By the spring of 1949, Chinese Communist forces were crossing the Yangtze into south China and preparing to establish a new regime in Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek was preparing to evacuate his government to the island of Taiwan. For Vietminh leaders, the prospect of a friendly China on the northern frontier of Indochina created optimism that their long-awaited general offensive might be at hand. French intelligence reported that a major meeting of Vietminh leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, held in April near Vinh had evaluated the situation; Ho declared that although an increase in French forces would create problems, a general offensive was possible with Chinese assistance. In preparation for that eventuality, the meeting decided to initiate preparations to open up a battlefront along the frontier to facilitate contact with the PLA.20
All of this, of course, was good news to the Vietminh. But Ho Chi Minh was undoubtedly conscious that any open identification of his movement with the Chinese Communists could poison relations with Vietnamese moderates and provide an important incentive for a U.S. entry into the war on the French side. In a bid to defuse such suspicions, he periodically denied that his government was about to identify itself with the new regime in China. In March 1949, he reportedly denied the existence of an agreement with China as “a colonial rumor.” The next month, he told an American journalist in an interview somewhere in the Viet Bac that independence would come through the DRV’s own efforts and dismissed the accusation of “Communist domination” of the Vietminh as “pure French imperialist propaganda.” In a statement in August, he admitted that there were some similarities between Mao Zedong’s “new democracy” and the policies of his government, but, he added, “Chinese New Democracy is Chinese, ours is Vietnamese.”21
The French decision to recognize Bao Dai’s Associated State as the sole legal government in Vietnam represented an added challenge, since it could end Washington’s doubts about French intentions and trigger a direct U.S. entry into the Franco/Vietminh war. In June 1949, in a bid to influence the course of events in Paris, Ho intimated in an interview with an Indonesian journalist that the Vietminh might be willing to negotiate with the French on the condition of national independence and unity. But the final Communist victory in China that summer undoubtedly persuaded many Party leaders that total victory might be achieved by military means, thus reducing the need to seek a negotiated settlement. On July 9, Pham Ngoc Thach, now serving as a DRV representative for south Vietnam, denounced Bao Dai as “a puppet in the pay of the invaders” and told a French journalist that the recent successes of the Chinese army presaged the end of hard times for the Vietminh. At the end of the month, French intelligence sources reported that Vo Nguyen Giap had ordered preparations for moving to the final stage of the general offensive.22
In mid-August, a secret meeting of the DRV Council of Ministers decided to make a formal request to the new Chinese government for aid in the war against the French. Ho Chi Minh selected two representatives to travel to Beijing to congratulate Mao Zedong on his victory over the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. That victory, Ho declared in a message to the Chinese leader, served to encourage other Asian peoples and especially his own compatriots in their efforts to free themselves from the yoke of colonial rule. Shortly after, Ho decided to make a personal visit to China to convey his request for a close relationship with the new leaders in Beijing.23
The two Vietnamese delegates reached Beijing in mid-October and conferred with Chinese officials. They had arrived at a delicate moment. The new Chinese government had just been established at a mass meeting held in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on October 1 and was in the process of determining its own future role in the world. Although Mao Zedong had already declared that the new China would “lean to one side” in its relations with the Soviet camp, the degree of tilt toward Moscow was still underermined, as a direct meeting between Stalin and Mao had not yet taken place. While relations with the United States had been tense in recent months, U.S. diplomatic representatives remained in China, and there was still a hope among some officials in Washington—if not in Beijing—that a diplomatic rupture could be avoided.
