Ho Chi Minh

Peter Neville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429828225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Ho Chi Minh explores the life of this globally important twentieth-century figure and offers new insights into his lengthy career, including his often-forgotten involvement with British intermediaries in 1945–46 and with the United States in 1944–45.

Ho was the father of his nation, a major protagonist in the Cold War and anti-colonial struggle, and the promoter of a distinctive Vietnamese form of communism. This biography charts his life from his early years and education in Europe to his establishment of the revolutionary pro-communist movement, the Viet Minh, and his subsequent rise to power. Placing important emphasis on his role as a military organizer while stressing his preference for diplomatic solutions, this book contains detailed analysis of the complex talks with France and failure to prevent the Franco-Viet Minh war in 1946. It also follows Ho's complex relationships with America, China, France, and Russia, and explores the Vietnam War and his legacy.

In addition to providing extensive coverage of the 1954 Geneva Conference, the rivalry between Ho and First Secretary Le Duan, and the 1968 Tet Offensive, Ho Chi Minh is also the first English-language biography of Ho to pay close attention to his attitude to women and their role within the communist party. It is the perfect introduction for students of Vietnamese history and twentieth-century history more broadly.

1 Youth and the emergent nationalist – early years

Ho Chi Minh was born in Nghe An Province in the central part of Vietnam known as Annam in 1890. The word ‘Annam’ came from the Chinese phrase ‘conquered South’ and was their name for Vietnam; it was adopted by the French colonialists to differentiate the central region from Cochin China in the South and Tonkin in the North. They too, however, tended to call the Vietnamese ‘Annamese’ which with its reference back to the Chinese occupation was resented by the Vietnamese.

At the time of his birth, Ho was given the name Nguyen Sinh Cung, but was then given the name Nguyen Tat Thanh at the age of ten, something which appears to have been in line with Confucian tradition in that part of Vietnam.¹ At first, Tat Thanh (Ho) seems to have lived in his grandfather’s house in the village of Kim Lien. It would have a modest, straw structure bare of everything but the most simple furniture. Survival would have been a struggle for a family with only half an acre of ground (about 3,000 square metres).

The dominant influence in the young Ho’s life would have been his hot-tempered father Nguyen Sinh Sac,² an orphan who had been adopted, and then picked as a son-in-law by a village scholar, a position which carried much prestige in a poor rural community. Sac began his studies in the village to prepare for the civil service examinations which allowed entry into the imperial civil service with its centre at the capital city of Hué. This was a route out of poverty for a poor rural scholar who made money from teaching school children. The residual link with China was shown by the fact that Sac had to take an exam in Chinese literature to acquire his doctorate. It is clear that Sac was kept afloat during his studies by his hard-working wife Hoang Thi Loan.

What little is known about Ho Chi Minh’s background shows that his father was a convinced Vietnamese nationalist. He was a friend of the nationalist leader Phan Boi Chau, who, encouraged by Japan’s sensational military victory over Russia in 1904–1905, had taken up residence in that country. Phan wanted his friend to send young Tat Thanh to Japan for instruction in revolutionary ways, but Sac had refused. Nevertheless, Sac soon acquired a reputation for radicalism with both the imperial and French authorities. Many years later, a French official, Paul Arnoux, who spent years chasing after Ho Chi Minh as a Sûreté official, recalled arriving in Annam in 1907, where people spoke about a learned mandarin [Sac] in Ha Tinh province. He was fired for radicalism and lived out his later years in a degree of obscurity in southern Vietnam before dying in 1930. Arnoux remarked that ‘Ho’s life began in an atmosphere of anger, bitterness, of hatred towards France…’³ The father’s imprint was clearly crucial. Tat Thanh’s elder sister Thanh was a devoted nationalist, as was his brother Khiem, who dared to write a direct letter of protest to the French colonial Governor General Albert Sarraut about conditions in Nghe An Province. Nothing seems to suggest that the children’s mother was a political radical.⁴ She was likely to have been too busy securing the family income because her husband’s earnings were so small. His mother died when Thanh was only ten years of age.

