Back in Hong Kong, Nguyen Ai Quoc was exerting his efforts to focus world attention on the trials of his compatriots inside Vietnam. In reports to Moscow, he described himself as constantly badgering acquaintances at the FEB in Shanghai to publicize the uprising and instruct workers’ organizations around the world to demonstrate their support for their comrades in Indochina. In an article ritled “Red Nghe Tinh” (Nghe Tinh Do, a reference to the two neighboring provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh where the rebellion was strongest), written in early 1931, he alluded to the explosive power of combined worker-peasant discontent in central Vietnam and concluded that the revolt there indeed merited the word “red.”33
But Nguyen Ai Quoc was frusrrated at his inability to play a more active role in directing the movement. Problems were escalating rapidly in his relations with Tran Phu, who had been quick to criticize Nguyen Ai Quoc in Hong Kong for the latter’s “nationalist” tendencies and his failure to keep abreast of the latest Comintern line. Quoc had managed to swallow his irritation at his younger colleague’s condescension, but Phu’s obvious desire to elbow him aside and seize control over the future direction of the Party must have offended him deeply.
The tension between the two men broke into the open as the new year began. In a letter to Quoc in January 1931, Tran Phu complained about the absence of reliable communications between Saigon and the FEB in Shanghai. Who, Phu asked testily, is responsible for the rupture of this link? If Quoc can’t put the Standing Committee in touch with Shanghai and Comintern headquarters in Moscow, what was his function in Hong Kong? Is there not some other way that Shanghai and Moscow could contact the committee? At the very least, Phu declared, the Standing Committee in Saigon needed to receive the letters the FEB and Comintern had promised to send them. In closing, Phu complained at the tone his older colleague had employed at the beginning of Quoc’s previous letter.34
Although Nguyen Ai Quoc may have been irritated at the patronizing tone of Tran Phu’s messages, he sought to respond faithfully to Phu’s complaints, declaring in an undated letter to Noulens in Shanghai that “our firm” in Saigon “needs letters from you.” Quoc noted that “the firm” had been put into operation only recently and had not received any follow-up orders. Without directives and official support from its parent firm, it would be very difficult for representatives in Saigon to carry out their task in all branches of their operation. So it was vital for them to receive letters as soon as possible.35
Nguyen Ai Quoc shared many of his younger colleague’s frustrations. In another letter to Noulens a few days later, he complained about a lack of directives from the Comintern, pointing out that for several months no messages had arrived at the Hong Kong office from any organization under the direction of Moscow, or even from the FCP, which still played the informal role of a patron for the ICP. The people of Indochina, he lamented, were becoming convinced that their suffering, their struggles, their millions of arrests and their hundreds of deaths were being completely ignored by their comrades around the world. They felt abandoned and forgotten and had come to believe that they could expect nothing from international solidarity. Pleading for further directives, Quoc concluded with a request to be transferred to Shanghai.36
In early March 1931, a visitor to Hong Kong brought some temporary relief. Joseph Ducroux, a Comintern agent operating under the code name Serge Lefranc and working with the Comintern’s Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat in Shanghai, arrived in the crown colony to confer with Nguyen Ai Quoc as the first stop on a swing through Southeast Asia to consult with leading members of Communist parties throughout the region. Lefranc and Nguyen Ai Quoc had become acquainted in the early 1920s, when both were connected with the Federation of Young Communists in Paris, and Nguyen Ai Quoc took the occasion of their meeting to unburden himself to his guest. Lefranc immediately passed on his host’s complaints to Noulens. Offering his support to Nguyen Ai Quoc’s request for additional operating funds, Lefranc concluded: “We must also consider how best to use him. He can do more than liaison and translations and here he can only do that. He can carry out no genuine [political work] because as a liaison agent he is isolated from Indochina.” Noting that Nguyen Ai Quoc was one of the most experienced and effective agents in the area, Lefranc proposed that he be transferred to Shanghai to handle Indochinese affairs under the direct guidance of the FEB, with someone else appointed to do the liaison work in Hong Kong. As for the situation in Indochina, Lefranc remarked that since October the ICP had received no directives from Moscow and the leadership of the Party was virtually isolated. If Nguyen Ai Quoc were in Shanghai, he concluded, perhaps the operations of the Party could be improved.37
