Ironically, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s trip to Chongqing deprived him of an opportunity to restore contact with his comrades inside Vietnam. On November 11, Phung Chi Kien and Kien’s colleague Dang Van Cap arrived in Guiyang to meet him, A member of the ICP Central Committee since the Macao conference in 1935, Kien had been living in south China and Hong Kong and had recently collaborated with two other Party veterans, Hoang Van Hoan and Vu Anh, to set up an “overseas party branch” in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, to handle Party affairs in south China. They were soon in bitter competition with local members of the VNQDD, the Revolutionary Youth League’s old rival, led by the veteran nationalist Vu Hong Khanh. In late October 1939, the Central Committee had instructed Kien to get in touch with Nguyen Ai Quoc in Guiyang; upon learning he had just missed Quoc, Kien returned to Kunming, leaving Dang Van Cap behind to await Nguyen Ai Quoc’s return. But plans once again went awry. Quoc returned to Guiyang on November 18, but owing to the heavy congestion in the crowded streets around the office, Cap was unable to establish contact with him.
By now, Nguyen Ai Quoc had become aware of the existence of the new overseas Party branch in Kunming, and in February 1940 he went there to contact Phung Chi Kien and his colleagues. Vu Anh, a cadre of worker background who was then employed under the pseudonym Trinh Dong Hai as a truck driver in a lumber factory, would later write:
A man of middle age, dressed in the European manner with a collar and tie, arrived at the Yong An Thang factory and asked me in Chinese, “Is there an employee here by the name of Trinh Dong Hai?” I introduced myself. The visitor told me in a low voice in Vietnamese that his name was Tran, and he invited me to go to the town square to talk. En route, I was struck by his vivacious manner and his unusually brilliant eyes. I guessed that he was a cadre of some eminence, without doubting in the least that I was face to face with Nguyen Ai Quoc. I knew only that our Central Committee had asked the Chinese Communist Party to locate him, and here he was before me. This fact alone gave me confidence.12
Vu Anh informed his visitor that the Party had set up a clandestine network in Yunnan using the cover of a commercial firm and took him to meet Phung Chi Kien. They also met with Hoang Van Hoan, a graduate of the league’s training institute in Canton who had spent several years in a Party branch in Siam and was now working as a tailor in Kunming. Quoc took up residence at a local bookstore, while advising his colleagues on how to carry out revolutionary operations in the area. As always, he had his typewriter with him, and hacked out numerous articles for the overseas Party branch newspaper Dong Thanh (United in Spirit). In April, he accompanied Phung Chi Kien in visits to the Party’s bases along the railroad from Kunming to the Indochinese border. The French had built the rail line, using several thousand Vietnamese workers, to facilitate communications between Indochina and the southern Chinese provinces. Disguised as an old peasant dressed in faded khaki clothes, “Mr. Tran” stopped at several towns along the line over a period of several weeks, inspecting conditions and giving political advice, and then returned to Kunming in late May 1940.13
In the meantime, conditions for Party members were growing harsher inside Indochina. The Daladier government foreshadowed the end of the Popular Front in France; the colonial government had responded by placing tougher restrictions on Party activities in Indochina. Then, in late August, came the stunning announcement that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a treaty of mutual nonaggression. A week later, German military forces crossed the Polish border, and Great Britain and France declared war on Berlin.
