In November 1927, Nguyen Ai Quoc received a reply from the Comintern to his travel request. Instead of Siam, he was instructed to proceed to Paris to assist the FCP in drafting an effecrive program of action to build up the revolutionary movement in Indochina, not only among Vietnamese residents in France but also by establishing a base in Siam or elsewhere in the region. No funds were appropriated, however, for his prospective return to Asia.
En route to France, Quoc stopped briefly in Berlin, where he helped German comrades there to set up a branch of the new Anti-Imperialist League, a cover organization for Soviet operations abroad. He then proceeded under an assumed name to Paris, where he reported to FCP headquarters in Montmartre. The FCP offered him neither employment nor financial assistance, which clearly irritated him. In a letter sent to a colleague in Moscow the following May, he expressed his frustration with the French Party’s continuing failure to address colonial issues. While he admitted that the FCP had devoted some attention to colonial problems, he complained that most of the progress was just on paper. To make the point, he cited his own experience:
While I spent a month and a half in Paris, Doriot was in prison, and I had no opportunity to talk with others. I frequently asked for an address so that I could contact them after I returned to the Far East, but they refused. They claim that the Colonial Commission has a budget for colonial operations, but I hear that the box is empty. I think that the finances of the Colonial Commission should be investigated and that it should regularly submit reports to other comrades on its operations and plans. Further, it must organize a more effective means to contact our people in Indochina so that I can stay in touch with them.4
Nguyen Ai Quoc may have intended to remain in France until he had managed to obtain funds to return to Asia, but acquaintances warned him that the Sûreté, which had heard rumors that he had returned to France, was intensifying its efforts to locate him. In early December, he went to Brussels to attend a meeting of the executive council of the Anti-Imperialist League. There is no record that he spoke publicly at the conference, but he did take the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a number of the delegates at the conference, including the Indonesian nationalist Sukarno, the Indian nationalist Motilal Nehru (father of the future Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru), and Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Soong Qingling, He also renewed his friendship with the Japanese Communist Katayama Sen, whom he had known in Paris and Moscow. Madame Soong in particular would prove useful to him at a crucial moment in the not distant future.5
After the conference adjourned in mid-December, Nguyen Ai Quoc returned briefly to France, and then left by train for Berlin. On arrival, he wrote a letter to Thomas Dombat in Moscow, explaining that he hoped to return to Indochina in two or three weeks and asking for funds from the Peasant International to help cover his travel expenses, as well as for a plan of action to assist him in his future work. But Dombal’s reply, which did not arrive until early January, was noncommittal about Quoc’s request for assistance. Protesting that he did not have a clear idea about the situation in Indochina, Dombal suggested that Quoc should first direct his attention to the task of mobilizing the peasantry in the provinces on both sides of the Chinese border, organizing peasant associations and carrying out propaganda, but he made no mention of the possibility of financial aid.6
During the next several months, Nguyen Ai Quoc remained in Berlin while waiting for a more definitive answer to his request. To keep his expenses at a minimum, he lived with an acquaintance who was a member of the German Communist Party. He produced articles on various subjects, including an account of Peng Pai’s Hai Lu Feng Soviet movement in Guangdong province, and made plans to write a recollection of his experience working with the peasant movement in China. In a letter to a comrade in Moscow, Quoc estimated that the book would be about 120 pages long and divided into five separate sections. By April, however, with his funds running out, he was becoming increasingly impatient and sent off a quick note to the Dalburo reporting on his situation. The note was cryptic, but expressive:
Can’t work in France, useless in Germany, but needed in Indochina, so I have already requested to return there. In letters to comrades I have already provided a budget for travel and work. When Doriot passed through Berlin, he promised to give attention to my situation. I told him if there were no operational funds, at least give travel money so I can leave, because for over a year I have wandered aimlessly from country to country while there is much to do in Indochina. But up to now, I have received no direction from comrades or a reply from Doriot. I am now in a difficult situation, 1) limitless waiting (await directive for four months), 2) have nothing on which to live, so told MOPRE [the Comintern division directed to provide help to revolutionary comrades] but they say they can’t give me unlimited assistance, just eighteen marks a week (that sum is not enough to live on …). So please send me as soon as possible a detailed directive on what I must do and when I can leave.7
Two weeks later, he finally received a letter from Moscow granting him permission to return to Indochina, with funds for travel and three months’ room and board to be provided by the FCP. In mid-May he wrote the Dalburo that he had received permission to leave and would depart at the end of the month.8
In early June, Nguyen Ai Quoc left Berlin and traveled by train through Switzerland to Italy. Many years later he recalled the journey:
When [I] requested a permit to travel through Italy, the fascist government asked a lot of complicated questions. At the border, the guards looked at a book called The Anti-Comintern Dictionary which contained two thousand pages, which gave the names of revolutionaries of all countries from A to Z. They didn’t see [my] name there, so let me through.
