Ho Chi Minh
By WILLIAM J. DUIKER
Hyperion
IN
A LOST LAND
He entered the city quietly, with no
fanfare. While his followers roamed the streets, celebrating their victory or
accepting the surrender of enemy troops, he settled in a nondescript two-story
commercial building in the Chinese section of town. There he spent several days
in virtual seclusion, huddled over the battered typewriter that he had carried
with him during a decade of travels from Moscow to south China and finally, in
the first weeks of 1941, back to his homeland, which he had left thirty years
before.
By the end of the
month he had completed the speech that he planned to make to his people
announcing the creation of a new nation. Shortly after 2:00 P.M. on September
2, he mounted the rostrum of a makeshift platform hastily erected in a spacious
park soon to be known as Ba Dinh Square on the western edge of the city. He was
dressed in a faded khaki suit that amply encased his spare emaciated body, and
he wore a pair of rubber thongs. Thousands had gathered since the early morning
hours to hear him speak. In a high-pitched voice that clearly reflected his
regional origins, he announced the independence of his country and read the
text of its new constitution. To the few Americans who happened to be in the
audience, his first words were startling: "All men are created equal; they
are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
The time was the
late summer of 1945, shortly after the surrender of Japanese imperial forces
throughout Asia. The place was Hanoi, onetime capital of the Vietnamese empire,
now a sleepy colonial city in the heart of the Red River delta in what was then
generally known as French Indochina. For two decades, Nguyen the Patriot had
aroused devotion, fear, and hatred among his compatriots and the French
colonial officials who ruled over them. Now, under a new name, he introduced
himself to the Vietnamese people as the first president of a new country.
At the time, the
name Ho Chi Minh was unknown to all but a handful of his compatriots. Few in
the audience, or throughout the country, knew of his previous identity as an
agent of the Comintern (the revolutionary organization, also known as the Third
International, founded by the Bolshevik leader Lenin twenty-six years before)
and the founder in 1930 of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Now he described
himself simply as "a patriot who has long served his country." For
the next quarter of a century, the Vietnamese people and the world at large
would try to take the measure of the man.
The forces that
initiated his long journey to Ba Dinh Square had begun to germinate in the late
summer of 1858, when a small flotilla of French warships, joined by a small
contingent from Spain, launched a sudden attack on the city of Da Nang, a
commercial seaport of medium size on the central coast of Vietnam. The action
was not totally unexpected. For decades covetous French eyes had periodically
focused their gaze on Vietnam: missionaries on the lookout for souls to save,
merchants scouring the globe for new consumer markets and a river route to the
riches of China, politicians convinced that only the acquisition of colonies in
Asia would guarantee the survival of France as a great power. Until midcentury,
the French government had sought to establish a presence in Vietnam by
diplomatic means and had even sent a mission to the imperial capital at Hué,
about fifty miles north of Da Nang, in an effort to persuade the Vietnamese
emperor to open his country to French influence. When the negotiations stalled,
the government of Emperor Louis Napoleon decided to resort to force.
The country that
French warships had attacked was no stranger to war or foreign invasion.
Indeed, few peoples in Asia had been compelled to fight longer and harder to
retain their identity as a separate and independent state than had the
Vietnamese. A paramount fact in the history of the country is its long and
frequently bitter struggle against the expansionist tendencies of its northern
neighbor, China. In the second century B.C., at a time when the Roman republic
was still in its infancy, the Chinese empire had conquered Vietnam and exposed
it to an intensive program of political, cultural, and economic assimilation.
Although the Vietnamese managed to restore their independence in the tenth
century A.D., it took several hundred years for Chinese emperors to accept the
reality of Vietnam's separate existence; in fact, this happened only after
Vietnam's reluctant acceptance of a tributary relationship with the imperial
dynasty in China.
Vietnam's long
association with China had enduring consequences. Over a millennium, Chinese
political institutions, literature, art and music, religion and philosophy, and
even the Chinese language sank deep roots into Vietnamese soil. The result was
a "Confucianized" Vietnam that to the untutored observer effectively
transformed the country into a miniature China, a "smaller dragon"
imitating its powerful and brilliant northern neighbor. The Vietnamese monarch
himself set the pace, taking on the trappings of a smaller and less august Son
of Heaven, as the emperor was styled in China. The Vietnamese ruling elite was
gradually transformed into a meritocracy in the Chinese mold, its members
(frequently known as mandarins) selected (at least in theory) on the basis of
their ability to pass stiff examinations on their knowledge of the Confucian
classics. Generations of young Vietnamese males were educated in the very
classical texts studied—and often memorized—by their counterparts in China.
Their sisters, prohibited by rigidly patriarchal Confucian mores from pursuing
official careers—or indeed almost any profession—were secluded within the
confines of the family homestead and admonished to direct their ambitions to
becoming good wives and mothers.
Vietnam's passage
into the Chinese cultural universe was probably not an especially wrenching
experience, for the social and economic conditions that had helped to produce
Confucian civilization in China existed to a considerable degree in Vietnam as
well. Like its counterpart to the north, Vietnamese society was fundamentally
agrarian. Almost nine of every ten Vietnamese were rice farmers, living in tiny
villages scattered throughout the marshy delta of the Red River as it wound its
way languidly to the Gulf of Tonkin. Hard work, the subordination of the desires
of the individual to the needs of the group, and a stable social and political
hierarchy were of utmost importance. The existence of a trained bureaucracy to
maintain the irrigation system and the road network was considered essential,
but there was relatively little need for commerce and manufacturing. Although
indigenous elements were never eliminated in Vietnamese culture, to untutored
eyes the country appeared to be a mirror image in microcosm of its giant
neighbor to the north.