Two weeks later, Lefranc traveled to Saigon. Tran Phu, who had been alerted to his expected arrival by Nguyen Ai Quoc, ordered Ngo Due Tri, a colleague who had attended the October conference, to meet Lefranc in front of the Saigon Palace Hotel. Tri, who had replaced Nguyen Phong Sac on the Standing Committee because Sac was preoccupied with the revolt in central Vietnam, could be expected to recognize Lefranc because the two had met while studying at the Stalin School in Moscow. Tri met with Lefranc in Lefranc’s hotel room on March 23 and then made arrangements for him to confer with the other two members of the Standing Committee at Tran Phu’s house the following day. After receiving their report on the situation in Indochina, Lefranc passed on funds to assist the Party in its operations and informed them that Noulens would arrange a meeting with ICP leaders as soon as possible. He also told them that Nguyen Ai Quoc would soon be transferred to Shanghai to facilitate communications between the Party leadership and the Comintern. After sending a postcard to Nguyen Ai Quoc to let him know of his whereabouts, Lefranc left Saigon on the twenty-seventh.38
By now, French efforts to restore law and order in the central provinces were beginning to bear some results, and although colonial officials freely admitted that the Communists were still popular among the local population there, the combination of government attacks on rebel-held villages and violent acts committed by supporters of the movement in response was beginning to have an effect. Local Party committees were running out of cadres, weapons, and operating funds, and a sense of desperation was becoming pervasive within the movement. Such conditions began to influence many fence-sitters, who started to cooperate with the authorities. The police were also having some success in capturing leading members of the Party and obtaining information through their interrogation (often supplemented by physical torture). Prisoners were often beaten with clubs, suspended by chains from prison walls, or even given electrical shocks on sensitive parts of the body. French successes in suppressing the unrest sowed panic and division inside the movement, and the fear of spies within the ranks became endemic. When Nguyen Duc Canh, a veteran of the revolutionary movement who had attended the May 1929 conference of the league, was seized by imperial authorities in Ha Tinh province, the ICP provincial committee reported that it had decided to assassinate him in prison so that he could not betray others in the movement. In another message, the same committee reported that any Vietnamese suspected of holding favorable views of the imperialists—whether a merchant, a landlord, or even a household servant—should be condemned to death.39
At the end of March 1931, Tran Phu convened the Second Plenum of the Party Central Committee in Saigon. Although the precise nature of the discussion was not recorded, the resolution issued at the close of the meeting declared bravely that the movement was progressing because of the world situation as well as through the urgent efforts of the Party. But it conceded that serious problems existed. The movement in the northern provinces was almost totally moribund because of an absence of Party leadership in Tonkin, a problem that the Central Committee ascribed to the vestiges of “petty bourgeois” influence (a legacy from the Revolutionary Youth League) within the regional leadership. As a result, local operatives had failed to recruit effectively among factory workers and the rural poor. The resolution concluded by calling for efforts to broaden the clas
s struggle among the peasants, to create more Party cells in factories, and to eradicate the influence of nationalist parties among the masses.40
A few days following the end of the plenum, the Sûreté located the headquarters of the Standing Committee in Saigon and launched a raid while the Standing Committee was consulting with members of the regional committee of Cochin China. Everyone at the meeting was arrested except for General Secretary Tran Phu, who had fortuitously gone to the toilet in the garden just as the police arrived and managed to elude his pursuers by escaping through the back gate. Among those seized was Ngo Duc Tri, who betrayed a number of his comrades under interrogation. By April 17, Tran Phu was the only remaining member of the Party leadership still at large.41