The news had a catastrophic impact on Party operations in Indochina. General Georges Catroux, the new governor-general, had ordered an immediate crackdown on all legal and semilegal activities by the ICP and other radical political organizations. Le Hong Phong, the ICP Comintern representative whose activities were under careful observation by the French, was rearrested in Saigon in late September. Ha Huy Tap, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s harsh critic at the time of the Macao congress, was already in prison as the result of a police roundup during May Day rallies the previous year. In a desperate effort to prevent a disaster, General Secretary Nguyen Van Cu convened a meeting of the Central Committee at a safe location outside Saigon in early November. Because of heightened French surveillance, only four members attended, and none of the representatives from Tonkin (where the regional committee had just been forced to move its headquarters from Hanoi out into the suburbs) managed to show up for the meeting. The four tried to present a brave face. Although the government crackdown had forced the Party back into hiding, the increased likelihood of a general war in Europe created enticing prospects for a collapse of France or a Japanese invasion of Indochina, either of which heightened the chance for a popular uprising aimed at national liberation. After all, no less an authority than Lenin had declared that the best time to launch a revolution was during a world war. Concluding that the French crackdown rendered the Popular Front strategy null and void, the committee drew up a new policy calling for preparations to launch a general uprising to overthrow the colonial regime. For the first time since the collapse of the Revolutionary Youth League a decade earlier, the issue of Vietnamese national independence took the Party’s immediate and direct attention. Two months later, Nguyen Van Cu and his colleague Le Duan, a young Central Committee member from central Vietnam who had attended the November conference, were arrested by the French and placed in a Saigon prison.14
Shortly after Quoc returned to Kunming in May 1940, two additional members of the Party arrived in the city, under orders from the Central Committee to seek further training in revolutionary operations: Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap. Dong, a veteran Party member who had attended the Revolutionary Youth League Congress in Hong Kong in May 1929, had been born in Quang Ngai province, south of Da Nang, in 1908. The son of a mandarin who served as chief of staff for Emperor Duy Tan, Dong had graduated from the National Academy in Hué, but then joined the revolutionary movement and fled to Canton, where he studied at the Whampoa Academy. With his prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, Dong had a quiet and unassuming demeanor that disguised a fierce determination, and he soon came to the attention of his colleagues as a potential leader. Arrested during a government sweep operation in Saigon in April 1931, he spent several years in prison on the island of Poulo Condore in the South China Sea. After several years in the “tiger cages,” the infamous jail cells that were used by the French to house dangerous political prisoners during the colonial era, he was granted amnesty in 1937 and served as a journalist during the Popular Front era.
His colleague Vo Nguyen Giap, was born in 1910 in Quang Binh province; Giap was also from a mandarin family, but his maternal grandfather had taken part in the resistance movement against the French in the 1880s. In 1924, Giap had entered the National Academy in Hué but, fiery and intense in character, soon became involved in radical activities after observing the funeral services for Phan Chu Trinh. Expelled from school in 1927, he joined the Tan Viet party but eventually shifted to the ICP and was arrested for taking part in student demonstrations in Hué during the Nghe Tinh revolt. Released from prison in 1933, he resumed his schooling and eventually received a law degree from the University of Hanoi. After graduation, he did not become a full-time revolutionary but accepted a position as a history instructor at a private school in Hanoi. It was there that he met Nguyen Thi Minh Giang, the younger sister of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s wife, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. They soon married and Minh Giang gave birth to a daughter, while Giap (known within the movement as Van) became a journalist for the Party newspaper, Notre Voix; he also collaborated with his colleague Truong Chinh on a pamphlet highlighting rural conditions in Indochina. Now under close police surveillance, Giap had become fascinated with military history and voraciously read books on the subject at the municipal library in Hanoi.
According to his own account, Vo Nguyen Giap had been instructed to leave Hanoi for China by Hoang Van Thu, a young Party member from the Tho minority group who had be
en named to the Central Committee in 1938 and was now secretary of the regional committee for Tonkin. Thu, who had often conversed with Giap about military matters, instructed him to consider carefully the potential of guerrilla warfare in a future struggle against the French (this was no great surprise to Giap, who was already familiar with Maoist tactics in China and the use of similar forms of warfare during the traditional era in Vietnam) and hinted that on his arrival in China, Giap was likely to meet Nguyen Ai Quoc for the first time.