But if the
Vietnamese people appeared willing to absorb almost whole the great tradition
of powerful China, they proved adamant on the issue of self-rule. The heroic
figures of traditional Vietnam—rebel leaders such as the Trung sisters (who
resisted Chinese rule in the first century A.D.), the emperor Le Loi, and his
brilliant strategist Nguyen Trai, who fought against the Ming dynasty 1400
years later—were all closely identified with resistance to Chinese domination.
Out of the crucible of this effort emerged a people with a tenacious sense of
their national identity and a willingness to defend their homeland against
outside invasion.
One of the
lasting consequences of the Vietnamese struggle for national survival was
undoubtedly the emergence of a strong military tradition and a willingness to
use force to secure and protect national interests. In the centuries after the
restoration of national independence from China in A.D. 939, the new Vietnamese
state, which called itself Dai Viet (Great Viet), engaged in a lengthy conflict
with its neighbor to the south, the trading state of Champa. Eventually the
Vietnamese gained the upper hand, and beginning in the thirteenth century they
pushed southward along the coast. By the seventeenth century, Champa had been
conquered and the territory of Dai Viet had been extended to the Ca Mau
Peninsula on the Gulf of Siam. Vietnamese settlers, many of them ex-soldiers,
migrated southward to create new rice-farming communities in the fertile lands
of the Mekong River delta. Dai Viet had become one of the most powerful states
in mainland Southeast Asia, and the Vietnamese monarch in his relations with
neighboring rulers began to style himself not simply as a king but as an
emperor.
But there was a
price to pay for the nation's military success, as territorial expansion led to
a growing cultural and political split between the traditional-minded
population in the heartland provinces of the Red River delta and the more
independent-minded settlers in the newly acquired frontier regions to the
south. For two centuries, the country was rent by civil war between ruling
families in the north and the south. In the early nineteenth century the empire
was reunified under a descendant of the southern ruling family bearing the name
of Nguyen Anh, who adopted the reign title Gia Long. At first the new Nguyen
dynasty attempted to address the enduring legacy of civil strife, but by
midcentury regional frictions began to multiply, supplemented by growing
economic problems such as the concentration of farmlands in the hands of the
wealthy, and exacerbated by incompetent leadership in the imperial capital of
Hué.
The Vietnamese
civil war had occurred at a momentous period in the history of Southeast Asia,
as fleets from Europe, sailing in the wake of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da
Gama, began to prowl along the coast of the South China Sea and the Gulf of
Siam in search of spices, precious metals, and heathen souls to save. Among the
Europeans most interested in the area were the French, and when in the
nineteenth century their bitter rivals, the British, began to consolidate their
hold on India and Burma, French leaders turned covetous eyes toward Vietnam.
In 1853 the third
emperor of the Nguyen dynasty died, and the Vietnamese throne passed into the
hands of a new ruler, the young and inexperienced Tu Duc. It was his
misfortune, and that of his people, that on his shoulders was placed the
responsibility of repulsing the first serious threat to Vietnamese independence
in several centuries. Although well-meaning and intelligent, he was often
indecisive and nagged by ill health. When French troops landed at Da Nang
harbor in the summer of 1858, Tu Duc's first instinct was to fight.
Contemptuously rejecting an offer to negotiate, he massed imperial troops just
beyond French defenses on the outskirts of the city. Admiral Charles Rigault de
Genouilly, the French commander, had been assured by French missionaries
operating in the area that a native uprising against imperial authority would
take place, but it failed to materialize. At first, the admiral hoped to wait
out his adversary, but when cholera and dysentery began to thin out the
European ranks, he decided to abandon the city and seek a more vulnerable spot
farther to the south. Early the following year the French resumed their attack
at Saigon, a small but growing commercial port on a small river a few miles
north of the Mekong River delta. Imperial troops in the area attempted to
counterattack, but their outdated weapons were no match for the invaders, and
after two weeks Vietnamese resistance collapsed.
Although the
first reaction of the emperor had been to fend off the aggressors with military
force, the defeat in the south left him disheartened. Despite appeals from
advisers at court for a policy of continuing defiance, Tu Duc decided to
negotiate, and in 1862 he agreed to cede three provinces in the Mekong delta to
the French, eventually to be known (with the addition of three more provinces a
few years later) as the French colony of Cochin China. The first round had gone
to Paris.
For a few years
the imperial court at Hué maintained a precarious grip on independence, but
when the French resumed their advance in the early 1880s, launching an attack
on the citadel at Hanoi and occupying several major cities in the Red River
delta, the court seemed paralyzed. The sickly Tu Duc had died just before the
reopening of hostilities, and in the subsequent leadership crisis the court
split into opposing factions. Over the next few months several new monarchs,
most of them children, were enthroned and unseated in rapid succession.
Ultimately, power was seized by the influential regent Ton That Thuyet, who put
his own protégé, Ham Nghi, on the throne in hopes of continuing the resistance.
In response to a Vietnamese request, the Qing dynasty in China sent imperial
troops to aid its vassal, but the Vietnamese were nonetheless unable to
prevail. In 1885 China withdrew its armed forces and signed a treaty with
France expressly abandoning its longstanding tributary relationship with
Vietnam. In Hué, a more pliant emperor was placed on the throne to replace the
young Ham Nghi, who fled with his recalcitrant adviser Ton That Tuyet into the
mountains in the interior to continue the struggle. In the meantime, the now
dominant peace faction at court concluded a new treaty with France conceding to
the latter political influence throughout the entire remaining territory of
Vietnam. The French transformed their new possession into the protectorates of
Tonkin (comprising the provinces in the Red River delta and the surrounding
mountains) and Annam (consisting of the coastal provinces down to the colony of
Cochin China far to the south). In Annam, the French allowed the puppet emperor
and his bureaucracy to retain the tattered remnants of their once august
authority. In Tonkin, colonial rule reigned virtually supreme. For all intents
and purposes, Vietnam had become a French possession.