That day, Tran Phu addressed a rambling report to the FEB in which he recounted these disastrous events. Characteristically, he placed the primary blame for the Party’s misfortunes on unnamed internal elements who, he charged, continued to act on the basis of the erroneous policies promulgated by the previous leadership. The ICP, Phu complained, was not yet a proletarian party, but a party of all the oppressed classes. The lack of workers in the organization had led to “petty bourgeois thinking” and opposition to the policy line by leading elements within the regional committees in north and central Vietnam. Still, Tran Phu expressed optimism for the future of the movement, estimating that there were about 2,400 full-fledged Party members at the time of writing, compared with only 1,600 the previous October. More than 63,000 peasants had joined the movement as compared with 2,800 in the autumn. To handle such responsibilities, he asked for more operating funds.42
While Tran Phu was maneuvering desperately to keep out of the clutches of the Sûreté, Hilaire Noulens in Shanghai and Nguyen Ai Quoc in Hong Kong were trying to stay abreast of the situation. Sometime in April, Noulens wrote to Quoc, confirming that he had received Quoc’s reports about the serious problems in Indochina and remarking that he was in the midst of preparing a detailed report on the situation that he would shortly send to Hong Kong. In the meantime, he expressed his dissatisfaction with the lack of information that he was receiving from Quoc about the situation in Indochina. We lack information in your letters, he complained, about inner Party life and the activities of various associations. There was also too little information on why and how people were arrested, so that lessons could not be drawn on how to avoid such arrests in the future. Noulens concluded that it was “not practical” for Nguyen Ai Quoc to transfer to Shanghai at this time. All the preparatory measures that had been agreed upon must be carried out before it would it be appropriate to speak of holding another meeting.43
On April 20, 1931, as yet unaware of the new wave of arrests in Indochina, Nguyen Ai Quoc wrote to the ICP leadership in Saigon with a list of criricisms forwarded from Noulens. Responding to a suggestion from the regional committee in central Vietnam that the name of the Party not be formally changed until separate organizations had appeared in Cambodia and Laos, Quoc justified the move, explaining that the Comintern’s directive called on the new Party to help form cells among working-class elements in both protectorates.
Nguyen Ai Quoc was still unhappy about his own role. In a second letter to Saigon, mailed on the twenty-fourth, he complained that he was “just a letter box” and commented that he had asked the FEB to replace him and assign him to a new task. In the meantime, he responded testily to Tran Phu’s complaints with a list of his own, pointing out that if reports from the Standing Committee arrived in Hong Kong regularly, he would not need to rely on information provided by local Party committees. Unfortunately, he said, the Standing Committee was not communicating with Quoc’s Southern Bureau on a regular basis, and no information on the situation in central and north Vietnam had arrived in Hong Kong since December. Although Quoc conceded that circumstances in Indochina were difficult, he stressed the importance of providing information to administrative units outside the country on the situation inside Indochina. Otherwise, there would be no means for such units to provide advice and instructions.44
Tran Phu never received the message. On April 18, the day following his own rambling letter to Shanghai, he was arrested by the French authorities. A few months later, he died in prison. There were varying interpretations of his death: The colonial administration reported to Paris that he had died of tuberculosis, but sources in the Party charged that torture may have been the cause. Ngo Duc Tri and Nguyen Trong Nghia, the other members of the Standing Committee, were both in prison. With Nguyen Phong Sac having been executed in April, the Party was almost totally bereft of leadership inside the country.45
The French crackdown on unrest in the central provinces continued relentlessly. According to Sûreté reports, by the late spring of 1931 at least 2,000 activists were dead, and an astounding 51,000 followers of the movement were reported to be in detention. Party documents seized by the French displayed a growing sense of desperation, discouragement, and mutual infighting, as local authorities were increasingly emboldened to strike back at the rioters. As a Party historian later recorded:
In Quang Ngai regular demonstrations of 300 to 500 people took place during the early months of 1931.... After the month of May, violent demonstrations were generally accompanied by the execution of traitors. But the most important demonstration took place at Bong Son, in Binh Dinh province, on July 23. Three columns of demonstrators, armed with machetes, sticks and guns, marched along the main road, felling trees to make barricades, cutting telegraph wires and setting fire to cars encountered along the road. Several notables were executed.46
