In the meantime, Party bases were established in other areas to help restore its internal apparatus. By the mid-1930s, the population of the three regions of Vietnam had grown to over 18 million, with over 4 million in Cochin China, 5 million in Annam, and the remainder in Tonkin. In Cochin China, the task of reconstruction fell on the shoulders of Tran Van Giau, an ambitious young Stalin School graduate who had returned to Saigon from Moscow in early 1933. He immediately set out to revive the Party organization throughout the southern provinces. Following the current line in the Soviet Union, cadres were instructed to concentrate their efforts among workers in urban areas. The Great Depression had led to a high level of unemployment in the factories, however, and few workers dared to enroll in the cause.25
The Party had relatively more success in rural regions, most notably in parts of the Mekong delta, where popular resentment against the demands of rapacious landlords and corrupt officials was strong. Nevertheless, a handful of Communist intellectuals in Saigon took advantage of a gradual relaxation of official restrictions on indigenous political activities. A Party newspaper called La Lutte was established, with assistance from Vietnamese followers of Leon Trotsky who had studied in Paris. Party leaders in Saigon were even successful in running candidates for positions on the municipal council. In mid-1933, a new regional committee for Cochin China was established, with subcommittees for the eastern and western provinces, and a small school was created to train cadres. The intense Tran Van Giau, who was the driving force behind such activities, was arrested by the French in October, but was released shortly after for lack of evidence.
Official reports to the ministry of colonies in Paris displayed the frustration of the local security services at their inability to counter ICP activities. As one report declared: “The Sûreté stands powerless at the birth and expansion of the danger. It can only give the alarm. Its services cannot take suppressive action unless they receive orders from government authorities.” But the Sûreté did have one success. Since the suppression of the Nghe-Tinh revolt, the notorious Party assassin Le Hong Son, one of the original members of the Tam Tam Xa, had been moving from one country to another to avoid capture by the French. Expelled from Burma in July 1931, he had gone to Siam and then on to Shanghai to establish contact with the CCP headquarters. But he was arrested by police in the French concession. After intensive interrogation, he was handed over to imperial Vietnamese authorities in Hué, and in February 1933 he was executed at the provincial capital of Vinh.26
Tran Van Giau’s modest achievements in Cochin China were in stark contrast with conditions elsewhere in Indochina. In both Annam and Tonkin, police surveillance and popular apathy made it difficult for Party cadres to carry on operations. In central Vietnam, a small number of Communist operatives who had infiltrated from Siam attempted to revive the Party’s moribund organization. Some of the new recruits were former members of the ICP who had recently been released from prison (according to French reports, at one time there were more than two thousand radicals in prison in Vinh alone), but in general Party leaders were suspicious of the loyalty of ex-prisoners. According to a contemporary report by the provincial committee of Nghe An, “of one hundred old Communists, only one is capable of staying true to the doctrine of the Party.” By mid-1934, three regional committees, each with responsibility for from four to seven provinces, had been set up in Annam. In Tonkin, ICP activities were virtually nonexistent until 1934, when Party cells began to appear in the mountains of the Viet Bac, as the area north of the Red River delta was known. Shortly after, from his base in China, Le Hong Phong was able to reestablish a regional committee for Tonkin.
Meanwhile, in Siam a group of Party members operating in the Vietnamese communities in the Khorat plateau—a legacy of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s activities in the region in the late 1920s—established a temporary central committee to provide direction for the movement and set up a training institute to prepare new recruits for operations in Vietnam. They then set out to establish themselves as the direct liaison between Party operatives in Cochin China and Annam and the outside world. Similar committees were established in Laos and Cambodia.27
One of the most important tasks for Party leaders as they sought to recover from the disastrous effects of the Nghe-Tinh revolt was to formulate a new strategy. In mid-1932, Le Hong Phong and other senior cadres living in south China drafted a new Party program of action, which was eventually printed by lithograph to be circulated among the Party faithful in Indochina. In keeping with the mood in Moscow at the time, the tone of the document was decidedly sectarian and leftist, emphasizing the antifeudal revolution over the anti-imperialist struggle and expressing heavy suspicion about the role of nationalist parties in the Vietnamese revolution.