The French
conquest of Vietnam was a manifestation of a process of European colonial
expansion which had begun after the Napoleonic Wars and accelerated during the
remainder of the nineteenth century as advanced Western states began to enter
the industrial age. Driven by a desperate search for cheap raw materials and
consumer markets for their own manufactured goods, the capitalist nations of
the West turned to military force to establish their hegemony throughout the
region. By the end of the century, all of the countries of South and Southeast
Asia except the kingdom of Siam—later to be known as Thailand—were under some
form of colonial rule.
The surrender of
the imperial court did not end the Vietnamese desire for independence.
Centuries of resistance to China had instilled in the Vietnamese elite class a
tradition of service to king and country as the most fundamental of Confucian
duties. Many civilian and military officials refused to accept the court's
decision to capitulate to superior military force and attempted to organize
local armed forces to restore Ham Nghi to power. In Ha Tinh province, along the
central coast of Annam, the scholar-official Phan Dinh Phung launched a Can
Vuong (Save the King) movement to rally support for the deposed ruler and drive
the French from his native land. When his friend Hoang Cao Khai, a childhood
acquaintance who had decided to accommodate himself to the new situation,
remonstrated with Phung to abandon his futile effort and prevent useless
bloodshed, the latter replied in the lofty tones of the principled Confucian
patriot:
I have concluded that if our country has survived these past
thousand years when its territory was not large, its wealth not great, it was
because the relations between king and subjects, fathers and children, have
always been regulated by the five moral obligations. In the past, the Han, the
Song, the Yuan, the Ming [four of the most powerful of past Chinese dynasties]
time and again dreamt of annexing our country and of dividing it up into
prefectures and districts within the Chinese administrative system. But never were
they able to realize their dream. Ah! If even China, which shares a common
border with our territory and is a thousand times more powerful than Vietnam,
could not rely upon her strength to swallow us, it was surely because the
destiny of our country had been willed by Heaven itself.
But the existence
of two claimants to the throne created a serious dilemma for all those
Vietnamese who were animated by loyalty to the monarchy. Should they obey the
new emperor Dong Khanh, duly anointed with French approval at Hué? Or should
they heed the appeal of the dethroned ruler Ham Nghi, who from his mountain
hideout had issued a call for the support of all patriotic elements in a
desperate struggle against the barbarians? The dilemma of choosing between resistance
and accommodation was a cruel one and created a division in the traditional
ruling class that would not heal for over half a century.
At the heart of the anti-French
resistance movement was the central Vietnamese province of Nghe An. A land of
placid beaches and purple mountains, of apple green rice fields and dark green
forests, Nghe An lies in the Vietnamese panhandle between the South China Sea
and the mountains of the Annamite cordillera along the Laotian border to the
west. It is a land of hot dry winds and of torrential autumn rains that flatten
the rice stalks and flood the paddy fields of the peasants. It is paradoxical
that this land, so beautiful to the eye, has often been cruel to its
inhabitants. Crowded into a narrow waist between the coast and the mountains,
the Vietnamese who lived in this land, over 90 percent of whom were peasants
scratching out their living from the soil, found life, at best, a struggle. The
soil is thin in depth and weak in nutrients, and frequently the land is flooded
by seawater. The threat of disaster is never far away, and when it occurs, it
sometimes drives the farmer to desperate measures.
Perhaps that
explains why the inhabitants of Nghe An have historically been known as the
most obdurate and rebellious of Vietnamese, richly earning their traditional
sobriquet among their compatriots as "the buffalos of Nghe An."
Throughout history, the province has often taken the lead in resisting
invaders, and in raising the cry of rebellion against unpopular rulers. In the
final two decades of the nineteenth century, Nghe An became one of the centers
of the anti-French resistance movement. Many of the province's elites fought
and died under the banner of Phan Dinh Phung and his Can Vuong movement.
The village of Kim
Lien is located in Nam Dan district, in the heart of Nghe An province, about
ten miles west of the provincial capital of Vinh. The district lies along the
northern bank of the Ca, the main river in Nghe An province. Much of the land
is flat, with rice fields washed by a subtropical sun stretching to the sea a
few miles to the east, but a few hillocks crowned by leafy dark-green
vegetation rise above the surrounding plain. Clumps of palm trees dot the
landscape and provide shade for the tiny thatch huts of the peasants huddled in
their tiny hamlets. Within each individual hamlet, banana trees, citrus, and
stands of bamboo provide sustenance in times of need and materials for local
construction. Still, the farmers of the district were mostly poor in the nineteenth
century, for it was a densely populated region, and there was inadequate land
to feed the population.
It was here, in
1863, that Ha Thy Hy, the second wife of the well-to-do farmer Nguyen Sinh
Vuong (sometimes called Nguyen Sinh Nham), gave birth to a son, who was given
the name Nguyen Sinh Sac. Vuong's first wife had died a few years earlier,
after bearing her husband's first son, Nguyen Sinh Tro. To raise his child,
Vuong married Ha Thy Hy, the daughter of a peasant family in a neighboring village.
By the time Sac was four, his mother and father had both died, and he was
brought up by his half brother Tro, who had already taken up farming on his
father's land. The farmer's life was difficult for Tro and his neighbors. When
a typhoon struck, the land was flooded, destroying the entire harvest; times of
drought produced stunted rice plants. As a result, many farmers in the village
worked at other tasks as a sideline, such as carpentry, bricklaying, weaving,
or metalworking. Yet there was a long tradition of respect for learning in the
area. A number of local scholars had taken the Confucian civil service
examinations, and several offered classes in the classics as a means of
supplementing their meager income.