Offering a dismal counterpoint to the suppression of the movement by the colonial regime, a widespread drought swept over the central provinces. A French report written in July 1931 stated that, with the destruction of the rice crop, 90 percent of the population in Nghe An’s Nam Dan district were dying of hunger. Even moderates like Bui Quang Chieu were revolted by the brutality of the French suppression. Although the central provinces were now quiet, declared his newspaper La Tribune Indochinoise, it was “the silence of death.”47
On May 12, 1931, Hilaire Noulens sent Nguyen Ai Quoc his long awaited critique of the evolving situation in Indochina. Noulens accused Party leaders of departing from Comintern guidelines in a number of respects. “Putschism”—what the party labeled the advocacy of premature rebellions against colonial regimes—had nothing to do with communism and such putschist actions as shooting at police and acts of individual terrorism would only do damage to the movement in spite of their superficially heroic character. Meetings were too long and concerns for secrecy were often lax, while organizational work among the masses was frequently neglected. Still, Noulens promised to do his utmost to bring the situation in Indochina to the attention of the world revolutionary movement. In the meantime, he concluded, “by all means write us about your work, your achievements and mistakes, etc.”48
While waiting for news of his request for a transfer, Nguyen Ai Quoc remained in Hong Kong. He had been living for months in the apartment on Kowloon peninsula, and had become romantically involved with Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, the alternate at the October 1930 plenary conference. Like Nguyen Ai Quoc himself, “Duy” (as she was then known within the movement) bridged the gap between past and present. Born in 1910 into an illustrious family in Ha Dong province, near Hanoi, she was the granddaughter of an official in Bac Giang who had received a pho bang degree. Her father, Nguyen Van Binh, had learned to speak French but, after failing the civil service examinations, decided eventually to accept employment as a railroad official at Vinh sometime after 1907. After enrolling in a girl’s elementary school at Vinh, Minh Khai transferred to a coeducational high school at age fourteen. She was introduced there to revolutionary ideas by Tran Phu, who persuaded her to join the Tan Viet party. High-spirited and physically attractive, after her arrival in Hong Kong, she soon caught Quoc’s attention,49
Not much is known about Minh Khai’s romantic relationship with Nguyen Ai Quoc, or whether they ever p
articipated in a formal wedding ceremony. Quoc’s previous relationship with Tuyet Minh, his Chinese wife in Canton, had apparently come to an end after his departure from China in April 1927, although there are some indications that she encountered him by chance after he settled in Hong Kong in early 1930. If so, the relationship was not resumed. Lam Duc Thu, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s onetime colleague in the league, told his Sûreté contact that Tuyet Minh considered Quoc too old for her taste and had agreed to marry him only out of financial need. Quoc’s feelings on the matter are unclear, but about a year after his departure from Canton, he wrote her a short note, which Thu passed on to the French: “Although we have been separated for almost a year, our mutual feelings remain, although unspoken. I want to take this occasion to send you these few words of reassurance, and to ask you to give my best wishes to your mother.”50
With Nguyen Ai Quoc’s relationship with Tuyet Minh at an end, in the spring of 1931 he struck up a liaison with his young Vietnamese colleague and requested permission from the FEB to get married. In a letter to Quoc in April, Noulens replied that he needed to know the date of the marriage two months in advance. Not long after that, however, Minh Khai was arrested by the British police in Hong Kong on suspicion of involvement in subversive activities. Because she claimed to be a Chinese citizen by the name of Tran Thai Lan, she was transferred to Chinese authorities in Canton and incarcerated for several months before being released for lack of evidence.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s reaction to Minh Khai’s arrest and extradition remains a mystery. He referred briefly to the incident in a letter to Noulens in late April or early May, remarking laconically that one of the comrades in charge of communications in his office had been detained by the authorities. He then turned to his own situation and reiterated his request for a transfer. “Just do what you can for me,” he asked, “even though it is a bother.”51
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