Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (4 page)

Ho Chi Minh’s conversion to communism transformed his life. He was a founding member of the French Communist party, and in 1921 he established the Intercolonial Union, a communist-front group to work against imperialism. He spent 1923 and 1924 in Moscow. Late in 1924 the Soviet leadership asked him to go to Canton as an adviser to the Soviet envoy. There Ho discovered a large Vietnamese expatriate community coalescing around Phan Boi Chau, the old family friend. But the joy of the reunion was short-lived. Ho Chi Minh talked at length about revolution, but Phan Boi Chau’s commitment stopped at talk. Perhaps he was just too old—the fire had dimmed. Ho also found him conservative, willing to get rid of the French but not the Vietnamese elite in a genuine revolution.

Young Vietnamese nationalists in Canton gravitated to Ho Chi Minh’s leadership. One of them was Pham Van Dong. Born in Quang Nam Province of central Vietnam in 1906 to a mandarin family, Dong had studied at the French lycée in Hue. His father was exiled to the French colony of Reunion in 1915 for fomenting rebellion among the Vietnamese troops recruited to fight in World War I. As a student, Pham Van Dong became intensely anti-French, and he moved to Canton to escape the secret police. He was captivated by Ho Chi Minh’s “shining simplicity.” Nguyen Luong Bang, another young nationalist born in Hai Hung Province in 1904, met Ho in Canton and saw him “healthylooking, extremely bright-eyed... with an engagingly gentle way of speaking.” With Pham Van Dong, Nguyen Luong Bang, and several other young Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh founded the Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam in 1925. It was the first purely Marxist organization among the Indochinese.

French secret agents and Chinese police went after the rebels, and Ho Chi Minh urged his associates to return to Vietnam and organize anti-French communist cells. He went to Moscow in 1927, attended conferences in Europe later in the year, and in 1928 lived in Bangkok as a Buddhist monk organizing the Vietnamese emigrant community. In Moscow, he temporarily ran afoul of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who worried that Ho’s sense of nationalism ran deeper than his commitment to communism. Stalin always suspected nationalists because their devotion to country or ethnic group often transcended their devotion to the class struggle. In Moscow, Ho was too much of a nationalist and not enough of a communist to suit Stalin.

Ho traveled to Hong Kong in 1929 and met Le Duc Tho, another Vietnamese nationalist. Tho, who was born in Nam Ha Province in 1910 to a mandarin family, had become an anti-French nationalist while attending school. With Le Duc Tho, Pham Van Dong, Nguyen Luong Bang, and several other Vietnamese in Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh established the Indochinese Communist party in June 1929. Its leaders wanted to “overthrow French imperialism, feudalism and the reactionary Vietnamese capitalist class.” Another young Vietnamese nationalist soon joined them. Vo Nguyen Giap, born in Quang Binh Province in 1912, came from a well-to-do family. He earned a law degree at Hanoi University. By the time he was a teenager, Giap hated the French. Although he had never met Ho Chi Minh, Giap was familiar with his revolutionary nationalism and joined the Indochinese Communist party.

In northern Vietnam, not the south, the revolution began. There the population was denser, the rice yields lower, the landholdings smaller. All this evoked a more intense sense of community than prevailed in the south. Religions contributed to the differences. Buddhism came to Vietnam from two different sources. To the south, from India came Theravada Buddhism, viewing salvation as a future state distinct from the present; individuals find nirvana by transcending the present and detaching themselves from earthly cares. In the north, Mahayana Buddhism from China was progressive. It is in acts of love and charity directed to the problems of the moment, in which devotees put off their own salvation until others achieve it, that salvation is to be found. Mahayana Buddhism reinforced the communal spirit that social and economic conditions fostered in the north. When the time came to resist the French and the Japanese, that spirit supplied the conditions for political organization.

It started in Nghe An. The Great Depression depressed rice prices, eroding peasant income and creating an epidemic of economic misery and political discontent. Widespread tax revolts erupted spontaneously throughout central Vietnam, and more sporadic eruptions took place in the Mekong Delta. But in Nghe An, radicals organized peasants into Red Soviets—local councils demanding an end to rents, seeking massive tax cuts, and in conformity with communism, striving for land redistribution.

