William J. Duiker. Vietnam: Revolution in Transition. 2nd 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.” 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 20th 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.” 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 20th 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.” 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.”
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