Opinions published in the Party press at that time reflected a similar line. An article in the journal Bolshevik, the official mouthpiece of the Overseas Executive Committee, was strongly critical of petty bourgeois attitudes, such as the idea that the national revolution must take place before the socialist revolution. The author of the article—probably the recent Stalin School graduate Ha Huy Tap—also criticized Party cadres inside Indochina for placing too much attention on mobilizing peasants in rural areas and called for more emphasis on recruiting workers into the movement. Peasants, the author charged, were “greedy for personal property; very amorphous and slow from an ideological and practical point of view, very disunited, i.e., very badly qualified to assume the direction of the revolutionary movement.”
Although these criticisms were ostensibly directed at unnamed Party cadres inside Indochina, the chief concern of the editors of Bolshevik was the views and past policies of Nguyen Ai Quoc himself. One article noted that “certain comrades” inside Indochina had argued that rich peasants and capitalists were essentially anti-imperialistic and thus could become part of the revolutionary movement; it then flatly stated that such views had been promoted by Nguyen Ai Quoc at the unity conference in February 1930, but were justifiably repudiated by the new Party leadership later that year. The ICP, the journal emphasized, was a party of the proletariat, and not of all the working masses; although the “most advanced elements of other classes can be incorporated into its organization, it must attempt to preserve a proletarian majority.” As for the issue of national independence:
The Communist Party directs the class struggle and not that of race.... As the Communist Party is the party of the proletariat, and as it struggles to maintain the political line of internationalism, it must combat theories and national propaganda and prohibit the usage of clichés of this genre: to advocate the restoration of the country and the renaissance of the race of dragons and fairies” [a phrase often used to designate the Vietnamese people] and so forth. We struggle against French imperialism, but that does not imply support for nationalism.28
Another article, undoubtedly written by Ha Huy Tap, was even more explicit. We owe much to Nguyen Ai Quoc, it noted,
but our comrades should not forget the nationalist legacy of Nguyen Ai Quoc and his erroneous instructions on the fundamental questions of the bourgeois democratic revolutionary movement in Indochina, as well as his opportunist theories which are still rooted in the spirit of the adherents of the league and the Tan Viet.... Nguyen Ai Quoc did not understand the directives of the Communist International; he did not fuse the three Communist organizations of Indochina from top to bottom, and did not put into prior discussion the tactics that the Communist International had to apply to extirpate the opportunist dreams of these sections. The brochure entitled “Political Principles” [i.e., the political program adopted in February 1930] and the statutes of the unified Party did not exactly follow the instructions of the Communist International.
Nguyen Ai Quoc also advocated such erroneous and collaborationist tactics as “neutrality with regard to the bourgeoisie and the rich peasants,” “alliance with the middle and small landowners,” and so forth. It is because of such errors from January to October 1930 that the ICP
followed a policy that in many respects was in opposition to the instructions of the Communist International, even though it had energetically led the masses in revolutionary struggle, and it is equally because of this that the policy followed by the soviets of Nghe An was not consistent with the Party line.29
In June 1934, Le Hong Phong and Ha Huy Tap convened a meeting in the Portuguese colony of Macao to consult with leading cadres from inside the country over future policies and to prepare for the Party’s first national congress. In the resolution issued at the end of the conference, so-called national reformists—including such diverse figures as Bui Quang Chieu, the patriotic journalist Huynh Thuc Khang (later to be a member of Ho Chi Minh’s government in Hanoi), and the radical intellectual Nguyen An Ninh—were all accused of being the accomplices of imperialism. Such elements, the resolution charged, were particularly dangerous because they “posed as defenders of the working masses, adversaries of the government, propagandists for constitutional reforms and partisans of Franco-Annamite collaboration and the union of classes, with the sole aim of turning the masses from the revolutionary road.” It was the task of all Party members, the document concluded, to undermine the influence of such groups, including Trotskyite elements, members of the old Revolutionary Youth League, and remnants of the Tan Viet party.30
