Radicalism: Context

When the Vietnamese revolution broke out in 1945 it was dominated by the Communist-led Viet Minh. Due to the ‘triumph’ of Marxism-Leninism over rival anti-colonial ideologies little has been written on the radical movements that subsequently failed to mobilize the majority of the population. The period in which Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution focuses begins in the 1920s; this period is traditionally viewed as a transition between the scholar-gentry of Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh’s generation to the emergence of the Indochinese Communist Party and Nguyen Ai Quoc/Ho Chi Minh in the 1930s.

The generation of Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh were concerned with questions of long-term modernization and Westernization in Vietnam as a result of French colonialism. While Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh were ultimately seeking the same goal, an independent Vietnam, their arguments were characteristically different. Phan Boi Chau can be characterized as an ‘anti-imperialist’ determined to throw the French out completely whereas Phan Chu Trinh can be viewed as ‘anti-feudal’, seeking to learn from the French in order to later overthrow them. According to David Marr, these “men set the guidelines for most later debate on anticolonial tactics, strategy, and doctrine. The next generation would be better equipped intellectually and would have the advantage of improved objective circumstances . . .” as well as learning from the past mistakes of their predecessors.”[1] David Marr characterizes the period 1925-1945 as the merging of Phan Boi Chau’s ‘anti-imperialism’ and Phan Chu Trinh’s ‘anti-feudalism’ into one stream of anticolonial thought exemplified by Ho Chi Minh.

David G. Marr’s Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 and Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 provide the standard views of this period of intellectual foment beginning with the above-mentioned Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh. Marr states that the “twentieth-century history of Vietnam must be understood within the context of fundamental changes in political and social consciousness among a significant segment of the Vietnamese populace in the period 1920-45.”[2] While these changes are not decisive they serve as a precondition for mass mobilization and successful strategies for a people’s war. One drawback to Marr’s texts is the centralized focus on the communist intelligentsia and the lack of focus on the non-communist intelligentsia. This gap in the history of Vietnamese radicalism has been taken up by Hue-Tam Ho Tai in Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution.

---

[1] David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925, 275.

[2] David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, 2.

Radicalism: Text

Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution examines the role of radicalism during the early phase of the Vietnamese Revolution and “its eventual displacement by Marxism-Leninism as the dominant force in reshaping anticolonial politics and as the source of language for discussing cultural, social, and political issues.”[1] The author defines radicalism as “an essentially nonideological current of reaction, both to colonial rule and to native accommodation to that rule, whose chief characteristics were iconoclasm and the marriage of the personal and the political.”[2] Radicalism as labeled by Tai emerged during the mid-1920s in a time when many urban Vietnamese youth left home searching for knowledge and freedom overseas in countries such as, France, China, and Japan. Tai demonstrates two intertwining themes evident in a series of student strikes that led to the mass departure of these young students searching for answers: (1) the desire for freedom, in its various forms, by the newly urbanized and Westernized Vietnamese youth and (2) searching for the future of Vietnam and the Vietnamese.

Using a variety of sources, Tai seeks to analyze the relationship between political culture and cultural politics and the relationship between rhetoric and action in the 1920s. Some of the sources Tai utilizes are journals, newspapers, and contemporary fiction written in French and Vietnamese, official records from the French archives, and what she calls personal sources—her father’s unpublished memoirs, his published works, interviews with her parents, other family members and their contemporaries. Being the child of two revolutionaries from the 1920s offers Tai a valuable insight that not many scholars can lay claim to.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai makes Nguyen An Ninh, a non-Marxist intellectual, the central figure of her study in order to challenge the assumption that the Vietnamese Revolution can only be understood in terms of the history of communism. Tai states that Nguyen An Ninh epitomized the experience of exile in France for young Vietnamese during the 1920s. Ninh rejected Governor General Sarraut’s argument that national sovereignty was the end result of a long, slow process of political maturation. He argued that the crisis facing Vietnamese society was not one of tradition versus modernity but rather a crisis of moral knowledge. Ninh wanted “Vietnamese youth to reinvent itself, to create its own destiny; not merely to turn its back on the past but to look forward to the future.”[3] Aside from focusing on Nguyen An Ninh, Tai also looks at other non-Marxist revolutionaries such as Pham Quynh and Bui Quang Chieu.