Arnoux’s comments about the anger and bitterness in Ho’s early life should not surprise. It was the French colonists who planted such seeds of resentment. As the son of a scholar, young Ho Chi Minh was not liable to forced labour on road projects and other public works, but most other Vietnamese were. As a youngster he would have known that some villagers had not returned from such forced labour projects because of disease and malnutrition. He also learned from his father and other relatives about Vietnam’s heroes, like Le Loi: those who had stood up to Chinese or Mongol invaders. It has been suggested that his father sheltered labourers who had fled from a local road project in his house.⁵

Village life for Ho also involved practical tasks giving him a down-to-earth attitude to life which served him well in his later years. They included working at the village forge, while leisure hours might have included bird hunting. At fifteen, young Ho was sent to the Quoc Hoc National Academy where he learned both French and Vietnamese (he always retained a respect for the French language).⁶ This development may have been linked to the difficulty Ho and his siblings had in living with his hot-tempered father who had a problem with alcohol.⁷ Ho seems to have attended the National Academy from 1907 to 1909, which specialized in the education of the sons of mandarins and imperial officials. It was located in Hué. Ho made an impact on his fellow students, although they laughed at his country ways. He was intelligent but challenging in the classroom. One of his teachers described him as an ‘intelligent and very distinguished student.’⁸ Already the ferocious work drive which was a feature of the adult Ho Chi Minh was evident. He enjoyed the lectures given by a history teacher on the French Revolution, but was already to show defiance of Vietnam’s colonial masters.

He spoke out against the servility of the emperor’s court at Hué, discerning as his father did, that it was merely a puppet of the French. This at a time when radical political protest was strengthening in Vietnam. Two strains were emerging. One led by Ho’s father’s fellow scholar Phan Chu Trinh looked westwards through the ‘Journey to the West’ (Tay Du) movement. The second, led by Phan Boi Chau, looked eastwards to Japan in the equivalent ‘Journey to the East’ (Dong Du). As has been seen, Sac had rejected Chau’s request that Ho be sent to Japan as a trainee revolutionary. Instead, the young man looked to the West, a wider world than an insular and chauvinistic Japan.

Ho was still, however, a convinced Vietnamese nationalist who reportedly supported the so-called ‘Short Hairs’ movement, a symbolic revolt against the wearing of the chignon or bun, a traditional hairstyle in Vietnam (as did his father). It was a gesture in favour of modernization, and many years later the then President Ho Chi Minh could still remember the song chanted by his compatriots as they gave haircuts to passers-by (not always with their agreement apparently):

Comb in the left hand,

Scissors in the right.

Snip! Snip!

Cut out the ignorance,

Do away with stupidity,

Snip! Snip!⁹

It must be recorded, though, that some historians have remained sceptical about the extent of Ho’s involvement in the ‘Short Hairs’ movement.¹⁰ What is not in doubt is that by 1909 Ho had imbibed the strong nationalist spirit which ruined his father’s career. The ‘Short Hairs’ movement was a particular manifestation of the discontent that many Vietnamese felt about French rule and their desire to modernize their country.

Ho studied for some years at the National Academy, improving his knowledge of Chinese characters and being able to read the books of the French Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau and Montesquieu. In January 1911, Ho moved to the small coastal town of Phan Tiet (most famous for the production of fish sauce [nuoc-mam]), where he taught in a school until September of that year in both French, of which he now had a good grasp, and the quoc ngu, a phonetic Latinized transcription of the Vietnamese language which is still in use today.¹¹ In a life which became notably transient Ho then moved to the capital of Cochin China, Saigon, a thriving commercial centre much prized by the French. He enrolled on a course in marine navigation in a vocational school, but already thought of moving to China where the radical nationalist Phan Chu Trinh was established. 1911 was the year in which the Manchu dynasty was overthrown and replaced by a republic.