After his discussion with Hoang Van Thu, Vo Nguyen Giap had launched preparations for his trip to China. In early May, after dismissing his last class at school, he walked to West Lake, in the northern suburbs of Hanoi, and said good-bye to his young wife and infant daughter. They agreed that she would join him in China once she could make arrangements for the care of their child. In fact, they would never meet again. Accompanied by Pham Van Dong, who was still recovering from illness incurred during his years in the Poulo Condore prison, Giap then left Hanoi for the Chinese border. Taking the train to Lao Cai, they crossed the frontier into China and continued on to Kunming. The train was so closely watched by the authorities that when inspectors came through the cars of the train to check identity cards, the two had to slip into the railcar that the inspectors had just exited.15
After arriving in early June, Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Van Dong contacted Phung Chi Kien and Vu Anh, the local ICP representatives in Kunming, who told them to await a certain Mr. Vuong, who would assign them new duties. Vuong (who was Nguyen Ai Quoc) met them on the shores of Green Lake, a popular scenic area in downtown Kunming, and instructed them to proceed to CCP headquarters in Yan’an to enroll for a course in military science at the Party institute there. Giap and Dong left a few days later for Guiyang, where they were forced to wait at the CCP’s Eighth Route Army liaison office for travel documents that would provide them with authorization to continue on to Yan’an. But just before their departure for the north, they suddenly received a cable from Nguyen Ai Quoc announcing his impending arrival in Guiyang; Quoc told them to wait there for him rather than proceeding on their journey.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s change of plans had been provoked by recent events in Europe, where the German offensive launched in May 1940 had resulted in the final surrender of France on June 22. As Quoc explained, the German occupation of France and the formation in the southern part of that country of a puppet Vichy regime meant that “new changes will undoubtedly take place in Indochina.” A few days later, Phung Chi Kien and Vu Anh arrived in Guiyang as well, and Quoc joined them on a trip to Guilin, where he convened a meeting of the editorial board of the journal D.T., the overseas party newspaper formerly known as Dong Thanh, to discuss the situation. “The French defeat,” Quoc remarked, “represents a very favorable opportunity for the Vietnamese revolution. We must seek every means to return home to take advantage of it. To delay would be harmful to the revolution.” When one of his colleagues pointed out the necessity of obtaining weapons, Quoc replied,
We’ll have the weapons when we launch our general uprising. That is one of the most important problems for the revolution. But if we had weapons now, who would bear them? So we must first find a way to return home and mobilize the masses. When the masses are aroused, they will have weapons.’16
After conferring with his comrades, Nguyen Ai Quoc ordered Vu Anh and Phung Chi Kien to return to Guiyang to pick up Giap and Pham Van Dong and escort them back to Guilin; there they were instructed to make initial preparations for an eventual return of the external Party leadership to Indochina. Quoc instrucred another colleague to get in touch with the CCP leadership at its headquarters in Yan’an, and then he made arrangements to fly to Chongqing to confer with Zhou Enlai and other Chinese Party leaders on strategy. He returned to Kunming by bus, arriving at the end of July.17
Although it was clear that conditions were ripe for the beginning of a new stage of the Vietnamese revolution, some important decisions had to be made. First, it had to be decided where to establish the external headquarters for the Party as it prepared for an eventual general insurrection. Nguyen Ai Quoc had already dispatched colleagues to the area of Yunnan bordering on Tonkin, but he eventually decided that conditions were unfavorable there because the Party lacked a mass following in Ha Giang and Lao Cai provinces across the frontier; in addition, both of them were covered with impenetrable mountains and were relatively remote from the Red River delta. A better site, in his view, was the region along the southern border of Guangxi province. There were a substantial number of Party sympathizers on both sides of the frontier, while there was a strong likelihood that Chinese officials in the border districts would be willing to cooperate with ICP leaders to train armed units to be used against the French government in Indochina.
After his return to Kunming from Chongqing, Quoc received a letter from Ho Hoc Lam, the Kuomintang military officer who had given sympathy and support to the Vietnamese revolution since the late 1920s, when Phan Boi Chau stayed at his home in Hangzhou. Lam informed Quoc that General Truong Boi Cong, an ethnic Vietnamese now serving in the Chinese Nationalist armed forces, had just been given instructions by his superiors to organize Vietnamese patriots in the border region north of Cao Bang province in preparation for eventual operations in Indochina. Since General Cong was known to harbor hostile feelings toward the Communists, Lam advised Quoc to dispatch some of his own followers to the area to make certain that the Party’s interests were protected.