A central theme of Tai’s monograph is the impact of colonial rule on the education system of Vietnam—a country previously dominated by the Confucian examination system. While the French never succeeded in replacing the Confucian structure with a logical Western alternative, they were successful in creating a demand for non-traditional schools that were geared towards producing modern scholars that would serve in the colonial bureaucracy. A small number of Vietnamese were allowed to attend French-language schools in Vietnam while an even smaller number were allowed to achieve a higher education in France. The French also emphasized the importance of teaching quoc ngu (Romanized Vietnamese script). Through this ‘New Learning’, young Vietnamese began to see parallel struggles in both their national and personal lives—the national struggle for independence from colonial rule and the personal struggle for independence from tradition. Out of these struggles developed the radicalism of the 1920s.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai suggests that Marxism-Leninism triumph over radicalism can be attributed to a “peculiar conjunction of international trends and domestic problems.”[4] The majority of Vietnamese revolutionaries did not convert to Marxism-Leninism until the late 1920s, a time in which other revolutionary organizations were in disorder. Also, as Tai points out, upon the failure of the United Front in China the Comintern adopted a more revolutionary strategy that was directed at agrarian countries going through decolonization.

Upon reading Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s treatment of the non-communist revolutionary movements, it becomes understandable why general histories of Vietnam omit the non-communist anticolonial leaders during this period.[5] It does not make for easy, clean history. Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution is well-researched and received positive reviews across the board, but it is extremely dense and complicated. There existed numerous strands of radicalism throughout this period all supported with their own outlets for propaganda—newspapers, journals, pamphlets, etc. These various strands and thinkers may also have played a large role in the ‘triumph’ of the ICP as the major revolutionary force to come out of this period. Also the Vietnamese communists were more attune with the peasantry whereas the radicals of the 1920s came from the urban, educated elite and were detached from the village, unlike their predecessors Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh.

---

[1] Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 1.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 73.

[4] Ibid, 4.

[5] Excluding of course Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh.

Radicalism: Subtexts

William J. Duiker. Vietnam: Revolution in Transition. 2^nd ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Duiker is a former US Foreign Service officer and current professor of History at Penn State University. This work focuses on the Vietnamese revolution, which Duiker states from start to finish “was strongly influenced by the strategy and tactics of Marxism-Leninism.”[1] Aside from Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh, Duiker does not recognize the non-Marxist-Leninist strains of the revolution that evolved during the same time period. The author does mention Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution in the written work as well as an annotated bibliography, but the revolutionary figures that Tai discusses fail to appear in Duiker’s work. This work exemplifies the traditional narrative of tracing the histories of the successful revolutionaries—those that won, the Marxist-Leninists.

Truong Buu Lam. Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900-1931. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

The author is an associate professor of history at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Truong Buu Lam has collected twenty documents that were written during the late-colonial period of Vietnamese history. The documents vary from propaganda pamphlets, open letters to government officials, manifestos from political or cultural organizations, newspaper columns, poems, and more. These documents have been translated from the original Vietnamese, French, or classical Chinese by the author and given introductions in order to contextualize the documents. This anthology provides a glimpse into the conflicting ideologies and political struggles experienced by various political activists during this time period. Authors include Phan Boi Chau, Phan Chu Trinh, Nguyen An Ninh, Nguyen Thuong Huyen, and Pham Quynh—all of which are discussed by Hue-Tam Ho Tai in Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. This work serves as a nice companion to Tai’s book because it provides full English translations of documents written by many of the radicals she discusses.

David G. Marr. Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Marr, Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow in the Division of Pacific and Asian History at the Australian National University, has written extensively on Vietnam—in particular the history of 20^th century Vietnam. This work looks at the anticolonial scholar-gentry of Vietnam between 1885 and 1925, particularly focusing on Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh—two of the more popular and well-known Vietnamese nationalists during this era. Marr points out that these two men, despite their differences in ideology “set the guidelines for most later debate on anticolonial tactics, strategy, and doctrine.”[2] Phan Boi Chau wanted to end foreign exploitation of Vietnam and remove the colonial overlords whereas Phan Chu Trinh was more interested in the modernization of Vietnam, which would eventually lead to Vietnamese independence—both wanted the same end but by different means. While Marr does discuss other radicals during this time period, the majority of this volume focuses on the afore-mentioned figures and how their work influenced Nguyen Ai Quoc, later Ho Chi Minh. Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s work helps to bring Marr’s ‘minor actors’ more to the forefront and paints a much fuller picture of Vietnamese radical thought during the early twentieth century.