In the event the young man was to leave for France in the last days of 1911, signing on as a chef’s assistant on the Amiral Latouche Treville, a ship on the Haiphong-Marseilles route. He arrived in Marseilles with only ten francs in his pocket, wondering at the technical advances in the West like trams, while at the same time noticing that the metropolitan French seemed less arrogant than the colons in Hué and Saigon.

This period in Ho’s life was characterized by a wanderlust. Between 1911 and 1913, he briefly returned to Saigon and went to Bordeaux, Lisbon, Tunis, Dakar and East Africa. He claimed to have been a pastry chef in Boston and to have witnessed the lynching of blacks by the Ku Klux Klan in the South.¹² He may also have been to London, where according to the older Ho Chi Minh’s account he was variously a road sweeper and a boiler man. The most intriguing story about his stay in England concerns an offer made to him by the famous French chef Auguste Escoffier, who according to Ho’s account offered him the job of chef at the Carlton Hotel in London. One can only speculate about how modern Vietnamese and world history would have been affected if he had taken up the offer! The celebrity chef wanted young Ho to drop his advanced political ideas. There may have been a degree of myth-making in the later sanitized Communist Party accounts of Ho’s life, but his own account does establish that he already had qualities which would stand him in good stead: namely a ferocious appetite for work, a willingness to cope with Spartan living conditions, a flair for languages (he picked up some English) and a communal spirit. On his numerous voyages Ho looked after fellow Vietnamese seamen, taught them to read and write and told them about the need for Vietnamese independence.¹³ He was by now also a true cosmopolitan, albeit a man always tied to his Vietnamese roots. And a young man who had seen his father sacrifice a career for his nationalist beliefs. It was likely to have been the French persecution of his father who was accused of complicity with Phan Boi Chau and other nationalists, which stopped Ho from getting a bursary to continue his studies in France.¹⁴ Hence his lowly position on the Amiral Latouche Treville.

While Ho Chi Minh was in Europe there had been another revolt against the French in Vietnam, which implicated the young Emperor Duy Tan (1883–1916). He was imprisoned on the French island of Réunion, a great distance from his realm (the most notorious French penal colony in Vietnam was Poulo Condore [Con Son prison island], where dissidents and nationalists were invariably sent). Meanwhile, the emperor’s subjects were dying in thousands in mud-filled trenches on the Western Front for a cause they detested in France.

Duy Tan’s revolt was in 1916 when records suggest Ho was in England (there are surviving postcards sent to Vietnamese compatriots in France), but thereafter his exact whereabouts are uncertain. Whether Ho was actually in the United States in 1917–18, as Vietnamese biographies suggest, remains in the words of one leading historian, ‘in the realm of conjecture.’¹⁵ Some historians have been sceptical, despite existing documentation, about whether Ho ever lived in England.¹⁶

This speculation pales into relative insignificance in any case in comparison with the central importance of the Russian Revolution of November 1917, when the Bolsheviks led by Lenin seized power. It was to provide Ho Chi Minh with the ideological template for his own life and career. Ho was not a communist in 1917, nor was he to be for some time, but his direction of travel from 1916 onwards was ever leftwards. Certainly by 1919, Ho Chi Minh began to flit mysteriously across the files of baffled French Sûreté officials, as they tried to establish exactly who Ho Chi Minh was.

The French radical

There is certain historical irony in the fact that Nguyen Ai Quoc, the future Ho Chi Minh, began his definitive evolution as a revolutionary socialist in France, the metropolitan colonialist power. It has been much easier to track the young man’s activities because the French police finally made the link between Thanh and Quoc, and had him followed by three Vietnamese agents who were part of Quoc’s wider Vietnamese expatriate community.