At first, the
young Nguyen Sinh Sac had little opportunity to embark on his own career as a
scholar. Although the family history, carefully carved in Chinese characters on
wooden tablets placed, in accordance with tradition, beside the family altar,
recorded that many members had successfully taken the civil service
examinations in earlier times, apparently none had done so in recent
generations. Sac's half brother Tro had little interest in learning. Yet it
soon became clear that Sac was eager for education. After leading his brother's
water buffalo back from the fields in the late morning, he often stopped off at
the school of the local Confucian scholar Vuong Thuc Mau, where he tied up the
animal and lingered outside the classroom, listening to the teacher conduct his
lessons. In his spare time, young Sac attempted to learn Chinese characters by
writing them on the bare earth or on the leaf of a persimmon tree.
By the time he
was an adolescent, Nguyen Sinh Sac's love of learning had become common
knowledge throughout the village and came to the attention of Hoang Duong (also
known as Hoang Xuan Duong), a Confucian scholar from the nearby hamlet of Hoang
Tru who often walked over the mud-packed footpaths to Kim Lien to visit his
friend Vuong Thuc Mau. Noticing the young lad on the back of a water buffalo
absorbed in reading a book while his friends played in the fields, Hoang Duong
spoke with Nguyen Sinh Tro and volunteered to raise the boy, offering him an
education through the classes that he taught in his own home. Tro agreed, and in
1878, at age fifteen, Nguyen Sinh Sac moved to Hoang Tru village, where he
began formal study in the Confucian classics with his new foster father and
sponsor. The event was hardly an unusual one, since it was customary for the
talented sons of poor farmers to be taken under the wing of more affluent
relatives or neighbors and provided with a Confucian education in a local
school. Should the child succeed in his studies and rise to the level of a
scholar or government official, relatives and neighbors alike could all bask in
the glow of the recipient's prestige and influence.
Like many other
scholars in the area, Master Duong (as he was known locally) was part teacher,
part farmer. The roots of the Hoang family were in Hai Hung province, just to
the southeast of Hanoi in the Red River delta, where many members were renowned
for their learning. After moving to Nghe An in the fifteenth century, Hoang
Duong's forebears continued the tradition of scholarship. His father had taken
the civil service examination three times, eventually receiving the grade of tu
tai ("cultivated talent," the lowest level of achievement in the
examination and the Confucian equivalent of a bachelor's degree in the United
States today).
While Hoang Duong
taught his students in two outer rooms of his small house, his wife, Nguyen Thi
Kep, and their two daughters, Hoang Thi Loan and Hoang Thi An, tilled the
fields and weaved to supplement the family income. Like their counterparts in
villages throughout the country, none of the women in Master Duong's family had
any formal education, since the arts of scholarship and governing—reflecting
timeworn Confucian principles introduced from China—were restricted exclusively
to males. In Vietnam, as in China, it was a woman's traditional duty to play
the role of mother and housekeeper, and to serve the needs of her husband. This
had not always been the case, since Vietnamese women had historically possessed
more legal rights than their Chinese counterparts, but as Confucianism became
increasingly dominant after the fifteenth century, their position in Vietnamese
society became increasingly restricted. Within the family, they were clearly
subordinate to their husbands, who possessed exclusive property rights and were
permitted to take an additional wife if the first failed to produce a son.
Within these
constraints, Nguyen Thi Kep and her daughters were probably better off than
most of their neighbors, since they had absorbed a little literary knowledge.
Kep's own family also had a tradition of scholarship. Her father had passed the
first level of civil service examination just like her father-in-law had. As
the wife of a local scholar, Kep was a respected and envied member of the local
community. In most respects, however, her life, and that of her daughters,
differed little from their less fortunate neighbors, who spent their days
knee-deep in the muddy fields beyond the village hedgerow, painstakingly
nursing the rice seedlings through the annual harvest cycle.
In this bucolic
atmosphere, young Sac grew to adulthood. He quickly showed himself adept at
Confucian learning, and when he displayed a romantic interest in Master Duong's
attractive daughter Hoang Thi Loan, the family eventually consented to arrange
a marriage, although Kep was apparently initially reluctant because of Sac's
status as an orphan. The wedding ceremony took place in 1883. As a wedding
gift, Master Duong provided his new son-in-law with a small three-room thatch
hut on a small plot of land next to his own house. A one-room structure nearby
served as the family altar, where the males in the family were expected to pay
fealty to the family ancestors. The house built for the newlyweds was cozy and
clean, with the living space in the front room, the kitchen in the rear, and an
outside room for Sac's study. The family was somewhat more affluent than most
in the village but did not hire laborers for their rice fields or the small
vegetable garden. During the next seven years, while her husband continued his
studies, Hoang Thi Loan bore three children—a daughter, Nguyen Thi Thanh, born
in 1884; a son, Nguyen Sinh Khiem, in 1888; and then, on May 19, 1890, a second
son, Nguyen Sinh Cung, who would later be known as Ho Chi Minh. (In Vietnam,
children are given a "milk name" at birth. When they reach
adolescence, a new name is assigned to reflect the parents' aspiration for
their child).
While Nguyen Sinh
Sac studied in preparation for taking the civil service examinations, his wife,
Loan, as was the custom, tended the rice fields and raised the children.
According to the recollections of her contemporaries, she was diligent and
family oriented, both traditional Confucian virtues, but she was also gifted
and intellectually curious. She had some acquaintance with Vietnamese literature
and often lulled her children to sleep with traditional folk songs or by
reciting passages from Nguyen Du's famous verse classic Truyen Kieu (The
Tale of Kieu), a poignant story of two lovers caught in the web of traditional
morality.
