At the end of October, the CPI sent a representative, Do Ngoc Dzu, to Hong Kong at Ho Tung Mau’s request to meet with ACP leaders in an attempt to reach a solution without outside intervention. But Dzu, presumably acting on orders, continued to insist that unity could take place only if the ACP was first dissolved, whereupon its members could apply to enter the CPI as individuals. Not surprisingly, the ACP delegates declined the offer.31
On December 16, 1929, Ho Tung Mau and one of his colleagues met with a representative of the Comintern who had arrived in Hong Kong on a tour to inspect all the communist organizations in the region. The representative advised his hosts that neither the Revolutionary Youth League (or its successor, the ACP) not the CPI and the Indochinese Communist League yet merited the title “Communist” and could not be officially recognized by the Comintern. Until a united party had been created, directives for all Marxist groups in Indochina would be provided by the CCP.33
In Siam, Nguyen Ai Quoc had heard about the split within the league from two delegates to the May 1929 congress, and in September he had written a letter to the leaders of the new CPI, declaring bluntly that he could have no confidence in any people except true Communists. They could demonstrate their good faith, he wrote, by seeking affiliation with the Comintern, and he invited them to send representatives to a meeting to be held in 1930 in Vladivostok. But CPI leaders, who received the letter from a Vietnamese émigré arriving from Siam and read it out loud during a Party meeting in Hanoi, took no decision on the matter. Quoc tried twice to go to Vietnam, but was unable to cross the border because of police vigilance. He was about to make a third attempt when a colleague recently arrived from Hong Kong (presumably Le Duy Diem) informed him about the urgency of the situation. Quoc immediately left for Bangkok, and embarked on a ship for Canton.34
Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived on January 20, 1930, checked into a hotel, and wrote his colleagues in Hong Kong, asking them to come to meet him in Canton. Presumably, he was afraid of being apprehended by the ever watchful British police at the border. Eventually, however, they convinced him that it was safer to meet in Hong Kong, where British authorities were relatively tolerant of the activities of aliens residing in the territory so long as they did not offer a perceived threat to the stability of the crown colony itself. Living conditions in Hong Kong were generally more comfortable than in neighboring China, and the predominantly Chinese population was relatively quiescent, although labor strikes had broken out on several occasions during the 1920s. Ho Tung Mau sent one of his followers to Canton to escort Quoc back to Hong Kong by train, where he settled in a hotel room in Kowloon.35
After arriving, Nguyen Ai Quoc went immediately to Le Hong Son’s apartment, where he familiarized himself with the situation and held discussions with Mau and other League members. He criticized them for their isolation from the masses and their failure to anticipate the split, which he described as “puerile.” He also got in touch with the local CCP headquarters. Then he invited members of the three warring factions inside Indochina to come to Hong Kong to prepare for the fusion of the three groups into a new party.36
By the end of January 1930, representatives from the ACP and the CPI inside Indochina had arrived in Hong Kong. Delegates from the Indochinese Communist League had left Indochina by ship, but were arrested en route on suspicion of gambling. On February 3, the conference convened in a small house in a working-class district in Kowloon. Later it became necessary to shift to other locations, including one session that reportedly took place under a soccer stadium in Kowloon. There were two delegates each from the ACP and the CPI. Le Hong Son and Ho Tung Mau attended the conference as representatives from the old Revolutionary Youth League headquarters in Hong Kong.37