Passing through Milan, he continued on to Rome, where he was taken to the police station, interrogated, and (according to his own account) beaten almost senseless. Afterward, the chief interrogator shook his hand and offered him a cigarette, then resumed the questioning. Those lacking in experience, Nguyen Ai Quoc later warned readers, can easily fall into the capitalist trap. After his release, he went on to Naples, where he boarded a Japanese ship for Siam at the end of June.9
Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Bangkok sometime in July 1928. Because Siam was not a European colony and had a relatively stable society, the government permitted relatively free movement for foreigners, even for a revolutionary of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s notoriety. The kingdom also possessed a considerable population of Vietnamese nationals (overseas Vietnamese were known in Vietnamese as Viet Kieu), mostly living in the flat and dry Khorat plareau in the northeastern part of the country. This helped Nguyen Ai Quoc circulate freely without attracting undue attention. In the northeast, members of the Revolutionary Youth League, under his orders, had already begun to establish a local branch of operations among the Viet Kieu community. Significantly, it took only about two weeks to travel on foot from northeast Siam over the Annamite mountains to central Vietnam.
Anticolonialist Vietnamese had been using the area as a sanctuary for many years. Most of the more than twenty thousand Vietnamese living in Siam then had originally migrated around the turn of the century. Many had supported the Can Vuong and Phan Boi Chau’s anticolonial movement. After a number of his own followers had begun to settle there, Chau had visited Bangkok in 1908 and asked the royal government to allow them to engage in farming. Many Siamese officials distrusted the French and sympathized with the Vietnamese cause, so they approved his request and a Vietnamese farm was founded at Phichit, in the Chao Phraya valley north of Bangkok. A few years later, Chau’s Restoration Society set up a branch office in Siam, and a number of Vietnamese radicals—including future members of the league such as Ho Tung Mau, Le Hong Son, and Pham Hong Thai—passed through the country on their way to China. After his arrival in Canton from Moscow in 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc had begun making plans to set up a base of the Revolutionary Youth League in the area. In 1925, Ho Tung Mau had been sent there to set up four branches, at Phichit and in Vietnamese commu
nities located at Nakhon Phanom, Udon Thani, and Sakon Nakhon in the northeast. Where the community was well organized, cooperatives were established to carry on cultivation and manufacturing for the common good.10
In August 1928, a Vietnamese dressed in simple local clothes and calling himself Father Chin arrived unannounced in Bandong, in the district of Phichit, about two hundred miles north of Bangkok. The village contained about two dozen Vietnamese families, who had established a branch of the league there in 1926. The stranger remained in the village about two weeks, visiting each family and relating to them the world situation and conditions inside Indochina.11
In September, having decided that the community was too small to serve as a base of operations, Nguyen Ai Quoc (still posing as Father Chin) left Bandong and went to Udon Thani in the northeast. The arduous trip took fifteen days, including a ten-day trek along jungle paths. The travelers in the small group carried their own provisions, as well as their luggage. At first, Father Chin had difficulties and lagged behind the others, his feet raw and his breath short. But through sheer willpower he persisted; by the end of the trip he showed his mettle, managing on occasion to walk as far as seventy kilometers in a single day.12
Udon was a much larger town than Bandong, and had a larger Vietnamese community as well as convenient communications links with other urban centers in the Khorat plareau. As a result, the local branch of the league, which had been established in 1926, operated as the headquarters for all league operations in Siam. Keeping the name Father Chin (only a handful of members of the Vietnamese community knew his real identity), Quoc instructed his followers on the need to broaden their organization and build a mass base for the league by appealing to the entire local population and not just radical youths.
Nguyen Ai Quoc remained in Udon for several months, initiating changes in the working habits and lives of his compatriots. Most Vietnamese in northeastern Siam were urban merchants or artisans who were unaccustomed to hard physical labor. Few had contact with the local population or had bothered to learn the Thai language. Quoc made strenous efforts to change these habits, attempting to set an example by engaging in hard physical labor (when the government authorized the establishment of a local school, he helped to build it by carrying bricks). In the evenings, he talked to villagers about world events and conditions in Indochina. The local Vietnamese community gradually began to improve relations with the surrounding Thai population by digging wells, felling trees, and building schools. Quoc himself made an effort to learn the Thai language, setting a strict schedule to memorize ten words a day, and he established schools for Vietnamese residents to learn Thai and to appreciate local customs. He assured his compatriots that the Siamese people sympathized with the struggle in Indochina, since Siam survived as an independent state only under the benign tolerance of the colonial powers in the area.
Nguyen Ai Quoc also began to take steps to increase his compatriots’ political awareness, writing poems and dramas that vividly described the loss of Vietnamese independence at the hands of the French. Operating through the guise of the Than Ai (friendship) association, an organization that had been established by league members in the area, he traveled constantly, setting up new cells for league operations from Mukdahan in the east to Nong Khai, just across the Mekong River from the Laotian administrative capital of Vientiane. To improve the league’s propaganda, he reorganized the local Vietnamese-language journal Dong Thanh (One Heart), renaming it Than Ai and simplifying its style to make it more accessible to local readers.13
In early 1929, Nguyen Ai Quoc went to Sakon Nakhon, where there were more overseas Vietnamese than in Udon. According to the recollections of league members living in the area, however, the Viet Kieu at Sakon Nakhon were less politically enlightened than in Udon. Many were Christians; others were Buddhists or believers in the spirit of the traditional Vietnamese military hero Tran Hung Dao. Noticing that many still made offerings at local temples to cure their ailments, Quoc introduced them to modern medicine and invited doctors to visit the area. Yet he had no compunctions about using local beliefs for his own purposes, and writing verses for a song about Tran Hung Dao:
At the temple of Dien Hong and before the genies, the sermon is given,
The people, with one heart, are resolved for all,
And whoever should wish to seize Vietnam
Must first kill us to the last man.
