong for an extended period of time in order to maintain his links with other members of the league and find a new location for its headquarters. But the local authorities were suspicious of his papers and ordered him to leave within twenty-four hours. The next day he left by ship for Shanghai. That great commercial city was still gasping under the “white terror” that Chiang Kai-shek had launched the previous month against Communist elements in the area. To escape detection, Nguyen Ai Quoc rented a room in a luxury hotel and dressed the part of a wealthy bourgeois. With his funds rapidly running out, he was eventually able to catch a ship for Vladivostok.1
In Vladivostok, which still served as the headquarters for Soviet revolutionary operations in the Far East, Nguyen Ai Quoc met his old friend Jacques Doriot, one of the rising young stars of the French Communist Party. He also encountered the Comintern agent Grigory Voitinsky, who had been promoting the formation of the Communist movement in China. Doriot proposed
that Quoc return to Europe and then proceed to Siam in order to try to reconstruct the movement in Indochina with the assistance of the FCP and league activists operating there. Voitinsky suggested that he return to Shanghai to work with Vietnamese troops stationed in the French concession in the city.
Nguyen Ai Quoc listened politely to Voitinsky, but he had a strong preference for Doriot’s proposal. Indeed, before his departure from Canton he had already concluded that he had only two choices—to remain in China under risk of arrest or to go to Siam to restore contact with the movement in neighboring Indochina. He left by rail for Moscow, arriving in early June. There he sent a formal travel request to the Dalburo, arguing that he would prefer to go to Siam, rather than returning to China. The most important task, he argued, was to strengthen the movement inside Indochina, where the news of the recent events in China had undoubtedly caused discouragement. Quoc felt that he could influence events in Indochina more effectively from Siam than from Shanghai.2
In his request to the Dalburo, Nguyen Ai Quoc had declared that he would require funds for a trip to Siam, and from there on to Indochina for “a time of residence estimated in the colony of about two years.” While waiting for a decision from the Comintern, he was assigned a temporary position at Comintern headquarters, and in his spare time he wrote for publication in Inprecor a number of articles on conditions in Indochina. After a rest at a convalescent home at Eppatoria, near Crum on the shore of the Black Sea, where he received medical treatment for an unknown ailment, he received approval from the Stalin School to set up a separate section for the Vietnamese students whom he had earlier arranged to send from Canton. Among the five who were now in Moscow was Tran Phu, an intense and thin-faced young militant from Quang Ngai province. The son of a court official, Tran Phu had attended the National Academy in Hué and joined one of the minor nationalist parties in central Viernam. Sent by his colleagues to Canton to negotiate with Nguyen Ai Quoc on forming an alliance, he decided to join the league and was sent to Moscow in 1927, where he soon made an impression with his intellectual brilliance and dedication.3
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