David G. Marr. Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Marr’s thesis in Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 is that in order to understand the political and strategic developments of 20^th century Vietnam, one must contextualize the period in relation to the “fundamental changes in political and social consciousness among a significant segment of the Vietnamese populace in the period 1920-45.”[3] Marr points out, as does Hue-Tam Ho Tai, that the intelligentsia of the 1920s faced some of the same problems as the scholar-gentry schooled under the traditional Confucian system, however the social and economic context had changed as did the education and types of thought utilized by the new intelligentsia—one that was a product of the French colonial system. Marr’s Vietnamese Tradition on Trial serves as a supplement to Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution because different aspects of radical thought and thinkers are emphasized—while Marr and Tai discuss some of the same personalities, Marr focuses more on the Marxist-Leninist school of thought as they gave birth to the eventual revolution.

R.B. Smith. “Bui Quang Chieu and the Constitutionalist Party in French Cochinchina, 1917-30.” Modern Asian Studies, 3, no. 2 (1969): 131-150.

Smith (1939-2000), former professor of history at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS), trained in medieval English history before becoming one of the first scholars/historians to focus on Vietnam in the late 1960s. Smith wrote heavily on the Second Indochinese War (American-Vietnam War) and approached it from an internationalist perspective, which is evident in this article. Smith ends his article with suggestions for future studies by pointing out that very few American scholars have shown interest in the Constitutionalist Party led by Bui Quang Chieu, which he labels as the only anti-colonialist/pro-independence group that showed any real interest in developing a truly representative assembly with the power to bring about Vietnam’s eventual modernization. While this article is rather old, it still proves beneficial in supplementing Hue-Tam Ho Tai’s work on the early Vietnamese radicals of the 1920s and 1930s—of which Bui Quang Chieu is one of the subjects of her study.

Nguyen Khac Vien. Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam. Edited by David Marr and Jayne Werner. Translated by Linda Yarr, Jayne Werner, and Tran Tuong Nhu. Berkeley, CA: Indochina Resource Center, 1975 (Orig. pub. 1974).

Vien, the Communist son of a Confucian scholar, brings to light the underpinnings of how Confucianism left its mark on certain aspects of Marxist thought in both China and Vietnam. In translating a selection of Nguyen Khac Vien’s writings, the goal of the editors and translators was to foster a greater understanding of the Vietnamese “enemy” by the Western public [written at a time when the Vietnamese were considered enemies of America]. Hue-Tam Ho Tai mentions Vien in passing, most likely because Vien’s radicalism was of the Marxist-Leninist bent and she is attempting to show the ‘other side’ of Vietnamese radicalism. Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam is part of the traditional narrative of the years preceding the Vietnamese Revolution of the 1940s and alternative modes of thought in the 1920s and 1930s.

Sarah Whitney Womack. “Colonialism and the Collaborationist Agenda: Pham Quynh, Print Culture, and the Politics of Persuasion in Colonial Vietnam.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2003.

Pham Quynh thought of himself as a patriot, a visionary, and a social revolutionary, other Vietnamese revolutionaries and historians have not shared this view—labeling him a collaborator of the French colonial period. Pham Quynh was the publisher of Southern Wind, a journal based in Hanoi sponsored by French Indochina’s Governor General Albert Sarraut in an attempt to win over northern neo-traditionalists. In her dissertation, Womack argues that indigenous actors that collaborated with colonial authorities were important negotiators between colonial states and colonial societies and that acts of collaboration arose from the personal agendas of those involved. Using Pham Quynh, the ‘arch-collaborator,’ as an example, Womack explores how accommodation-based models can further our understanding of colonialism and colonial societies. As Pham Quynh’s model was ultimately a failure, Womack also explores “the ways in which even failed histories shape the present, and how parts of them are salvaged and incorporated into other, more successful ones.”[4]

---

[1] William J. Duiker, Vietnam: Revolution in Transition, 226.

[2] David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925, 275.

[3] David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, 2.

[4] Sarah Whitney Womack, “Colonialism and the Collaborationist Agenda,” 218.