In 1891, Nguyen
Sinh Sac traveled to the provincial capital of Vinh to sit in candidacy for the
tu tai, but he failed to pass. His performance was sufficiently
encouraging, however, for him to continue his studies after his return home,
and to teach classes to local children in his home to help support the family.
When his father-in-law, Master Duong, died in 1893, adding to the family's
financial burdens, Sac was forced to delay his preparations for retaking the
examination. While his older sister helped with the household chores, little
Nguyen Sinh Cung enjoyed himself, playing in the fields or roaming around his
father's school. At night, before being placed in his hammock, his grandmother
read him local tales of heroism. Cung was intelligent and curious, quick to
absorb knowledge.
In May 1894, Sac
took the examinations in Vinh a second time and received the grade of cu
nhan, or "recommended man," a level higher than the tu tai
and the equivalent of a master of arts degree. The achievement was unusual for
a local scholar, and on his return to Hoang Tru village he was offered a small
plot of land as a traditional reward given by the community to successful
candidates in the civil service examinations. Since he had only three acres of
rice land as part of his wife's dowry, Sac accepted, but he refused offers to
arrange an expensive banquet in his honor, preferring instead to distribute
water buffalo meat to poor villagers.
It was
commonplace for recipients of the prestigious cu nhan degree to seek an
official position in the imperial bureaucracy, thus "honoring the self and
enriching the family" (vinh thanh phi gia), but Nguyen Sinh Sac
preferred to continue his studies while earning a modest income as a local
instructor of the classics. In the hallowed Confucian tradition of wifely
sacrifice—in the expressive Vietnamese phrase, vong anh di truoc, vong nang
theo sau, or "the carriage of the husband goes before, that of his
wife after"—Hoang Thi Loan continued to work in the family's rice fields
while raising the family.
In the spring of
1895, Nguyen Sinh Sac traveled to Hué to take the imperial examinations (thi
hoi), the highest level of academic achievement in the Confucian
educational system. He did not pass but decided to remain in the city in order to
enter the Imperial Academy (Quoc tu Giam) in preparation for a second effort.
The academy, whose origins dated back to the early years of national
independence in Hanoi, served as a training place sponsored by the court for
aspiring candidates for the imperial bureaucracy. Sac had no funds to pay his
tuition or room and board, but fortunately the school offered a few modest
scholarships to help defray living costs and with the assistance of a friend he
was able to obtain one. Sac returned briefly to Nghe An to bring Loan and their
two sons back to Hué, so that his wife could seek work to help the family meet
expenses.
In those days,
the trip from the Nghe An provincial capital of Vinh to Hué was both arduous
and dangerous. The journey lasted about a month, and the road wound through
dense forest and over mountains infested by bandits. It was quicker and more
comfortable to travel by sea, but to poor villagers like Nguyen Sinh Sac, the
cost of passage by ship was prohibitive. The family thus decided to make the
trip on foot, covering at most about thirty kilometers a day and walking in
groups with several other travelers for protection against bandits and wild
animals. With his short legs, the five-year-old Cung found it difficult to keep
up the pace, so his father sometimes carried him, entertaining him with stories
of mythical creatures and the heroic figures of the Vietnamese past.
Hué, originally
known as Phu Xuan, had once been the headquarters of the Nguyen lords who had
ruled the southern half of the country during the two centuries of civil war.
After the founding of the Nguyen dynasty in 1802, Emperor Gia Long had decided
to transfer the capital there from its traditional location in the Red River
valley as a means of demonstrating his determination to reunify the entire
country under Nguyen rule. A small market town nestled on the banks of the
Perfume River about midway between the two major river deltas, it had become an
administrative center after becoming the seat of the imperial court, but was
still much smaller in size than the traditional capital of Hanoi (then known as
Thang Long), and probably contained a population of fewer than ten thousand
inhabitants.
After arriving,
undoubtedly exhausted, in Hué, Nguyen Sinh Sac was able to arrange temporary
lodgings at the house of a friend. Eventually, however, the family moved into a
small apartment located on Mai Thuc Loan Street, not far from the eastern wall
of the imperial city, on the northern bank of the Perfume River. The Imperial Academy
was located on the southern bank, about seven kilometers west of the city. But
Sac seldom attended school, spending most of his time studying at home. In his
spare time he taught the classics to his own boys and the children of local
officials. Reflecting the intense respect for education that characterized
Confucian societies, he put extra pressure on his sons, admonishing them to
study hard and pay strict attention to their calligraphy. According to the
accounts of neighbors, little Cung had already begun to display a lively
interest in the world around him, joining his brother to watch the imperial
troops perform their drills and trying to sneak into the imperial city for a
closer look inside. Observing a royal procession as it left the palace on one
ceremonial occasion, he returned home to ask his mother whether the emperor had
injured his leg. When asked why he had posed the question, Cung replied that he
had just seen the ruler being carried by bearers in a sedan chair.
In 1898, Sac
failed in his second attempt to pass the metropolitan examination and decided
to accept temporary employment as a teacher at a neighborhood school in the
hamlet of Duong No, just east of the city. His wife, Loan, remained in the
apartment in Hué to supplement the family's meager income by weaving and taking
in washing. The school at Duong No had been founded by a well-to-do local
farmer, who gave permission for Sac's own two sons to attend the classes. It
was apparently at that time that the boys were first exposed to the Confucian
classics in the Chinese language.
In August 1900,
Sac was appointed by the imperial court to serve as a clerk for the provincial
examinations in Thanh Hoa, a provincial capital almost five hundred kilometers
north of the imperial capital. The assignment was considered an honor, since cu
nhan were not usually allowed to serve as proctors. Sac's elder son, Khiem,
went with him; Cung remained with his mother in Hué. On his return from Thanh
Hoa to Hué, Sac stopped briefly in his home village of Kim Lien to build a tomb
for his parents.
