The heavy emphasis on the issue of national independence in the front’s program, of course, was a radical departure from the policies adopted at the Party’s first national congress in Macao in March 1935, but it represented a logical culmination to the trend that had begun with the Seventh Comintern Congress in Moscow later that same year. The new focus on national themes was reflected in the front’s formal name, the league for the Independence of Vietnam, which not only stressed the issue of independence but also replaced the term “Indochina” in the name of the Communist Party with the more emotive word “Vietnam,” the use of which had for so long been forbidden by the French colonial regime. The name also appeared in appeals sent out to the general population after the close of the meeting. In a letter to the people dated June 6, 1941, that was published in both Chinese characters and romanized Vietnamese script, Nguyen Ai Quoc evoked the spirit of past heroes, as well as recent patriotic figures such as Phan Dinh Phung, to arouse his readers to defend their national heritage. In the letter he appealed to all patriotic elements, not simply the peasants and workers but also patriotic landlords and scholar gentry, to join together in the common endeavor.
In focusing the attention of the Party first and foremost on Vietnamese independence, Nguyen Ai Quoc and his colleagues had appeared to abandon the concept (first set forth at the Party’s first plenary conference in October 1930) of a regional effort to liberate all of Indochina and to create a federation of separate independent Indochinese states that would then carry out later stages of the revolution. In fact, the cause of the non-Vietnamese peoples of Indochina was to be delayed, but not forgotten. In the resolution, the regional committees of Cochin China and Annam were instructed to establish Party bases in Cambodia and Laos, respectively, as well as among other minority nationalities, so that all could later be brought under the umbrella of what was still labeled the Indochinese revolution.29
Although the new front placed primary emphasis on the task of overthrowing imperialism, the issues of antifeudalism and social change were not entirely ignored, since Party leaders were aware that they needed to cultivate their natural constituency among workers and poor peasants to build a solid revolutionary base for the coming struggle. For the moment, however, the front’s social program was to be relatively modest in order to avoid alienating progressive and patriotic elements among the landed gentry and the bourgeoisie. Slogans that had been used in the past advocating the confiscation of all land owned by landlords were replaced by calls for a reduction in land rents and the seizure of the property of French imperalists and their Vietnamese collaborators. As the Party resolution stated,
The landlords, rich peasants, and a segment of the native bourgeois class have greatly changed their attitude. Before, they had an antipathy to revolution and wanted to destroy it or were indifferent. Now the situation has changed, and with the exception of a few “running dogs” who flatter and fawn on the Japanese enemy, the majority of such people have sympathy for the revolution or are at least neutral.... If previously the landlords and the native bourgeoisie were the reserve army of the antirevolutionary imperialists, they have now become the reserve of the revolution.
It was clear, however, that the policy was tactical only:
This does not mean that our Party is ignoring the problem of class struggle in the Indochinese revolution. No, the problem of class struggle will continue to exist. But at the present time, the nation has prime importance, and all demands that are of benefit to a specific class but are harmful to the national interest must be subordinated to the survival of the nation and the race. At this moment, if we do not resolve the problem of national liberation, and do not demand independence and freedom for the entire people, then not only will the entire people of our nation continue to live the life of beasts, but also the particular interests of individual social classes will not be achieved for thousands of years.30
The immediate goal was thus to build up a nationwide movement for national independence, one that could not only win the support of the mass of the Vietnamese population but even earn the sympathy of progressive peoples around the world. Victory would symbolize the triumph of the bourgeois democratic revolution and usher in the formation of a proletarian-peasant government dominated by the Communist Party. There would then be ample time to move toward the second, or proletarian socialist stage, of the revolution. In the meantime, the Party hoped that oppressed elements within the population would enthusiastically support the cause.