The first public indication of the attitude of the new Chinese government toward the conflict in Indochina came in November, when Liu Shaoqi, Ho’s acquaintance from Canton days who now ranked second to Mao Zedong in the Party hierarchy, delivered the keynote speech at an international trade union congress held in Beijing. In this widely reported address, Liu announced that the Chinese government would provide active assistance to national liberation movements elsewhere in Asia. He specifically mentioned the struggles in Indochina and in Malaya, where Communist guerrillas had launched a resistance movement against the British colonial administration. In a second speech later that month, Liu called on the Chinese people to give their active support to the oppressed peoples in colonial countries of Asia and Australasia. By that time, all other Communist governments around the world had granted diplomatic recognition to the new government in Beijing. In October, an article by Truong Chinh in the ICP newspaper Su That congratulated the new government of Mao Zedong. The author declared that the Communist victory in China represented a victory for all democratic and peace-loving peoples in the world, especially for peoples in the colonial world currently fighting against the forces of global imperialism. Beijing responded on November 25 with a brief and somewhat laconic declaration that China and Vietnam “are on the front lines in the vanguard of the struggle against imperialism.”24
In December 1949, the DRV held its own first national conference of trade unions in the Viet Bac. In the course of the meeting, held in a conference hall under enormous portraits of Stalin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh, two hundred assembled delegates listened as Truong Chinh proclaimed the political and ideological alignment of the DRV with the new regime in China. In a letter read aloud at the meeting, Ho Chi Minh pointed out that the working class must be the leading force in the nation. The final resolution of the conference celebrated the Chinese people, whose victory “shifts the balance of forces toward the democracies.”25
In mid-December, Mao Zedong left for Moscow to work out a relationship with the Soviet Union. There had apparently not been enough time for Chinese leaders to decide on a response to the Vietminh request prior to Mao’s departure for the USSR, but sometime in mid-December, Liu Shaoqi told Luo Guibo, a military officer assigned to the PLA general staff, that he was to be sent to Indochina to meet with Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese officials. His mission, Liu explained, would be threefold: to thank the Vietnamese for their assistance during the Chinese civil war; to restore regular contacts between the two parties; and to obtain information on the situation in Indochina. After a stay of three months, Luo was instructed to return to China to report his findings.26
On December 24, a week after Mao’s departure for the USSR, Liu Shaoqi convened a meeting of the Politburo to analyze the situation in Indochina and formulate a policy. Any decision to provide assistance to the Vietminh would not be without cost, since the French government had not yet decided whether to grant diplomatic recognition to the new China and would obviously be offended should Beijing decide to recognize the Vietminh. The following day, acting in the name of Chairman Mao, Liu informed Vietnamese leaders by wire that the Chinese government was prepared to send a team to help the DRV assess its needs. He also invited the Vietnamese to dispatch a formal delegation to discuss the issue in Beijing.
A few days later, Liu received a reply from Indochina accepting the invitation. Ho Chi Minh had assessed the situation with his own cabinet in mid-December and had already concluded that the victory of Mao’s forces opened up bright prospects for the Vietnamese revolution. Comparing the Communist victory on the mainland to a chess game in which the “red side” had won a convincing triumph, Ho predicted that the new China would provide significant assistance to the Vietminh and called for intensified preparations for the forthcoming general offensive.
By the time Beijing officials received the Vietnamese message, a delegation of V
ietnamese officials had already left on foot for China. Unbeknownst to their hosts, who had been informed that the senior member of the delegation would be Tran Dang Ninh, commissar for supply on the Vietminh general staff, the actual leader of the DRV delegation was Ho Chi Minh himself. To avoid attracting the attention of the French security forces, Ho’s participation was kept a secret; in fact, only two members of his own entourage were aware of his presence. After leaving the Vietminh redoubt in Tuyen Quang province on December 30, the team crossed the border on foot. Ho wore his familiar khaki suit, in the style of Sun Yat-sen, and traveled under the name of Ding. On January 16, 1950, the group reached Jingxi. Accompanied by a PLA escort, they continued on to Nanning, where they met with Chinese officials and were informed that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had just agreed to grant diplomatic recognition to the DRV. The Chinese announcement was made on January 18, four days after Vietminh sources in Bangkok had declared that the DRV was the sole legal government in Vietnam. After a brief rest, Ho and his comrades boarded a train for the Yangtze River port city of Wuhan.27
A few days later, the delegation reached Beijing, where Ho saw his old comrade Hoang Van Hoan, who had arrived from Europe too late to attend the trade union congress in November. The Chinese had tried to keep the arrival of the Vietnamese delegation secret, but Western intelligence sources had already learned about it. It was soon reported in the Western press. Liu Shaoqi had prepared for the upcoming talks by appointing a committee headed by General Zhu De, Mao’s longtime comrade-at-arms and now vice chairman of the government and commander of the PLA, to deal with the military issues that would inevitably be raised in meetings with the Vietnamese. At the same time he informed Mao Zedong in Moscow of Ho’s arrival. Mao cabled a reply asking Liu to pass on his warm regards to Ho Chi Minh and congratulating the DRV on joining the socialist camp.