The decision was
costly. Back in Hué, his wife had given birth to her fourth child, a boy named
Nguyen Sinh Xin (from xin, meaning literally "to beg"). But
the ordeal weakened her already fragile constitution, and despite the help of a
local doctor she became ill and died on February 10, 1901. Neighbors later
recalled that during the Têt (the local version of the lunar new year)
holidays, the young Cung ran crying from house to house asking for milk to feed
the baby, and that for weeks his normally sunny disposition turned somber.
On hearing the
news of his wife's death, Sac returned immediately to Hué to pick up his
children and take them back to Hoang Tru village, where he resumed his
teaching. For a while, young Cung continued to study with his father, but
eventually Sac sent him to a distant relative on his mother's side, a scholar
named Vuong Thuc Do. By then, little Cung had begun to make significant
progress in his studies. He was able to recognize quite a few Chinese
characters—the essential medium for a Confucian education and still used to
write the colloquial Vietnamese language—and enjoyed practicing them. It was
clear that the boy was quick-witted and curious, but his father was concerned
that he sometimes neglected his studies and sought out other amusements. Cung's
new instructor may have been some help in that regard. Vuong Thuc Do genuinely
loved his students and reportedly never beat them—apparently quite unusual in
his day—and he regaled his proteges with stories of the righteous heroes of the
past, one of whom was his own older brother, who had fought with Phan Dinh
Phung's Can Vuong movement against the French.
After a few
months in Hoang Tru, Sac returned to Hué; his mother-in-law, Nguyen Thi Kep,
kept the children. Sac's daughter, Nguyen Thi Thanh, who had stayed in the
village with her grandmother when the rest of the family moved to Hué, was now
fully grown but had not married, so she remained at home to reduce the burden on
the family. Cung helped out in the house and garden, but still had time to
play. In summertime he joined his friends in fishing in the local ponds, flying
kites (many years later, local residents would recall that when on windless
days many of his friends quickly grew discouraged, Cung would still try to keep
his kite in the air), and climbing the many hills in the vicinity. The most
memorable was Mount Chung, on the summit of which sat the temple of Nguyen Duc
Du, a general of the thirteenth century who had fought against an invading
Mongol army. It was here, too, where the patriotic scholar Vuong Thuc Mau, at
whose doorstep Sac had first discovered his love of learning years before, had
formed a band of rebels in 1885 to fight under the banner of the Can Vuong
movement. From the heights of Mount Chung, climbers had a breathtaking view of
rice fields, stands of bamboo and palm trees, and the long blue-gray line of
the mountains to the west. There was only one sad interlude in this, the
happiest period of young Cung's childhood. His younger brother Xin continued to
be sickly, and died at the age of only one year.
Back in Hué,
Nguyen Sinh Sac applied to retake the imperial examinations and this time he
earned the degree of doctorate, second class (known in Vietnamese as pho
bang). The news caused a sensation in Hoang Tru, as well as in Sac's native
village of Kim Lien. Since the mid-seventeenth century, the villages in their
area had reportedly produced almost two hundred bachelor's and master's degree
holders, but he was the first to earn the pho bang degree. On his
return, the residents of Hoang Tru planned a ceremonial entry into the village,
but Sac, whose dislike of pomp and circumstance was now becoming pronounced,
again declined the honor. Despite his protests, the village arranged a banquet
to celebrate the occasion. At his request, however, some of the food was
distributed to the poor.
According to
tradition, the honor of claiming a successful examination candidate went to the
home village of the candidate's father. In Sac's case, of course, this meant
that the village that could now label itself "a civilized spot, a literary
location" (dat van vat, chon thi tu) was his father's birthplace of
Kim Lien, rather than Hoang Tru, where he now resided. To reward their native
son, the local authorities of Kim Lien had used public funds to erect a small
wood and thatch house on public land to entice him to live there. Sac complied,
using it as a new home for himself and his three surviving children. It was
slightly larger than his house in Hoang Tru, consisting of three living rooms,
with one room reserved for the family water buffalo and a small room containing
an altar for Hoang Thi Loan. A couple of acres of rice land were included with
the house, as well as a small garden, where Sac planted sweet potatoes.
The award of apho
bang degree was a signal honor in traditional Vietnamese society and often
brought the recipient both fame and fortune, usually in the form of an official
career. Nguyen Sinh Sac, however, had no desire to pursue a career in the
bureaucracy, especially in a time of national humiliation. Refusing the offer
of an official appointment at court on the grounds that he was still in
mourning for the death of his wife, Sac decided to stay in Kim Lien, where he
opened a small school to teach the classics. The monetary rewards for such work
were minimal, and Sac contributed to his financial difficulties by giving
generously to the poor residents in the village. Sac did adopt one concession
to his new status, however, taking on the new name Nguyen Sinh Huy, or
"born to honor."
(Continues...)
(C) 2000 William J. Duiker All
rights reserved. ISBN: 0-7868-6387-0
'Half Lenin, Half Gandhi'
A biography of Ho Chi Minh seeks to
illuminate the leader who for all his prominence preferred to remain a cipher.
Related Link
By
FRANCES FITZGERALD
By WILLIAM J. DUIKER
Hyperion
ot.com/-HSpIogmKLM0/T-Zh1qTJ-bI/AAAAAAAAAR8/pST4Ht78k8Y/s1600/CB17.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">
<
 
HO CHI MINH
|
By William J. Duiker.
|
Illustrated. 695 pp. New York:
|
Hyperion. $35.
 |
onfucian
humanist and Communist revolutionary, the architect of Vietnamese independence
and of the successful struggle against the French, the United States and the
Saigon government, Ho Chi Minh was one of the most influential political
leaders of the 20th century. Yet even after his death in 1969 -- and for all
the years the American troops fought in Vietnam -- he remained a shadowy
figure, his life and career shrouded in myth and in the myriad guises he
assumed during his many years in exile and in the maquis of Vietnam. As the
French journalist Jean Lacouture wrote in his 1967 biography, ''Everything
known about Ho's life prior to 1941 is fragmentary, controversial and
approximate.'' Thanks to William J. Duiker's magnificent new biography, this is
no longer the case.