In setting up the Vietminh Front, Nguyen Ai Quoc had managed to re-create in slightly more advanced form the program that he had originally established with the formation of the Revolutionary Youth League in the mid-1920s. The two pillars of the front would be the issues of national independence and social justice, appeals that could be expected to earn wide support throughout much of the country. Almost two decades after Lenin’s death, his strategy had been resurrected in far-off Indochina. Yet in establishing the new front inside Indochina, Quoc was gambling that conditions throughout the world would turn favorable to the cause of revolution in Vietnam. Would Japanese occupation lead to the weakening of the French colonial regime? Would the Japanese fascists themselves ultimately be defeated by an alliance of democratic forces around the world? Would the victorious Allies be sympathetic to the establishment of a new independent government of peasants and workers in Hanoi? All that remained to be seen.31
The ultimate goal of the Vietminh Front, of course, was to assist the Party in its struggle for power. The Sixth Plenum in November 1939 had set the stage by calling for an armed uprising to seize power and restore national independence. That objective was temporarily aborted with the arrest of Nguyen Van Cu and much of the remainder of the committee in the following months; now, with the outbreak of global conflict, it was resurrected by the Party’s external leadership in a more concrete form. Where previously Party leaders had not been specific on how to carry out the future insurrection against the colonial regime, now they began to give closer attention to the forms of struggle that would be best suited to the occasion.
Central to this task was to undertake an examination of the strategy and tactics adopted by the CCP in its own conflict with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government and later against the Japanese invaders. In the early 1930s, ICP leaders had faithfully followed strategic guidelines formulated in Moscow, which called for a future insurrection focused on control over the major cities. But by the end of the decade, dedicated young Party activists like Vo Nguyen Giap and Hoang Van Thu started to turn to the Chinese experience for inspiration. They read the works of Mao Zedong and began to express an interest in applying his strategy, which was based on the launching of guerrilla warfare in the countryside, inside Vietnam. During his period of residence in China in the late 1930s, Nguyen Ai Quoc had himself developed some familiarity with Mao’s ideas on revolutionary warfare, and he undoubtedly found Mao’s concept of a “people’s war” suitable as a weapon to carve out a liberated base area in his own country. But for Quoc, it was not only a matter of what kind of revolutionary tactics to adopt; it was also important to decide when to put them into effect, and how to use them most effectively to seize power at the end of the war. As a small country now occupied by two powerful enemies, Vietnam did not possess the advantage of size that had enabled Mao and his colleagues to set up a large base area in north China. A premature uprising by the ICP could lead to severe repression and destroy the movement just as the promise of national liberation was about to brighten. Quoc would now need to caution his more headstrong colleagues that it was necessary to prepare the Party’s tiny military forces for an eventual insurrection at the moment of maximum opportunity, when Japan was on the verge of defeat at the hands of its enemies. In the meantime, they should limit themselves to strengthening their political base by building a Vietminh network throughout the country, while creating a small military force that in due time would launch local insurrections in preparation for the final general uprising. Wit
h guerrilla units already beginning to form in the mountains of the Viet Bac, a potential liberated base in that area, isolated from the heart of French authority and close to the Chinese border, was already a strong possibility.
The final task of the Eighth Plenum was to choose a new central committee. When Nguyen Ai Quoc modestly refused the request of his colleagues to assume the position of general secretary, the choice fell on Truong Chinh, who had temporarily occupied that position since the fall of 1940. The choice appeared to be a sound one. Born in a family of scholars in North Vietnam in 1907, Chinh (real name Dang Xuan Khu) had received a baccalaureate degree at the prestigious Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi. After joining the Revolutionary Youth League in the late 1920s, he was imprisoned for revolutionary activities. Released in 1936, he began a career as a journalist while serving simultaneously as an influential member of the ICP regional committee in Tonkin. Proud in his demeanor, cautious and thorough in his actions, didactic in relations with his colleagues, Chinh possessed a strong ideological bent and lacked the warm personality of Nguyen Ai Quoc, but he could be expected to add a mature voice to Party deliberations as it entered a fateful new stage in its career. Shortly after the conference adjourned on May 19, Chinh left for Hanoi to set up secret headquarters for the Central Committee. Other members returned to south China to seek assistance from abroad. For the moment, Nguyen Ai Quoc remained in the border region. But his spirits must have been high, for he was now back in Vietnam after thirty years abroad.