According to accounts by the participants, agreement was surprisingly easy to achieve. Nguyen Ai Quoc opened the meeting by identifying himself and then gently lectured the delegates for having permitted the break to take place. He assigned responsibility for the split to both sides, and emphasized that the main problem at the moment was to restore unity to the movement. It soon became evident that the existing differences between the members of the two factions were based more on personal pique and regional sensitivities than on ideology. Members from Tonkin and Cochin China harbored suspicions of each other’s true revolutionary credentials (northerners frequently disparaged southerners as lazy and easygoing, while the latter criticized their northern compatriots for being dour and stubborn), while both resented the dominant position that members from Nguyen Ai Quoc’s native Nghe An province occupied within the leadership of the movement. With the ACP leadership, undoubtedly chastened by Moscow’s criticism in its October letter, now convinced of the need to create a formal Communist Party, the only major issue remaining to be resolved was how to end the split and integrate the factions, including the absent Indochinese Communist League, into a single party on mutually satisfactory terms. Here Nguyen Ai Quoc’s position as Comintern representative served him to advantage. He suggested that the simplest solution was neither the absorption of one party by the other not the merger of the existing parties, but the dissolution of both and the formation of a new organization, with a new program and new statutes, and into which all who approved the aims and met the standards could be accepted as members. There was a quick and probably relieved acceptance of the proposal by all the delegates.38
The only remaining point of contention was the name to be given to the new united party. Nguyen Ai Quoc had already given some thought to the issue prior to convening the conference. In a note to himself dated January 6, he had listed five main points to be brought up at the founding conference; one was to agree on a new name for the party. At the meeting, he followed up on his idea, contending that neither of the names of the existing parties was adequate, since “Indochina” implied all of Southeast Asia, while “Annam,” a Chinese term meaning “pacified south,” was now used by the French for its protectorate in central Vietnam. He suggested that a new party should have a new name, Vietnamese Communist Party (Dang Cong san Viet Nam, or VCP). Quoc had already settled on the suitability of that tetm prior to convening the conference. Not only was Vietnam the formal name of the country under the independent Nguyen dynasty in the nineteenth century, it also conjured up the image of the first state of Nam Viet, which had emerged in the Red River valley prior to the Chinese conquest in the second century B.C. The name was immediately accepted.39
With the most thorny problems out of the way, the remaining issues were resolved without difficulty. Further sessions, allegedly held “in an atmosphere of unity and love,” drafted the new party’s program of action, regulations, and statutes. Nguyen Ai Quoc had seen a brief report of the results of the Sixth Comintern Congress and was at least generally aware of the changes in the general line of the movement at that time. But he had apparently not received a copy of a lengthy critique of the Revolutionary Youth League’s 1929 program that recently had been written at Comintern headquarters in Moscow. “Tâches immédiates des Communistes indochinoises,” which had apparently been written sometime in December, was sent to FCP headquarters in Paris, but for some reason not to league headquarters in Hong Kong, Le Hong Phong, one of the cofounders of the league, who was now in the USSR for training, had obtained a copy in Moscow and sent it to a colleague in Cochin China. Unfortunately, it did not arrive until after the close of the unity conference.40
The Comintern criticized the league’s program for vagueness on a variety of counts. Although it conceded that the only possible revolution in Vietnam now was a bourgeois democratic revolution, it was vital that the working class play the leading role in the struggle. To establish its dominance over the movement, the future Communist Party must combat with all its vigor “national reformist” influence (e.g., the Constitutionalist Party) and seek to profit from divisions within the local bourgeoisie. The document was also critical of the program’s interpretation of the Leninist two-stage revolution. With regard to the theory of accession to power in s
everal phases, it said, this theory “is a form of reformism and not of communism, since it is impossible to predict the existence of stages in the revolutionary movement which would enable it to pass from a minimal success to a direct attack on the regime.” Such an approach, it warned, “in reality only serves to place a brake on the actions of the masses and to weaken them instead of stimulating them.” In any event, it declared, the theory of a revolution divided into stages would leave the direction of the struggle in the hands of a small number of Communist intellectuals, a result that would be contrary to the elementary principles of Marxism. “It is the masses who make revolution,” Moscow intoned, “and the Communists are just there to instruct, organize, and direct the masses.” Finally, it concluded that it was not necessary to wait until the ACP was completely organized before provoking a revolutionary uprising.41