In attacking “nationalist” tendencies within the Party and the efforts of some cadres to recruit actively in rural areas, the Overseas Executive Committee was undoubtedly trying to reflect the ideological line currently in fashion in Moscow. Yet just as the committee in its zeal tried to bring Party members serving inside the country into line with strategic guidelines issued in the Soviet Union, attitudes were beginning to shift in Moscow. In October 1934, for example, an article written under the pseudonym “Orgwald” was published in Communist International, the Comintern’s official journal. In the article, “Entretien avec les camarades indochinois,” which had originally appeared in another journal in July 1933, the author criticized the ICP leadership for its sectarian attitudes toward the united front. It is one thing to express opposition to the national reformists, Orgwald noted, since their leaders are clearly counterrevolutionary and should be unmasked; but it is a mistake to call for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, because the petty bourgeoisie and perhaps even some members of the national bourgeoisie might be willing to cooperate with the Party if it used anti-imperialist slogans.31
Whether ICP leaders obtained a copy of this article is unclear. In any case, they had every reason to be confused about the current line, for another piece, labeled “Letter to Indochinese Comrades” and allegedly written by a leading member of the Chinese Communist Party, had appeared in the August 5, 1934, issue of the same publication. After devoting the bulk of the letter to a criticism of the inadequacy of the Party organization and the need for increased discipline and work with the masses, the author turned to the question of the united front and its importance in carrying on the revolutionary struggle. But in defining the nature of the front, the letter was ambiguous. Like the 1932 program of action (to which it specifically referred in a favorable manner), it was highly critical of “national reformists,” even those who hid their real character under “leftist” and “nationalist” slogans. These reformists, it affirmed, must be pitilessly opposed.32
Such views, which presumably had official approval from high-level sources in Moscow, must have sown confusion in the minds of the recipients. In a letter to ICP comrades written on March 17, 1935, the Comintern’s Vietnam specialist, Vera Vasilieva, confirmed that the Orgwald note and the CCP letter represented basic policy guidance, along with the ICP’s own 1932 program of action. Vasilieva’s letter was probably intended to serve as a set of guidelines for Party leaders in preparation for their upcoming national congress.
At its June 1934 Macao meeting, the Overseas Executive Committee had approved plans to hold the first national congress of the party in Hong Kong in January 1935. However, according to French sources, the Comintern asked that the meeting be postponed until the following March. In the late summer of 1934, Party leaders began to draw up draft documents to be discussed at their congress, now scheduled to take place in Macao; instructions were sent out to all echelons to select delegates, who were ordered to arrive there by March 15. Party leaders hoped that Moscow would send a delegate to attend the meeting as a formal representative from the Comintern. In the early autumn of 1934, an ICP delegation composed of Le Hong Phong, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai (who had been released from jail in Canton and was now operating under the name of Van), and Hoang Van Non (a Party member from Cao Bang province) left for Moscow to attend the Seventh Comintern Congress, which was scheduled to be held the following summer.33
With Le Hong Phong en route to Moscow, Ha Huy Tap now became the senior Party official in charge of preparing for the national congress. A native of Nghe An province, Tap had joined the Tan Viet party and then defected to the Revolutionary Youth League. While at the Stalin School, he developed a flair for theory and became a vocal critic of the ideological shortcomings of the league. Described by French security officials as proud, shifty, and “suspicious to an extreme,” Tap immediately began to encounter problems in his relations with his colleagues, who derisively labeled him “Mr. Short” because of his small stature. Relations were especially strained with Tran Van Giau. In September 1934, Giau arrived in Macao, partly to report on conditions in Cochin China and partly to play a formative role in preparations for the national congress. Tran Van Giau probably considered the feisty Tap an upstart, while Tap was suspicious of Giau’s arrogance and independent ways. Eventually, Tap began to fear that Tran Van Giau was a French spy, reporting his suspicions in a letter to Moscow. Only later, when Giau’s residence was searched by the French authorities, did Ha Huy Tap concede that his suspicions had been unfounded.34