When Nguyen Ai Quoc slipped secretly out of Hong Kong for Xiamen in January 1933, his position as the leader of the Indochinese Communist Party had been a fragile one. The strategy that he had adopted at the moment of forming the Revolutionary Youth League in 1925 had been repudiated by Moscow and was actively under attack by younger members of the Party, many of whom had received ideological training at the Stalin School. Yet on his return to the area in the spring of 1940, Quoc’s leading role over the movement was apparently accepted without demur by Party members inside the country. In part, this was a testimonial to the fact that his strategic views had been vindicated at the Seventh Comintern Congress, which recognized belatedly that Asian revolutions had their own dynamics and need not adhere to the Bolshevik model. He was also the unwitting beneficiary of the thoroughness of the Sûreté, which had systematically eliminated most of his potential rivals, including Tran Phu, Ha Huy Tap, and Le Hong Phong. For the moment, at any rate, no one in the Party was in a position to challenge him, and he took full advantage of his prestige and his already legendary career as a revolutionary to stake his claim to the hegemony of the Party.
Given these circumstances, it is not clear why Nguyen Ai Quoc decided to refuse the post of general secretary, which would have provided him with a firm hold over the levers of power within the Party. Perhaps he still viewed himself as an operator on the world stage, as an agent of the Comintern who would someday orchestrate the rise of a revolutionary wave that would sweep away the yoke of imperialism throughout the region of Southeast Asia. Perhaps, too, he already had begun to focus his eyes on a future time when, as president, he could hope to rise above the constraints of class struggle represented by the Communist Party to represent all the people in their struggle to build an independent and prosperous Vietnam.
IX | THE RISING TIDE
After the meeting of the Central Committee at Pac Bo in May 1941, the Party leadership began to disperse. General Secretary Truong Chinh, accompanied by Hoang Quoc Viet and Hoang Van Thu, returned to Hanoi to set up a new headquarters for the committee in the suburbs of the old imperial capital; other Party members were sent to nearby districts to organize guerrilla detachments and begin building a revolutionary base in the mountains of the Viet Bac. Others still crossed the border into China to receive training or to resume efforts to build up the fragile alliance with non-Communist nationalist groups in southern China. Nguyen Ai Quoc himself temporarily remained in Pac Bo to make preparations for future expansion to the south.
For the next few months, in a repetition of his earlier experience in Siam, he again became a teacher and the father of his flock. He organized a course to indoctrinate local cadres in Marx ism-Lenin ism and provide them with the military training necessary to become both fighters and apostles of revolution. After four days of lectures, the students began to practice their skills as propagandists. Nguyen Ai Quoc observed their performance and then criticized their shortcomings. He also served as a regular instructor for the course, giving an opening lecture on the world situation, and then following up with a discussion of conditions inside the country and the forthcoming tasks for the revolutionary movement. Since the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, Party cadres had frequently encountered problems in explaining why Stalin had chosen to ally his country with Hitler’s Germany, widely viewed as the archenemy of the world revolution. By late June 1941, however, word of the German attack on the USSR reached the border area and undoubtedly facilitated Nguyen Ai Quoc’s effort to coordinate the activities of the ICP with the global struggle against world fascism. As he explained it on one occasion: “The fascists have attacked the Soviet Union, the fatherland of the world revolution, but the Soviet peoples will definitely be victorious. We Vietnamese also stand on the side of New Democracy, and support the Soviet Union against the fascists.”1
Nguyen Ai Quoc also wrote a short pamphlet on the tactics of guerrilla warfare to serve as an instruction manual for the portion of the course that provided military training. The material was obviously culled from his experience observing the Communist forces in China, as well as from the guerrilla training course that he had attended in Hengyang two years previously. After an opening chapter devoted to a general description of guerrilla warfare, the remainder of the pamphlet consisted of a discussion of organizational techniques as well as the tactics of retreat, attack, and building a base area. It was eventually published for use in training programs in other areas of the Viet Bac.2
Nguyen Ai Quoc also found the time to write other things as well. He was an active contributor to Viet Nam Doc Lap, the journal which had been produced for the past year on a stone lithograph for the indoctrination of novice members of the movement. Printed on primitive paper made from bamboo pulp, the journal consisted of articles composed in a simple style to make them accessible to the local population. Very few of the local villagers were able to read, so he sponsored the creation of literacy programs, which taught not only quoc ngu, the romanized script, but also the rudiments of the history of the Party and the world revolution. Articles, many written by Nguyen Ai Quoc himself, dealt with a variety of subjects, but all had the purpose of spreading the message of the Vietminh and preparing the reader for the inevitable confrontation with the enemy. A typical piece was the short poem “Women,” which appeared in issue 104:
Vietnamese women forever
Have sacrificed themselves for our country and our race
Ten thousand gathered in response to the call of the sisters Trung
Set out to save the country and the people forever.
