 Ho
Chi Minh and the Communist Movement
The year 1925 also
marked the founding of the Viet Nam Thanh Nien Cach Menh
Dong Chi Hoi (Revolutionary Youth League) in Guangzhou
by Ho Chi Minh. Born Nguyen Sinh Cung in Kim Lien
village, Nghe An Province in May 1890, Ho was the son of
Nguyen Sinh Sac (or Huy), a scholar from a poor peasant
family. Following a common custom, Ho's father renamed
him Nhuyen Tat Thanh at about age ten. Ho was trained in
the classical Confucian tradition and was sent to
secondary school in Hue. After working for a short time
as a teacher, he went to Saigon where he took a course
in navigation and in 1911 joined the crew of a French
ship. Working as a kitchen hand, Ho traveled to North
America, Africa, and Europe. While in Paris from
1919-23, he took the name Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the
Patriot). In 1919 he attempted to meet with United
States President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace
Conference in order to present a proposal for Vietnam's
independence, but he was turned away and the proposal
was never officially acknowledged. During his stay in
Paris, Ho was greatly influenced by Marxist-Leninist
literature, particularly Lenin's Theses on the
National and Colonial Questions (1920), and in 1920
he became a founding member of the French Communist
Party. He read, wrote, and spoke widely on Indochina's
problems before moving to Moscow in 1923 and attending
the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, also
called the Comintern, in 1924. In late 1924, Ho arrived
in Guangzhou, where he spent the next two years training
more than 200 Vietnamese cadres in revolutionary
techniques. His course of instruction included study of
Marxism-Leninism, Vietnamese and Asian revolutionary
history, Asian leaders such as Gandhi and Sun Yat- sen,
and the problem of organizing the masses. As a training
manual, Ho used his own publication Duong Cach Menh
(The Revolutionary Path), written in 1926 and considered
his primer on revolution. Going by the name Ly Thuy, he
formed an inner communist group, Thanh Nien Cong San
Doan (Communist Youth League), within the larger Thanh
Nien (Youth) organization. The major activity of Thanh
Nien was the production of a journal, Thanh Nien,
distributed clandestinely in Vietnam, Siam, and Laos,
which introduced communist theory into the Vietnamese
independence movement. Following Chiang Kai-shek's April
1927 coup and the subsequent suppression of the
Communists in southern China, Ho fled to Moscow.
In December of that
year, a teacher from a Vietnamese peasant family, Nguyen
Thai Hoc, founded Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, (VNQDD,
Vietnamese Nationalist Party), in Hanoi. With a
membership largely of students, low-ranking government
employees, soldiers, and a few landlords and rich
peasants, VNQDD was patterned after the Chinese
Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), from which it received
financial support in the 1930s. Another source of funds
for the VNQDD was the Vietnam Hotel in Hanoi, which it
opened in 1928 as both a commercial enterprise and the
party headquarters. The hotel restaurant, however,
provided French agents with an easy means of penetrating
the party and monitoring its activities. At various
times, the VNQDD attempted, without success, to form a
united front with Thanh Nien and other independence
organizations. Thanh Nien, being two years older,
however, had had a head start over VNQDD in organizing
in schools, factories, and local government, which it
had done with patience and planning. The VNQDD therefore
concentrated instead on recruitment of Vietnamese
soldiers and the overthrow of French rule through
putschist-style activities.
In February 1929, the
French official in charge of recruiting coolie labor was
killed by an assassin connected with the VNQDD. The
French immediately arrested several hundred VNQDD
leaders and imprisoned seventy-eight. VNQDD leaders
Nguyen Thai Hoc and Nguyen Khac Nhu escaped, but most
members of the Central Committee were captured. The
remaining leadership under Nguyen Thai Hoc decided to
stage a general uprising as soon as possible. All
dissent to the plan was overridden, and the party began
manufacturing and stockpiling weapons. On February 9,
1930, a revolt instigated by the VNQDD broke out at Yen
Bai among the Vietnamese garrison, but it was quickly
suppressed. Simultaneous attacks on other key targets,
including Son Tay and Lam Thu, were also unsuccessful
because of poor preparation and communication. The Yen
Bai uprising was disastrous for the VNQDD. Most of the
organization's top leaders were executed, and villages
that had given refuge to the party were shelled and
bombed by the French. After Yen Bai, the VNQDD ceased to
be of importance in the anticolonial struggle. Although
more modernist and less bound by tradition than the
scholar-patriots of the Phan Boi Chau era, the VNQDD had
remained a movement of urban intellectuals who were
unable to involve the masses in their struggle and too
often favored reckless exploits over slow and careful
planning.