So long as one Vietnamese remains on this soil
The mountains and the waters of Vietnam will remain his Fatherland.14
French authorities were not aware of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s whereabouts during the two years after he left Canton in May 1927. Reports surfaced that he had been in Moscow, however, and eventually the Sûreté confirmed that he had spent a brief period of time in Paris in late 1927. But they lost track of him after his departure from Brussels in December. During 1928 and 1929, however, they did hear rumors about his presence in Siam and about a stranger circulating through Viet Kieu villages in eastern Siam. Quoc had to be very careful in his actions; both the French and the imperial government in Hué were looking for him. On October 10, 1929, a tribunal in Vinh condemned him in absentia to death on the charge of fomenting rebellion in Annam. In his reminiscences, Quoc claimed that the French knew he was in Siam, but since they didn’t know exactly where he was, they sent police to locate him. On one occasion, he was closely pursued and had to hide in a pagoda, with his hair cut short in order to disguise himself.’15
While Nguyen Ai Quoc was on his way to Siam, his colleagues in south China struggled to keep the Revolutionary Youth League in operation. Most of the members of the organization had been arrested, but were soon released, and managed to resume their activities in Canton under the leadership of Le Hong Son and Ho Tung Mau. They moved their headquarters, however, to a narrow alley near Ren Xing Street, near the Da Dong Gate and the original location of the training institute. In December 1927, desperate CCP activists launched a new uprising in the city. A number of members of the league took part in the operation, and several were killed by Nationalist troops as the government cracked down. Others, including Le Hong Son, were arrested and placed on trial for subversion. But the Nationalist authorities were unable to prove their case against them in court, and those detained were eventually released, although they were ordered to leave China. In the meantime, Ho Tung Mau had moved the headquarters of the league to Hong Kong, where it temporarily lost contact with the CCP and the Comintern in Moscow.16
Despite that setback, by early 1928 the league had become an established fixture in the Vietnamese resistance movement. The organization extended its network inside the country, and continued negotiations with non-Communist nationalist parties on forming a united front against the French colonial regime. Talks with these other nationalist groups, however, were persistently marked by mutual suspicion and difficulties arising from the league’s insistence that all other parties must accept its leadership. In December 1927, a new party called the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (Vietnamese Nationalist Party, commonly known as the VNQDD), was established by radical nationalists in Hanoi. Although the new party had taken the same name as Phan Boi Chau’s exile organization in China, now virtually moribund, it was a separate group, composed of young teachers and journalists in Tonkin and northern Annam. In the months following its creation, the VNQDD held talks with the league. On one occasion, it even sent delegates to Siam to talk with league representatives, but the latter apparently failed to show up for the meeting. There were in any case some serious differences in ideology: VNQDD leaders had adopted the moderately socialist “three people’s principles” of Sun Yat-sen as their formal program, rejecting the Marxist concept of class struggle. There were also differences on the tactical level, since VNQDD leaders insisted on keeping the leadership of their organization inside the country. As a result, competition between the two groups soon became fierce.17
Beyond its difficulties in establishing a common stand with other anticolonial groups inside Vie
tnam, the league was beginning to encounter serious internal fissures. Although it had rapidly become the most dynamic force within the Vietnamese nationalist movement, attracting new recruits from all three regions of Vietnam as well as from among the Viet Kieu abroad, under the surface discontent was brewing. The league had been constructed with two competing agendas, with the potential contradictions finessed by its agile founder, Nguyen Ai Quoc. Although inspired by the desire for national independence, the league leadership under Quoc was ultimately committed to the internationalist goals of Marxism-Leninism. To a Marxist, the fundamental conflict in the modern world was rooted in class inequalities between the oppressed peoples and their exploiters. Yet much of the league’s propaganda had focused on the issue of national independence, and the nature of its following tended to reflect that fact, since many of its early followers were converts from other nationalist parties.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s desire to adapt Lenin’s theses combining the dual issues of nationalism and class struggle to conditions in Indochina continued to be reflected in the leadership immediately after his departure from Canton in the spring of 1927. But while some of his successors, such as the Tam Tam Xa veterans Ho Tung Mau and Le Hong Son, had apparently become avid Marxists, others, like the veteran nationalist Lam Due Thu, had not. This split became increasingly visible in the spring of 1928, when the league held an informal meeting at Lam Due Thu’s home in Hong Kong. At that meeting, Thu took over the leadership of the organization and was able to push through a platform that stressed nationalism over social revolution.18
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