Through the years of revolutionary struggle
Our sisters have often participated.
Many times struggle courageously
Hearts of gold, courage of iron, who could do less?
Like Nguyen Minh Khai
Convicted to death many times.
Now the opportunity is near,
Defeat the French, defeat the Japanese, save people and homes,
Women from young to old
Unite together to struggle
Gather together in the Vietminh Front
First save the country, then ourselves.
So that all the world will know
We are the sons of the Fairy and the Dragon.3
Since the early 1930s, the basic tool of the Party’s outreach effort was the functional mass organization, representing the interests of specific social groups within Indochina. This means of recruiting followers at the base level, with the
more advanced members then moving into higher-level organizations, was a technique originally devised by Lenin and then perfected by the CCP in China. In an article entitled “The World War and Our Duty,” Nguyen Ai Quoc stressed the need for all patriotic groups in Vietnamese society—whether peasants, youth, women, children, workers, soldiers, or even the scholar-gentry—to join such organizations to fulfill the task of national liberation.
In his writings after the Pac Bo meeting, Nguyen Ai Quoc constantly referred to the sacred duty of liberating the fatherland. In a short pamphlet written in verse, which was titled The History of Our Country (Lich su nuoc ta), he opened with the statement that the Vietnamese people must learn the history of their own country; he then underscored the great historical lesson that “our people must learn the word ‘unity’: unity of spirit, unity of effort, unity of hearts, unity of action.” At the end of the work he appended a list of important dates in the history of the Vietnamese people. The last date on the list was 1945, labeled as the year of Vietnamese independence. When colleagues asked him how he knew precisely when liberation would take place, he replied enigmatically, “We’ll see.”4
While Nguyen Ai Quoc was training cadres and inspiring his followers with the sacred cause of liberating the fatherland, colleagues were striving to build a liberated base zone in the Viet Bac as a springboard for an eventual leap to power. Shortly after the adjournment of the Pac Bo plenum, Quoc had instructed Phung Chi Kien to construct such a base for an eventual advance southward toward the Red River delta. Kien eventually set up a new military headquarters in the mountains between the villages of Nguyen Binh and Hoa An, just west of the provincial capital of Cao Bang. Cao Bang sat astride National Route 4, which meandered southeastward along the frontier and eventually connected with routes leading into the delta and the seat of the Central Committee near Hanoi. The new command post was situated in a small basin surrounded by massive red boulders, inspiring Vo Nguyen Giap to dub it “the red blockhouse.” The headquarters itself was located in a small hut on the side of a mountain and well protected by the surrounding deep forest. It was still primitive, but compared with the cave at Pac Bo, the new accommodations were almost luxurious, and during the next few months, cadres at the base set up their own training program in preparation for launching guerrilla operations.
Ho Chi Minh Page 36