In Beijing, Ho was given accommodations at Zhongnanhai, the sumptuous villa in the western section of the imperial palace where Mao Zedong had taken up his private residence. It also served as the seat of the Chinese Politburo. Liu formally informed his guest that China had decided to grant diplomatic recognition to the DRV, while noting pointedly that Chinese leaders expected to pay a price in their relations with France. At a banquet for the delegation attended by several Chinese leaders, Liu suggested to Soviet Ambassador Roshin that Ho Chi Minh go personally to Moscow to confer with Stalin and present him with an account of currenr conditions in Indochina. When Stalin signaled his approval by cable, Ho and his colleague Tran Dang Ninh left with Zhou Enlai for Moscow on February 3. Hoang Van Hoan remained in Beijing to make preparations to open a new Vietnamese embassy.28
Since the end of World War II, Soviet interest in the fate of the Vietnamese revolution had been at a low ebb. In a widely reported speech given in September 1947, Stalin’s lieutenant, Andrey Zhdanov, had announced Soviet support for the struggle of oppressed colonial peoples against their imperialist exploiters, implying that bourgeois nationalist forces struggling for independence in colonial areas were viewed favorably in Moscow. But by early 1948, Soviet policy had hardened, as Communist parties in Asian societies were instructed to break their temporary alliances with local nationalist organizations and attempt to seize power on their own. That policy, apparently transmitted at a conference of youth organizations held in Calcutta, had been a disaster, resulting in the suppression of a Communist revolt in the Dutch East Indies and the eviction of Communist parties from united fronts by their nationalist rivals all over Southeast Asia.
Moscow’s newly uncompromising hostility toward bourgeois nationalist parties—an attitude reminiscent of the sectarian mood of the early 1930s—was a reflection of Stalin’s own views on the subject, an attitude sharpened by the failure of the CCP—Kuomintang united front during the 1920s. According to confidants, Stalin had harbored doubts about Ho Chi Minh’s own ideological orthodoxy for many years and became especially suspicious when Ho sought to establish a relationship with the United States in the months immediately following the Pacific War. Stalin was also reportedly unhappy when the ICP formally abolished itself in November 1945. Two years later, when Moscow granted diplomatic recognition to Sukarno’s struggling new Republic of Indonesia, it did not recognize the DRV, perhaps because of doubts that the Vietminh would be victorious in their struggle against the French.
In the early years of the Franco-Vietminh conflict, then, the Vietnamese apparently had no direct contacts with the USSR, although a French Communist Party delegation that traveled to Indochina in 1949 may have been sent on Moscow’s orders to evaluate the situation. In any event, in late August of that year Ho addressed a letter to Stalin, thanking him for Soviet support to the CCP during the civil war and for its assistance to the World Federation of Trade Unions.29
Stalin’s skepticism about Ho and the Vietminh’s prospects was clearly on display during Ho’s visit to Moscow. According to Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin treated the Vietnamese revolutionary with open contempt during the visit. On the second or third day after Ho’s arrival, when Soviet officials arranged a meeting with Stalin, the latter’s attitude toward his guest was, in Khrushchev’s words, “offensive, infuriating.” When Stalin and Mao Zedong finally signed their treaty of alliance on February 14, 1950, Ho Chi Minh was in attendance at the ceremony and proposed that Stalin should sign a similar agreement with his own country. Stalin replied that this was not possible, since Ho was in Moscow on a secret mission. When Ho—undoubtedly in jest—suggested that he be flown around Moscow in a helicopter and then land at the airport with suitable publicity, Stalin replied: “Oh, you orientals. You have such rich imaginations.” Ho Chi Minh used all his familiar ruses to win the support of his gruff host. At the close of one meeting, he asked Stalin to autograph a copy of the magazine The USSR Under Construction. According to Khrushchev, Stalin reacted in his “typically sick, distrusting way,” autographing the magazine but then later telling his personal bodyguards that he had been careless in signing it and instructing them to retrieve it. Later, after they got it back, Stalin joked with friends: “He is still looking for that magazine, but he can’t find it.”30