A retired professor of history who
served as a United States foreign service officer in Saigon in the mid-1960's,
Duiker spent over 20 years gleaning new information from interviews and from
archives in Vietnam, China, Russia and the United States. Other Western
historians have come closer to Ho as a person and to the cultural context of
his revolution, but Duiker has managed not only to fill in the missing pieces
of Ho's life but to provide the best account of Ho as a diplomat and a
strategist.
The Vietnam War -- as we call it --
was a watershed in 20th-century American history, and we assume it was one in
the history of Vietnam. But as Duiker's biography reminds us, the major problem
for the Vietnamese, as for many others on this planet, was how to respond to
the colonial power and the destruction of traditional society. Ho Chi Minh
dedicated his life to this task.
Ho's childhood lay in a world lost
in time. Born in 1890, just five years after the French consolidated their
control over all of Vietnam, Ho -- whose given name was Nguyen Tat Thanh --
grew up in Nghe An province, on the narrow and mountainous coast of
north-central Vietnam. One of the most beautiful regions of the country, it was
also one of the poorest and most rebellious. Ho's father, Nguyen Sinh Sac, was
a scholar from a peasant family who managed to work his way up through the
imperial examination system. Under his tutelage, Ho studied the classical
Chinese texts that taught governance as the Dao of Confucius. According to
Duiker, Sac was well acquainted with the scholars Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu
Trinh, the most important Vietnamese nationalists in the first two decades of
the century. Like many of the patriotic scholar-gentry, Sac refused to serve at
court during a time of national humiliation, and by 1905 it had become clear to
him that the imperial system, preserved by the French, was inadequate to cope
with the new realities. That year he sent Ho off to a Franco-Vietnamese school
with the admonition of the 15th-century scholar Nguyen Trai that one must
understand the enemy in order to defeat him.
When Ho entered the prestigious
National Academy in Hue in 1907, he was already a rebel. The following year he
was thrown out of school for lending support to peasants demonstrating against
high agricultural taxes and corvee labor. Pursued by the police, he traveled
south, taking jobs where he could. In 1911 he signed on as an assistant cook on
a steamer bound for France, under the name of Ba -- the first of his 50 or more
aliases. ''I wanted to become acquainted with French civilization to see what
meaning lay in those words,'' he later told a Soviet journalist.
Ho's travels took him to ports in
Asia and Africa, to New York and London. He stayed for some time in New York,
working as a laborer and going to meetings of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro
Improvement Trust in Harlem. In London he landed a job as a pastry cook under
Auguste Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel. Toward the end of World War I he
settled in Paris, the heart of the French empire. While earning his living as a
photo retoucher, he formed an association of Vietnamese émigrés and denounced
France's treatment of its colonies at gatherings of the French Socialist Party.
In 1919 he presented a petition to the Allied governments at the Versailles
conference, asking them to apply President Woodrow Wilson's principle of
self-determination to Vietnam. Only the French police paid attention to the
petition and its author, ''Nguyen Ai Quoc'' (''Nguyen the Patriot''). They
followed Ho everywhere, though ''Nguyen the Patriot'' was a penniless scribe, a
frail young man in ill-fitting suits who cut a Chaplinesque figure.
Ho came to Marxism in the summer of
1920, via Lenin's ''Theses on the National and Colonial Questions.'' He had
read Marxist works before, but, as Duiker explains, Lenin's arguments about the
connection between capitalism and imperialism and about the importance of
nationalist movements in Asia and Africa to world revolution struck him
forcefully, setting him ''on a course that transformed him from a simple
patriot with socialist leanings into a Marxist revolutionary.'' When the French
Socialist Party split over the issue of joining Lenin's Third International at
its 1921 congress, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party.
Still writing as Nguyen the Patriot, he argued not only that Communism could be
applied to Asia but that it was in keeping with Asian traditions based on ideas
of community and social equality.
For three years Ho pressed the new
party for action on the colonial question, but the French Communists proved to
be ''Eurocentric,'' as Duiker delicately puts it, so in 1924 he went to Moscow
at the invitation of the Comintern. The Soviet leadership was, however,
preoccupied by its own internal struggles, and it took Ho almost a year to
persuade officials to send him to southern China, where an uneasy alliance
between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists would permit him to begin
organizing the Vietnamese.
Ho Chi Minh spent the next 15 years
working for revolution in Vietnam as an agent of the Comintern. According to
Duiker's original and highly detailed account of this period, Ho's emphasis on
nationalism and his patient, pragmatic approach to organizing often put him at
odds with Moscow. Yet he singlemindedly pursued his own agenda, waiting out
periods of adversity and seizing opportunities as they arose. In Canton, Ho
published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League and set
up a training institute that attracted students from all over Vietnam. Along
with Marxism-Leninism he taught his own brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift,
prudence, respect for learning, modesty and generosity -- virtues that, as
Duiker notes, had far more to do with Confucian morality than with Leninism. To
his students Ho seemed to embody these qualities, and the teaching of his
precepts later became a distinguishing feature of the Vietnamese revolution.
