Source: Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works (Hanoi, 1960-1962), Vol. 2
Biography of Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh, real name Nguyen Tat Thanh (1890-1969), Vietnamese Communist leader
and the principal force behind the Vietnamese struggle against French colonial
rule. Ho was born on May 19, 1890, in the village of Kimlien, Annam (central
Vietnam), the son of an official who had resigned in protest against French
domination of his country. Ho attended school in Hue and then briefly taught
at a private school in Phan Thiet. In 1911 he was employed as a cook on a French
steamship liner and thereafter worked in London and Paris. After World War I,
using the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), Ho engaged in radical
activities and was in the founding group of the French Communist party. He was
summoned to Moscow for training and, in late 1924, he was sent to Canton, China,
where he organized a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles. He was
forced to leave China when local authorities cracked down on Communist activities,
but he returned in 1930 to found the Indochinese Communist party (ICP). He stayed
in Hong Kong as representative of the Communist International. In June 1931
Ho was arrested there by British police and remained in prison until his release
in 1933. He then made his way back to the Soviet Union, where he reportedly
spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. In 1938 he returned to China
and served as an adviser with Chinese Communist armed forces. When Japan occupied
Vietnam in 1941, he resumed contact with ICP leaders and helped to found a new
Communist-dominated independence movement, popularly known as the Vietminh,
that fought the Japanese. In August 1945, when Japan surrendered, the Vietminh
seized power and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi.
Ho Chi Minh, now known by his final and best-known pseudonym (which means the
“Enlightener”), became president. The French were unwilling to grant independence
to their colonial subjects, and in late 1946 war broke out. For eight years
Vietminh guerrillas fought French troops in the mountains and rice paddies of
Vietnam, finally defeating them in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Ho, however, was deprived of his victory. Subsequent negotiations at Geneva
divided the country, with only the North assigned to the Vietminh. The DRV,
with Ho still president, now devoted its efforts to constructing a Communist
society in North Vietnam. In the early 1960s, however, conflict resumed in the
South, where Communist-led guerrillas mounted an insurgency against the U.S.-supported
regime in Saigon. Ho, now in poor health, was reduced to a largely ceremonial
role, while policy was shaped by others. On September 3, 1969, he died in Hanoi
of heart failure. In his honor, after the Communist conquest of the South in
1975, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Ho Chi Minh was not only the founder
of Vietnamese communism, he was the very soul of the revolution and of Vietnam's
struggle for independence. His personal qualities of simplicity, integrity,
and determination were widely admired, not only within Vietnam but elsewhere
as well.
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