As it turned out, the danger from provocateurs came from elsewhere. One of the Party cadres in Macao, a cook by the name of Nguyen Van Tram, stole a substantial amount of money from ICP coffers and fled to Hong Kong. Because Tram had been given the responsibility for selecting the site of the congress in Macao, Party leaders were forced to change the venue on the suspicion that he might have divulged the location to the French, whose agents were active within the Portuguese colony. Ha Huy Tap also suspected a second member, Nguyen Huu Can, of reporting on ICP activities to the French consulate there. To minimize the damage, Tap instructed all Party units in Indochina and Siam to take extra security precautions and sent Tran Van Giau back to Cochin China to reorganize the ICP apparatus there. He also attempted to confuse the Sûreté by passing false information to Can, complaining that the Party was in trouble and could not hold its national congress as scheduled.35
The national congress had been scheduled to convene on March 18, but because of the growing fear of disclosure (and perhaps because some delegates were delayed en route), at the last minute it was postponed until March 27. Attending the meeting, in addition to Ha Huy Tap, were Hoang Dinh Giong, Phung Chi Kien, and ten other delegates. There was no representative from the Comintern or from the other Communist parties.
The delegates to the Macao congress represented a total of about eight hundred Party members operating in Indochina and Siam. The majority were ethnic Vietnamese, although a few, like Hoang Dinh Giong and Hoang Van Non, were members of the mountain minorities, or were overseas Chinese. Most were relatively young, in their twenties or thirties, and only a few were women. The presence of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Quoc’s love interest and one-time assistant at the Southern Bureau in Hong Kong, within the Party leadership suggests that barriers to advancement on the basis of sex were not yet a factor.
Although accurate statistics are lacking, it appears that the percentage of members from worker or peasant backgrounds was increasing, although the ruling clique within the Party was dominated by members from scholar-gentry backgrounds, many of whom had studied within the Franco-Vietnamese school system and now operated as full-time revolutionaries
. As we shall see below, Nguyen Ai Quoc had already complained that Party members who lacked any formal education often found it difficult to grasp the ideological complexities of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and were sometimes unreliable under pressure. Prejudice against those Party members from rural backgrounds was especially strong within the leadership, a legacy of accepted wisdom in Moscow as well as of traditional attitudes within the Vietnamese scholar-gentry class. Workers and peasants could be highly useful, however, as a means of facilitating the effort to penetrate factories and farm villages to spread propaganda for the cause.
Despite the winds of change emanating from Moscow, the decisions reached at the Macao congress made no changes in existing Party strategy. The political resolution, which reaffirmed the correctness of the narrow united front approach that had first been set forth in the 1932 program of action, called on Party comrades to infiltrate national reformist parties in order to undermine their leadership and lure their followers to the ICP. New Party statutes were approved, as well as resolutions on correct work among the masses. At the close of the meeting, a new nine-member Central Committee was selected, with Ha Huy Tap to serve as general secretary. The new committee was to be relocated in Saigon, where Ha Huy Tap maintained his residence. Le Hong Phong’s Overseas Executive Committee, which was to be retained as the liaison between the Central Committee and the Comintern, would be transferred to Shanghai.36
Ha Huy Tap took the occasion provided by his reports to Moscow on the results of the congress to deliver a few more shots at Nguyen Ai Quoc. In a March 31 letter to the Dalburo, he noted that Party members in Indochina and Siam were waging an open struggle against the legacy of the “national revolutionary” ideology of the Revolutionary Youth League and its former leader Nguyen Ai Quoc. That legacy, he warned, “is very strong and constitutes a very serious obstacle to the development of communism.” A pitiless struggle against Quoc’s opportunistic theories was therefore indispensable. The Communist parties in Indochina and Siam were both going to write a brochure against these tendencies. Tap proposed that Nguyen Ai Quoc draw up a self-critique to admit his past errors.
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