On September 12, 1930, more than 6,000 Nghe An peasants marched on Vinh, the provincial capital. Although the march began as a peaceful demonstration, the French called in an air strike, killing more than 174 people. Later in the day, when relatives drifted in to claim the bodies, aircraft killed another fifteen people. A French journalist called the second attack “an awkward error which had a bad effect.” Bad effect, indeed! The repression of the Nghe An Revolt was a seminal event, proof that France would stop at nothing to keep the empire. For the French, the revolt was sobering testimony to the power of Vietnamese peasants if anyone organized them. For the mandarins, the revolt signaled their downfall if communists ever took over. The “Vietnamese reactionary class,” as Ho described them, would lose everything.

But the collapse of the Nghe An Revolt taught Ho Chi Minh and his followers another lesson. Nobody would overthrow the French empire without first creating a broad-based political organization reaching all the way down to the peasant masses. As far back as 1924, Ho had said that in “all the French colonies.. . conditions have combined to further an uprising of the peasants. Here and there they have rebelled, but their rebellions have been drowned in blood. If the peasants remain pacific today it is because they lack organization and a leader.” Revolution depended on the support of millions of peasants. Success in Vietnam would be more a political than a military question.

September 1945—Ho Chi Minh, right, poses with Vo Nguyen Giap, minister of the Interior in Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government. Giap led the Vietminh and North Vietnamese military through the fall of Saigon. (Courtesy, AP/Wide World Photos.)

 

After the suppression of the Nghe An Revolt, the French went after all revolutionary nationalists. Pham Van Dong was arrested in 1930 and sent to the dreaded “tiger cages” at Con Son Island, where he spent the next eight years. Nguyen Luong Bang held out for a year, but he was put in a French prison in 1931. Tho spent years in hiding and in French jails during the 1930s. Vo Nguyen Giap went into exile in 1939, but the French arrested his wife and baby. Both died in prison in 1941, giving Vo Nguyen Giap a vendetta to accompany his nationalism. The French tried Ho in absentia, convicted him of treason, and sentenced him to death. Under pressure from the French, British authorities imprisoned him in Hong Kong. Rumors quickly spread that he had died there, a story both the French and the Soviet Union believed.

But late in 1932 some British contacts smuggled Ho Chi Minh out of Hong Kong and drove him to Shanghai, where he met with Soviet officials who helped him get to Moscow in 1933. Five years later, Ho Chi Minh returned to China, and the next year he met Vo Nguyen Giap for the first time. Pham Van Dong made it out of the French prison in 1939 and headed for China as well. There the three planned their next move, hoping that the turmoil in the world would provide them with an opportunity. It came in June 1940 when Germany conquered France. Nazi successes fit in well with Japan’s designs for Asia. Indochina seemed like a ripe plum, and Japan picked it. In September 1940 Japanese troops moved south out of China into Tonkin. They occupied the rest of Annam and Cochin China by July 1941. Ho now faced another foreign power. He quietly left China and returned to Vietnam. His thirty-year odyssey was over.

When Ho Chi Minh and his followers took up refuge in a limestone cave near Pac Bo in the mountains of Cao Bang Province, he was beginning one more in a long series of anti-imperialist uprisings. The Can Vuong movement of the late 1800s had demanded restoration of Vietnamese royalty, but in doing so it did not address the resentments of the peasant masses for the mandarin elite. Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh tried but failed; their isolated, poorly planned uprisings were easy prey for the efficient French colonial administrators. Phan Boi Chau’s close associate Hoang Hoa Tham organized the De Tham war against the French in a poorly structured effort that ended with Hoang Hoa Tham’s assassination in 1913. Nguyen Thai Hoc established the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, or Vietnam Nationalist party, in 1929 and launched an abortive uprising against the French at Yen Bay, but the movement, composed exclusively of middle- and upper-class Vietnamese, disintegrated. Nguyen Thai Hoc died at the guillotine in 1930.

