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.” 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.” 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in French and Vietnamese, official records from the French archives, and what she calls personal sources—her father’s unpublished memoirs, his published works, interviews with her parents, other family members and their contemporaries.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.” 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.” 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. 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.
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