In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began
to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued
by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow. He was sent by the
Comintern to France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two
years organizing Vietnamese expatriates. In 1930 he returned to China and
worked as he could while hiding out from the Chinese police and the French
Sûreté. Arrested in Hong Kong by the British, he spent a year in jail, and had
once more to escape to Moscow. But there was little help to be found there. In
the midst of Stalin's purges the Comintern repudiated Lenin's theses, insisted
that the Asian Communist parties pursue the wholly unrealistic goal of a
international proletarian revolution and ordered the Vietnamese to form an
''Indochinese'' Communist Party -- though the word signified nothing more nor
less than the French colonial project in the region. Ho was personally
criticized, investigated and sidelined.
In 1938 Ho's fortunes changed. With
the rise of Nazi Germany the Soviets changed their line on nationalism and
called for an alliance of ''progressive forces'' to oppose fascism. At the same
time, Chiang Kai-shek created a united front with the Communist Party to resist
Japanese aggression. His strategy vindicated, Ho returned to head the
Vietnamese movement, and with the Japanese invasion of Indochina, he created a
nationalist front of workers and peasants for the independence of Vietnam, the
Vietminh. In 1941 he re-entered the country he had not seen in 30 years to set
up a guerrilla base in the mountains.
BOOK
EXCERPT
"The time was the late summer of 1945, shortly after
the surrender of Japanese imperial forces throughout Asia. The place was
Hanoi, onetime capital of the Vietnamese empire, now a sleepy colonial city
in the heart of the Red River delta in what was then generally known as
French Indochina. For two decades, Nguyen the Patriot had aroused devotion,
fear, and hatred among his compatriots and the French colonial officials who
ruled over them. Now, under a new name, he introduced himself to the
Vietnamese people as the first president of a new country."
-- from the first chapter of 'Ho
Chi Minh'
|
In August 1945, three months after
the Japanese deposed the Vichy French administration and just two days after
the Japanese surrender to the Allies, the Vietminh moved into Hanoi, and amid
cheering crowds Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent country. But that
was just the beginning.
Ho Chi Minh did not want war with
the French. He did everything he could to prevent it. He courted United States
support through the O.S.S. officers he had cultivated during the war -- going
so far as to offer the United States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. He created a
coalition government, reined in the hotheads and agreed to accept a French
military presence and membership in the French Union so long as the French
agreed to the eventual goal of Vietnamese independence. But after the French
humiliations in World War II even the French Socialists could not accept the
idea of giving up the colonies. So at the beginning of 1947 Ho went back to the
maquis. He had told his friend Jean Sainteny, ''You will kill ten of my men
while we will kill one of yours, but you will be the ones to end up
exhausted.'' And so it was.
During the French war, as during
World War II, Ho and his companions lived in caves or thatched shelters in the
mountains, moving frequently to avoid French patrols, often hungry, often
suffering from malaria or dysentery. In 1954 the Vietminh won a decisive
victory at Dien Bien Phu, but still the war dragged on. Mao Zedong had begun to
provide the poorly equipped Vietminh with training and war matériel, and the
United States had begun to finance the French war effort. The great powers were
now heavily involved in Vietnam, and in 1954 they met in Geneva to negotiate a
settlement.
Under pressure from Beijing and
Moscow, the Vietminh agreed to a cease-fire and to the division of the country
into two regroupment zones at the 17th parallel. By the terms of the accord an
election was to be held in two years to unify the country. However, Beijing and
Moscow did not guarantee the election, the United States did not sign the
agreement and, soon after the conference ended, Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles announced that the United States would begin to foster a non-Communist
state in the South. In the view of Vietnam's revolutionaries, the Geneva
Conference was the first step on the road to the second Indochina war.
In Hanoi, Ho lived almost as simply
as he had in the maquis. Refusing to install himself in the governor general's
residence, he inhabited the gardener's cottage and then a house on stilts
beside a pond. He was President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but the
title he preferred was Uncle Ho. Often he could be seen in his worn khaki
uniform and sandals talking with peasants or groups of delighted children. To
many foreign observers there seemed to be more than a touch of artifice in his
self-presentation. After all, he was a sophisticate who charmed his
interlocutors in many languages and a man not immune to praise or the love of women.
(While in China he had, Duiker tells us, been married twice, and in Hanoi he
fathered a child.) Duiker does not explain Ho's play-acting, but then there is
much about Confucianism that eludes him. In the Confucian tradition, the
emperor must provide a model of correct behavior. By rejecting imperial
extravagance, Ho was demonstrating the Dao of his revolution to his countrymen,
its break with the past.
In the late 1950's and early 60's Ho
spent much of his time abroad engaged in the delicate negotiations required to
bring the Soviet Union as well as China to the aid of his government as the
Sino-Soviet split deepened. But his role was increasingly a ceremonial one. Le
Duan, a southerner who had spent many years in French prisons, had seized the
reins of power and proceeded to marginalize Ho and his long-term companions --
among them Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. Duiker suggests that Ho's decline in authority
began during the brutal land reform campaign of 1955-56, at a time of rising
Chinese influence over the revolution. According to Duiker, Ho was not directly
involved in the campaign, but ''his prestige as an all-knowing and all-caring
leader had been severely damaged.''
During the early 1960's Ho warned
his colleagues against launching a premature uprising in South Vietnam and
against overemphasizing the military struggle. He wanted to avoid bringing the
United States into the war, and until the Johnson administration began bombing
the North, he remained hopeful that Washington would withdraw its support for
the regime in Saigon. But it was not to be. When American troops began to
arrive in Vietnam in 1965, Ho was a 75-year-old man and no longer in charge of
his government.
''Ho Chi Minh was half Lenin and
half Gandhi,'' Duiker writes. Ho always sought to achieve his objectives
without resort to military force and, unlike some of his colleagues, he had a
cleareyed view of international and domestic realities, a flexible, pragmatic
approach and the patience and subtlety to seek diplomatic solutions. Unfortunately,
as Duiker might have added, neither the French nor the American leadership had
the sense to respond in kind.
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