After 1910, urban nationalists had appeared in the cities. Such groups as Bui Quang Chieu’s Constitutional party and Nguyen An Ninh’s Hopes of Youth were influenced by Western values. They wanted reform, not revolution, and definitely not any sort of violence. They failed to capture the mantle of Vietnamese nationalism because they were isolated from peasants, not just in their use of the French language but in their abandonment of Confucian symbols. The leaders were primarily intellectuals, given to endless ideological squabbles. It was also easy for French authorities to keep track of urban nationalists. A different approach had to be taken that would absorb Vietnamese from all classes.

Ho Chi Minh remembered Lenin’s advice that Asian communists should form alliances with each nationalist organization while keeping their independence from all of them. Ho downplayed communism, not wanting to give his French critics anything to use against him. The organization to liberate Vietnam had to be based on nationalism, not revolution, at least in the beginning. Only then was there any hope of bringing together large numbers of Vietnamese in a resistance movement. In May 1941, outside the cave in Cao Bang Province, Ho established the political organization for implementing his dream: the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietminh—the League for Vietnamese Independence. Ho Chi Minh declared: “Our people suffer under a double yoke: they serve not only as buffaloes and horses to the French invaders but also as slaves to the Japanese plunderers… . Rich people, soldiers, workers, peasants, intellectuals, employees, traders, youth, and women who warmly love your country… . Let us unite together!”

Like George Washington, whose towering presence held together competing interests in the fledgling United States of the 1790s, Ho became an iconic figure, a charismatic presence whose personality and image attracted Vietnamese nationalists of every sort. To make sure that he kept the loyalties of middle-class and upper-class Vietnamese nationalists, he soft-peddled his Communist credentials, prompting many Americans to conclude that he was more nationalist than communist. Ho Chi Minh was both, devoting fervor to each.

The Vietminh were about to inherit the mantle of Vietnamese nationalism. They built a coalition of urban intellectuals and peasants. French-educated Vietnamese intellectuals found in Marxism a scientific, anti-imperialist ideology that explained history and provided, in its moralistic fervor, a neo-religion to replace the void they felt in rejecting Confucian traditionalism. Peasants saw in the Vietminh a passionate movement dedicated to providing them with economic relief. Above all else, the Vietminh enjoyed the charisma of Ho Chi Minh.

Shortly after the formation of the Vietminh, Ho Chi Minh went back to China to seek assistance from Jiang Jieshi in fighting the Japanese. Just before leaving, Ho Chi Minh announced to his closest associates that he was changing his name from Nguyen Ai Quoc, by which he had been known among Vietnamese nationalists for more than thirty years, to “Ho Chi Minh” (He Who Enlightens). In China, Jiang Jieshi had Ho arrested, and he spent more than a year in prison, almost dying from the conditions. He was released late in 1943 when some Chinese leaders decided he might be useful after all in fighting Japan. Ho Chi Minh returned to Cao Bang Province.

The treachery he experienced at the hands of Jieng Jieshi sent Ho Chi Minh directly into the embrace of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. Even though the Soviet Union, in order to expedite its war in East Asia against Japan, tried to exploit rivalries between Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists, Ho negotiated an independent course, making sure to offend neither Mao or Stalin.

By that time Ho Chi Minh was ready to look toward a new source for assistance. Ever since his visit to New York City in 1913, he had a bemused curiosity about the United States. Although American capitalism created classes and exploited the poor, there was nevertheless a powerful sense of opportunity there. The Americans had, after all, been the first colony to revolt successfully against a European imperial power, and their Declaration of Independence was eloquent in its proclamation of human equality. American imperialism was even more intriguing. The United States had acquired the Philippines in 1898 and then fought a bloody war against Filipino insurrectionists who had no interest in replacing their Spanish yoke with an American one. American troops crushed the rebellion, but not before a guerrilla war took thousands of lives. But afterwards the Americans made good on their promise. The Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 launched the Philippines on the road to independence, with a twelve-year timetable before the American withdrawal. Maybe the Americans were as good as their Declaration of Independence proclaimed?