Stalin, however, did finally accede to one of Ho Chi Minh’s requests. On January 30, 1950, Moscow officially announced diplomatic recognition of the DRV as the sole legal government of Vietnam. But the Soviet leader’s doubts about Ho Chi Minh’s unorthodox ideological views were not yet allayed. Vietnamese sources still tell the story (probably, but not certainly, apocryphal) that at a meeting between the two held in 1952, Stalin pointed to two chairs in the meeting room and remarked, “Comrade Ho Chi Minh, there are two chairs here, one for nationalists and one for internationalists. On which do you wish to sit?” Ho allegedly replied, “Comrade Stalin, I would like to sit on both chairs.”31
Why did Stalin decide to grant diplomatic recognition to the DRV, despite his reservations about the ICP and its leader? According to Chinese sources, Stalin’s motives may have been related to his ongoing talks with Mao Zedong. Mao had gone to Moscow determined to work out a new treaty with the USSR that removed some of the extraterritorial privileges that the Soviet Union possessed in China granted by the Allied Summit in Yalta in February 1945. Stalin wished to retain those rights for security reasons, but he was fearful that in retaliation China might decide to deal directly with the United States. It was therefore important for Stalin to guarantee that Chinese foreign policy in Asia would be sufficiently radical to ensure that the United States would be antagonized, thus preventing a possible Beijing-Washington alliance. At meetings between the three in Moscow, Stalin thus encouraged Mao to take the lead in promoting revolution in Asia. The USSR, he promised Ho Chi Minh, was willing to help Vietnam all it could, but China must play the prominent role in directing the struggle. “Toward Vietnam we feel equal concern as we do for China,” he told Ho. “From now on, you can count on our assistance, especially now after the war of resistance, our surplus materials are plenty, and we will ship them to you through China.
But because of limits of natural conditions, it will be mainly China that helps you. What China lacks, we will provide.” Mao then assured Ho Chi Minh, “Whatever China has and Vietnam needs, we will provide.”32
On February 17, Ho joined Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on the long train ride through Siberia back to Beijing. Like Ho Chi Minh, Mao had obtained at least part of what he had desired from Moscow. The new Sino-Soviet treaty removed some of the more humiliating elements in the Yalta agreement, and Moscow promised to provide economic assistance. But such gains were hard earned: Mao later informed colleagues that “getting something from Stalin is like taking meat from the mouth of a tiger.”
The train pulled into Beijing on March 3. Mao hosted another banquet for Ho Chi Minh at Zhongnanhai, with all leading Chinese officials in attendance. In formal negotiations, the PRC agreed to provide security at the border and to authorize the establishment of Vietnamese consulates in the southern cities of Nanning and Kunming. In return, Ho instructed Hoang Van Hoan—soon to be named the first Vietnamese ambassador to China—that the ICP’s external headquarters were to be shifted from Thailand, where they had been located since the beginning of the Franco-Vietminh War, to China. According to the comments of a defector, Ho also agreed to provide guidance to fraternal Communist parties throughout the region, a return to the role that he had played as a Comintern agent during the early 1930s. On March 11, Ho and his colleagues left for Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh must have been at least modestly pleased at the results of his trip. He had won diplomatic recognition from the two chief socialist states, and a promise of military and economic assistance—however limited—from each. The Vietminh would no longer fight alone. At the same time, China also benefited from the new relationship that had been established with the Vietnamese. According to Chinese sources, Mao Zedong had become increasingly convinced that war with the United States was eventually inevitable, and could break out at any exposed point along the Chinese border. For that reason, he believed that it was important to shore up Chinese defenses, not only in Korea, but in Indochina as well.33
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