The appeal that was drawn up at the February 1930 conference showed that the shift in strategy previously adopted by the Sixth Congress in July 1928 had had some effect on Quoc’s own thinking. While the appeal was addressed to the majority of the population in Vietnam (workers, peasants, soldiers, youths, students, opptessed and exploited “brothers and sisters”), it deleted Quoc’s old idea of a proletariat-peasant vanguard (thus implying a broader class revolution) and openly stated that the new organization was “a party of the proletariat” that would struggle to overthrow French imperialism, feudalism, as well as the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, and to create a “worker-peasant and soldier government.” That government would gradually give way to the second, or socialist, stage of the revolution.42
Still, Nguyen Ai Quoc was clearly not yet ready to abandon entirely the broad Leninist united front approach that he had advocated During the life of the league. A strategy document approved at the conference called for efforts to win the support of intellectuals, middle peasants (a Party term for farmers who had enough land to live on, but not to hire laborers), the petty bourgeoisie, as well as nationalist gtoups such as Nguyen An Ninh’s Hope of Youth party. Even rich peasants and small landlords could be rallied to the cause so long as they were not clearly counterrevolutionary. Only the Constitutionalist Patty, led by the mod-etate reformer Bui Quang Chieu, was clearly defined as reactionary.43
From remarks in a February 18 letter to the FEB, written several days after the close of the conference, it seems cleat that Nguyen Ai Quoc believed that the documents drawn up at the unity conference were in conformity with the new Comintern line. In fact, however, they departed from Moscow’s new strategy in several respects; although Quoc was still a devoted adherent to the Leninist strategy in the colonial areas, Moscow had moved on. It was a departure that would soon emerge as a major source of difficulty for him in coming years.
At the end of the conference, the meeting had selected a provisional central committee, and then the delegates prepared to return to Indochina to set up a local apparatus for the new party. A few days later, Nguyen Ai Quoc left for Shanghai. Prior to departure, he had written to Le Quang Dat, telling him he intended to deal with the FEB about its relationship with the new party in Indochina. Then, in his letter of February 18, he reported the results of the unity conference to Hilaire Noulens, the new chief of the FEB in Shanghai. The league—which Quoc described as “the eggshell from which come {sic} the young Communist bird”—had now formally been abolished and a new party had been formed. It had 204 members in Tonkin and Annam, 51 in Cochin China, 15 in China, and 40 in Siam. Mass organizations for students, peasants, and workers that had been created by the league and its successor parties during the late 1920s now contained over 3,500 followers.44
With the formation of the new party in February 1930, Nguyen Ai Quoc was prepared to move to the next stage of the revolution in Vietnam. As he described it in this letter to Noulens, the Party was only one of several political parties and factions in Vietnam, including the Constitutionalists, the Indochinese Communist League (soon to be dissolved, with most members joining the VCP), the Hanoi-based VNQDD, and the now defunct Revolutionary Youth League. Although the Communist Party was still young and small, he declared, it is “the best organized and the most active of them all.” Now that the fighting between the two dominant Communist factions had been brought to an end, he expressed confidence that the VCP, armed with a correct policy and newfound internal unity, would begin to progress rapidly. Nguyen Ai Quoc’s magic sword, the weapon that the fifteenth century patriot Le Loi had used to free his compatriots from their external enemies, was now finally within his grasp.
VI | RED NGHE TINH
To Nguyen Ai Quoc, the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party was the fulfillment of a dream, the culmination of a process that had begun with his departure from the Saigon wharf almost twenty years previously. With the outbreak of the Great Depression in the West and the rise of a new era of activism inside Indochina, it must have indeed appeared that, as the Comintern had recently predicted, the period of temporary stability in the world capitalist order had come to an end, ushering in a new era of global revolution.