The name Nguyen Ai Quoc first appeared on a document presented to the Allied leaders at the Versailles Conference in 1919, who were working on the post-war settlement after the First World War. Evidence suggests that he arrived in France in 1917 (still called Thanh at that point) and set up, with two older colleagues, Phan Chu Trinh, who had left China, and Phan Van Dong, the Association of Vietnamese Patriots. He, it appears, drafted an eight-point petition to the Allied leaders to apply President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of ‘self-determination’ to France’s colonial territories. The presence of French premier Georges Clemenceau’s among the so-called ‘Big Three’ (Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George) ensured of course that such a plea would be rejected. The petition was entitled ‘Demands of the Annamite People’ and asked amongst other things for freedom of the press, religion and movement along with equality between Vietnamese and French. The presumption has been that Ho drafted the petition, with the help of Trinh whose French was better, while Phan Van Dong wrote the final version.¹⁷ The name Nguyen Ai Quoc appeared at the end of the document at a time when the Sûreté were still unsure about who they were dealing with (at that point it could have appeared to be a collective name for several Vietnamese radicals).

During this period Ho also became a member of the French Socialist Party (maybe as early as 1917), which had fragmented into two sections, the more left wing of which favoured membership of the Third International, established by Lenin in Moscow. He favoured the leftist faction of the Party led by men like Marcel Cachin (a future leader of the Communist Party).¹⁸ One of the reasons for this was that Ho became speedily disillusioned by the way the mainstream party failed to offer an effective critique of colonialism. Thus, an eventual move towards Lenin’s party, which did offer a critique of imperialism in the new Soviet Union, was always likely, even if he did find Karl Marx’s seminal work, Das Kapital, turgid.

In December 1920 Ho’s opportunity came when the left-wing socialists split away from the rump of the party to form the French Communist Party, at the 18th Congress of the French Socialist Party at Tours. Ho attended the Congress as a delegate and was given the floor as ‘Comrade Indochinese Delegate.’ In his speech Ho told his party comrades, ‘Today, instead of contributing, together with you, to world revolution as I should wish, I come here with deep sadness and profound grief as a Socialist, to protest against the abhorrent crimes committed in my native land.’ On and on Ho went about shameless French exploitation while stressing ‘the fact that we have been poisoned, with opium, alcohol etc.’ He could not with regret ‘reveal all the atrocities perpetrated by the predatory capitalists in Indochina.’ It was a seminal moment in Ho’s personal history and the history of Vietnamese communism and nationalism. He joined the French defectors to communism,¹⁹ and the French Communist Party itself was set up in 1921. A direct consequence of the Tours Congress.

Ho and Vietnamese compatriots like Trinh (although he was not a Marxist) had believed in the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789, but it soon became apparent that neither the French Communists nor the Socialists would extend these ideals to the colonies, even if they achieved political power (the first French Socialist government, allied to the Communists, only arrived in 1936).

Ho was put on a commission by the FCP (French Communist Party) to examine the colonial issue, but this led nowhere. Instead, Ho put his energies into the Intercolonial Union along with colleagues from Madagascar, French Africa and the French West Indies. Men like Ralaimongo from Madagascar and Henri Sarrotte from Martinique became friends and comrades, showing Ho’s capacity for personal relationships and his internationalism. In the Manifesto of the Inter Colonial Union, Ho issued a stirring challenge to ‘rally all the native people of the colonies living in France,’ but the preceding part of the same sentence raised false hope as the ‘French comrades’ who were supposed to be sympathetic did not rally to the cause.²⁰

Ho was also an active journalist and publicist during this period but was always to show what Sophie Quinn-Judg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 Youth and the emergent nationalist – early years
• 2 The Comintern agent
• 3 Survival
• 4 The return of the native
• 5 The prisoner
• 6 The August Revolution
• 7 The struggle with France
• 8 From Hanoi to Dien Bien Phu
• 9 A nation divided
• 10 The two republics
• 11 Eclipse
• 12 The Tet Offensive
• 13 Legacy
• Endnotes
• Select bibliography
• Index