The sudden Chinese interest in conditions in French Indochina had been provoked by the appearance of Japanese armed forces in the region. By early in 1940, Japanese military activities had begun to spread southward from the Yangtze valley into the area around Canton, as well as Hainan Island, and the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. In the late spring, Tokyo began to apply heavy pressure on French colonial authorities to prohibit the shipment of military equipment and supplies up the Red River into south China, where they were eventually to be used by Chinese Nationalist forces. Indochinese Governor-General Georges Catroux had been inclined to resist such pressure, but in the absence of any support from the beleaguered government in Paris, he had turned to the United States, requesting U.S. fighter planes from the Philippines. President Franklin Roosevelt, however, had rejected the plea on the grounds that any available military aircraft in the region would be needed to defend U.S. national interests there. Catroux thereupon agreed to Japanese demands to close the border, an act that led to his dismissal in July by the new puppet French government in Vichy.
Catroux’s replacement, Admiral Jean Decoux, was immediately faced with a new set of Japanese demands for the use of airfields and permission to station several thousand Japanese troops in Tonkin. Decoux reluctantly gave his assent, but on September 22, even before they were in place, local Japanese military units along the Chinese border attempted to intimidate him by launching an attack across the frontier on French posts near the border town of Lang Son. They were accompanied by Vietnamese nationalist forces enrolled in a group called the Restoration Society, a newly formed pro-Japanese organization chaired by Phan Boi Chau’s old colleague, the exiled prince Cuong De, who was now living in Tokyo.
The Japanese border attack soon caught the attention of ICP elements stationed in the area. During the 1930s, the Party had carefully built up a small base of popular support among the peoples living in the mountains around Lang Son. Much of the population in the region consisted of non-Vietnamese minority peoples, such as the Tay, the Nung, and the Tho. Most had practiced slash-and-burn agriculture in the area for centuries and had little contact with the lowland Vietnamese, or with the French colonial administration in the larger towns and cities. The first Party cells had been established near the town of Cao Bang in the spring of 1930, and in succeeding years a few cadres of minority extraction had been placed in important positions within the ICP. At the Macao conference in March 1935, the Tay leader Hoang Dinh Giong had been elected to the Central Committee, and Hoang Van
Thu, the Tho who ordered Vo Nguyen Giap to China, had been elected a few years later. Organizational efforts were facilitated by the Party’s political program, which—following the Leninist model—had promised self-determination for all minority peoples in a future revolutionary Vietnam, While it would undoubtedly be an overstatement to suggest that they had been converted en masse to communism, the Party had a strong base of sympathizers in the area.18
In the fall of 1940, such efforts began to bear fruit. On September 27, as the news of the Japanese invasion spread throughout the region, Party cadres took advantage of the disarray of the defending French colonial forces to order attacks by local minority tribal peoples under their command on villages in the mountains of Bac Son district, just west of Lang Son. At first, the rebels took advantage of the element of surprise, occupying a few villages and seizing weapons from government arsenals. But after colonial authorities reached agreement on a cease-fire with the Japanese military commanders, the French gradually went on the offensive and pacified the region. In late October, rebel forces broke up into small guerrilla units and fled into the mountains, while others crossed the Chinese frontier in the hope of receiving training and weapons from Truong Boi Cong’s border command.
Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Guilin in early October, while the Bac Son uprising (as it was later called) was still under way. He took up lodgings in a small thatch hut in the countryside and discovered that in his absence, his colleagues had met with Li Jishen, chief of staff of the Nationalist government’s Southwest Field Headquarters in the city, and the Kuomintang commander who had suppressed the Communist uprising in Canton in the spring of 1927. General Li, however, was quite amiable and asked his visitors to draw up a plan to provide local assistance for an anticipated Allied invasion of Indochina. On hearing the news from his colleagues, Quoc was cautious. We have only two real allies, he warned them: the Red Army in the Soviet Union and the PLA. Although Chiang Kai-shek’s forces were now fighting against Japan, his government remained fundamentally reactionary. If the ICP were duped by them, “it would be very dangerous.”19
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