But the creation of the VCP raised questions in his mind that needed to be answered. Where was the new party to fit within the organizational structure of the Comintern? Was it going to be placed under the guidance of the new secretariat headquartered in Singapore or, as Nguyen Ai Quoc hoped, would it be accepted as an independent party directly under the authority of the Far Eastern Bureau in Shanghai? In addition, what was his own new role to be? Would Moscow expect him to continue to serve as a representative of the Comintern or to take charge of the new Vietnamese party? If the latter were to be the case, where would he be based, since he could not return to Indochina under pain of arrest and possible execution?
It was partly to seek answers to these questions, as well as to report to his superior Hilaire Noulens on the formation of the new organization, that he left for Shanghai on February 13, 1930, only a few days after the close of the unity conference. Dressed in a thin suit hardly appropriate for the chilly Shanghai winter, he rented a room in a cheap hotel and sought to establish contact with Noulens, whose FEB office was located in a European-style building along bustling Nanjing Road, the main commercial thoroughfare in the city.
With the local authorities, both Chinese and Western, on the lookout for radicals, meeting his superior was difficult. On the eighteenth, in a mood of obvious frustration, Quoc sent a detailed letter to Noulens, reporting on the creation of the new party and concluding with a postscript written in his somewhat eccentric English:
I wish to see you as soon as possible, 1) because this report was written already two days and not reach you. There is too much delay. 2) we can resolve all these question in some hours, and I have spent already five days. 3) I am obliged to wait, doing nothing, while work is waiting for me, elsewhere.
In the letter, Nguyen Ai Quoc also registered his firm disagreement with Moscow’s plan to place the VCP under the new Southeast Asian secretariat to be based in Singapore, arguing that Vietnam’s geographical proximity to China and the fact that the strength of the Party was based primarily in the northern part of the country made it more appropriate to designate it as an independent organization located directly under the FEB through a suboffice located in Hong Kong. The Comintern wanted to create regional parties, regardless of ethnic or national origins, while Quoc wanted each party to have its own national character.
Presumably Quoc was eventually able to meet with Noulens, because a few days later he wrote to the Dalburo in Moscow declaring that he had already presented his report. Evidently he was also able to win Noulens’s tentative agreement to place the VCP under a new Southern Bureau, to be established under his direction in Hong Kong. But not all of his questions had been answered:
Now I don’t know what exactly is my position. Am I a member of the PCF or the PCV [the French Communist Party or the Vietnamese Communist Party]? Until new orders arrive, I will continue to direct the work of the PCV. But under what title? I am not directly involved in the ac
tivities of the PCV because I can’t return to Indochina. At this moment they have honored me by condemning me to death à contumace [in absentia]. Is my mandate with the Comintern terminated? If not, will I be connected with the regional bureau here? Please ask the Executive Committee for a decision.1
Before leaving, Nguyen Ai Quoc contacted Nguyen Luong Bang, a graduate of the league’s training institute in Canton who was now working in Shanghai, in order to provide him with instructions on how to agitate and spread revolutionary propaganda among the more than four thousand Vietnamese troops who were then serving under the command of European officers in the French concession there. Quoc warned his colleague to be circumspect in seeking to organize them under Party leadership. Soldiers often had good intentions, but could be impetuous. He also emphasized the importance of maintaining contacts with local representatives of the Chinese Communist Party, whose help might occasionally be needed.
While awaiting word from Moscow on his own new role, Nguyen Ai Quoc returned to Hong Kong to set up the suboffice of the FEB that he had mentioned in his letter. According to his Soviet biographer, Yevgeny Kobelev, the office of the Southern Bureau was located on the second floor of a modest stone building on Hong Kong Island and operated under the disguise of a commercial firm. He took lodgings in a small flat near the airport, located across from Hong Kong Island, on Kowloon peninsula. As a cover for his own activities, he posed as a journalist and called himself L. M. Vuong. While in Hong Kong, he sought to restore contact with Communist organizations elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In his February 18 report to Noulens, he had already suggested that the VCP should maintain close links with Singapore and send a Vietnamese Party member to work there. He also asked some of his local CCP contacts for the addresses of some leading Chinese Party members in Siam, so that links with them could be established as well.
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