On June 17, 1929, the
founding conference of the first Indochinese Communist
Party (ICP--Dang Cong San Dong Duong) was held in Hanoi
under the leadership of a breakaway faction of Thanh
Nien radicals. The party immediately began to publish
several journals and to send out representatives to all
parts of the country for the purpose of setting up
branches. A series of strikes supported by the party
broke out at this time, and their success led to the
convening of the first National Congress of Red Trade
Unions the following month in Hanoi. Other communist
parties were founded at this time by both supporting
members of Thanh Nien and radical members of yet another
party revolutionary with Marxist leavings but no direct
tie with the Comintern, called the New Revolutinary
Party or Tan Viet Party. At the beginning of 1930, there
were actually three communist parties in French
Indochina competing for members. The establishment of
the ICP prompted remaining Thanh Nien members to
transform the Communist Youth Leaque into a communist
party - the Annam Communist Party (ACP, Annam Cong San
Dang), and Tan Viet Party members followed suit by
renaming their organization the Indochinese Communist
League (Dong Duong Cong San Lien Doan). As a result, the
Comintern issued a highly critical indictment of the
factionalism in the Vietnamese revolutionary movement
and urged the Vietnamese to form a united communist
party. Consequently, the Comintern leadership sent a
message to Ho Chi Minh, then living in Siam, asking him
to come to Hong Kong to unify the groups. On February 3,
1930, in Hong Kong, Ho presided over a conference of
representatives of the two factions derived from Thanh
Nien (members of the Indochinese Communist League were
not represented but were to be permitted membership in
the newly formed party as individuals) at which a
unified Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) was founded,
the Viet Nam Cong San Dang. At the Comintern's request,
the name was changed later that year at the first Party
Plenum to the Indochinese Communist Party, thus
reclaiming the name of the first party of that named
founded in 1929. At the founding meeting, it was agreed
that a provisional Central Committee of nine members
(three from Bac Bo, two from Trung Bo, two from Nam Bo,
and two from the overseas Chinese community) should be
formed and that recognition should be sought from the
Comintern. Various mass organizations including unions,
a peasants' association, a women's association, a relief
society, and a youth league were to be organized under
the new party. Ho drew up a program of party objectives,
which were approved by the conference. The main points
included overthrow of the French; establishment of
Vietnamese independence; establishment of a workers',
peasants', and soldiers' government; organization of a
workers' militia; cancellation of public debts;
confiscation of means of production and their transfer
to the proletarian government; distribution of
French-owned lands to the peasants; suppression of
taxes; establishment of an eight-hour work day;
development of crafts and agriculture; institution of
freedom of organization; and establishment of education
for all.
The formation of the
ICP came at a time of general unrest in the country,
caused in part by a global worsening of economic
conditions. Although the size of the Vietnamese urban
proletariat had increased four times, to about 200,000,
since the beginning of the century, working conditions
and salaries had improved little. The number of strikes
rose from seven in 1927 to ninety- eight in 1930. As the
effects of the worldwide depression began to be felt,
French investors withdrew their money from Vietnam.
Salaries dropped 30 to 50 percent, and employment,
approximately 33 percent. Between 1928 and 1932, the
price of rice on the world market decreased by more than
half. Rice exports totaling nearly 2 million tons in
1928 fell to less than 1 million tons in 1931. Although
both French colons and wealthy Vietnamese landowners
were hit by the crisis, it was the peasant who bore most
of the burden because he was forced to sell at least
twice as much rice to pay the same amount in taxes or
other debts. Floods, famine, and food riots plagued the
countryside. By 1930 rubber prices had plummeted to less
than one-fourth their 1928 value. Coal production was
cut, creating more layoffs. Even the colonial government
cut its staff by one-seventh and salaries by one-
quarter.
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