Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution 1885-1954

 Figures

Maps 

Acknowledgements

A Note on Terms

Abbreviations

Introduction

1  The Birth Of Vietnamese Anticolonial Bases in Asia (1885-1925)

2  The Regional Networks of Vietnamese Communism(1925-1939)

3  Thai Break (1940-45)

4  Building Indochinese Links to Thailnad (1945-46)

5  The Southeast Asian Commercial Networks of the DRV (1946-51)

6  The DRV's Non-Communist vision of southeast Asia (1945--48)

7  Reviving the ICP's Southeast Asian Revolutionary Networks (1948-50)

8  The Cold War and the Closing of the Western Front (1950-54)

FIGURES

1. Tombstone of dang thuc Hua and the Martyrs in Thailand , Udon Thani 

2. Ayuthia and the Cochin-Chinese Quarter,17th Cenntury 

3. Vienamese Catholic Tombstone

4.Entry to Ban Yuan, Bangkok

5.  Special Birthday Publication on President Ho Chi Minh 

6.Women's Viet kieu Defence Forces in Savannakher, 1945

7. lao-Viet Commemoration of The Formation of the lao Issara Government

8. Nguyen Thanh Son 1950

9. Banknote with Translation in Chinese , Loa and khmre 

10. Viet Minh Arms Workshop in Southern Vietnam, 1948

11. Drawing Commemorating the Formation of the Southeast Asia league and its Regional Garderners

12. Ho Chi Minh's Plea for Recognition from All the Governments of the world 

January 1950 

13. Meeting Commemorating the Foundation of the Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos Alliance 1950

14. General Nguyen Binh 1948

15.  Tombstone of Pham Hong thai and Chinese Martyrs, near Canton

    MAPS

1  Thailand and Vietnam in southeast Asia 

2  Vietnamese Emigration to Siam ( 17th-20th Centuries)

3  The ICP's Peninsular Implantation (1930-36)

4  Thailand and The DRV's Southeast Asian Trading Operations (1046-51)

5  Reorienting the Southeast Asian Networks towards Indochina and southern China (1949-54)

Acknowledgements

This reflection on the Southeast Asian nature of the Vietnamese revolution and war between 1885 and 1954 has its roots in the Masters degree thesis I completed under the direction of Professor David Marr in 1991 at the Australian National University. As a not so anonymous reader for Curzon Press, Professor Marr would later reread the longer manuscript version that forms this book. I am grateful to him for his careful, thoughtful and constructive reading of my manuscript. If it is true that only I can be held accountable for any interpretative shortcomings or factual errors present in this work, it is equally true that any merit that happens to be found in the pages that follow must be traced back to his early supervision and inspiration.

I also owe an equally large debt to my current PhD thesis advisor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (IVe section, en Sorbonne), Professor Nguyen The Anh. He was one of the first to urge me to revise, rework and publish my manuscript as part of my current research on the Asian context of war in Vietnam in the 20th century. Thanks to discussions with him during and outside of his seminar on Vietnamese and Southeast Asian history, especially for the 18th and 19th centuries, I was able to fine-tune many of my methodological and historical approaches used in this book for the 20th century.

On that same note, the support of Claudine Salmon of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the former head of the group Archipel has sustained my enthusiasm for the task, and her erudite writings on the Chinese in Southeast Asia have been particularly inspirational. Similarly, Professor Denys Lombard's seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales on 'Networks and Synchronisms' made it clear to me that geography counts.

When it comes to Stein Tønnesson and Gerald Jackson at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, I could not have asked for more supportive, competent and above all friendly editorial help. It is not at all certain that this book would have seen the light of day without their assistance, especially the indefatigable corrections and invaluable criticisms of Tønnesson and the heroic patience of Jackson. I put them both to the test.

Finally, I owe an enormous debt to an international assortment of friends, colleagues and professors living in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Australia, France, the United States, Great Britain, Germany and no doubt elsewhere by now. I would be doing them a terrible disservice just to list them by name, without knowing how.

The political history of the world has shown that geography has often been an important element – if not a decisive one – in the process towards the final configuration of a region and in the relationship between its components, the sovereign (or non-sovereign) states of that region. In the case of the birth of an independent nation, the physical proximity of a neighbouring country could, to a certain extent, become an important factor in consolidating the geopolitical condition sought by the new nation.

(Suryono Darusman, Singapore and the Indonesian Revolution, 1945–1950)

It rained as the funeral procession moved slowly down the road towards Ban Chik, a small village located just outside the northeastern Thai town of Udon Thani. Dozens of Vietnamese families, friends and militants gathered to bid farewell to an individual who had been among them for so long. The man to be buried was Dang Thuc Hua. The year etched in red on his tombstone today is 1932. Over two decades earlier, this Vietnamese scholar-patriot had clandestinely left his native birthplace of Nghe An province to work with the famous anticolonialist leader, Phan Boi Chau. Hua sailed across the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand, moving through the ports of Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo before finally landing in Bangkok in 1909. While he did not know it at the time, he would spend the rest of his life in Thailand, planting rice, training youths and building bases among the Vietnamese communities there. Over the years his hard work and family connections laid the foundation for important rearguards for the anticolonial movement and formed an integral part of what would later become the western bulwark of a larger Asian revolutionary network for Vietnamese communism and war. 'When the revolution is being built up', Hua liked to tell his young disciples, 'its leadership must be abroad; but when the revolutionary movement breaks out, the leadership must be inside the country.'1

Dang Thuc Hua never returned to his native village. Like many Vietnamese revolutionary émigrés circulating through Asia during the colonial period, he was buried in a cemetery outside Indochina, just beyond the Mekong River, in northeast Thailand, while many of his associates were laid to rest in graveyards in southern China and Japan.

But neither Hua nor his tombstone has been forgotten. Since the early 1990s, Vietnamese diplomats stationed in Bangkok have been making an annual pilgrimage to this small cemetery in Ban Chik. There they pay their respects to Hua, whose remains were recently exhumed from the earth beneath his original, crumbling tombstone and transferred to a newly constructed "Tomb of the Martyrs" (Mo Liet Si). Inscribed below his name are those of other patriots who died in Thailand and the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) funded the erection of this heroic monument in Ban Chik in the early 1990s.3   

While Vietnamese, Asian and Western historians have written extensively on the history of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement inside the country, we still know very little about those who lived, worked and sometimes died in Asia. Hua's burial in Ban Chik is helpful in this sense, for his tombstone brings us into the wider, regional currents of Vietnamese history during the period of European domination. In many ways, this Vietnamese graveyard provides us with the opportunity to follow him back in time and space to explore how Thailand became the centre of a larger Vietnamese revolutionary network in Southeast Asia during the colonial period, the subject of this book.

   

Suryono Darusman, the Southeast Asian context of the Vietnamese revolution on

This emphasis on the Southeast Asian context of the Vietnamese revolution may come as a surprise to both Western and Asian readers accustomed to seeing this country's history presented in its current national form, packaged in its French Indochinese past or analysed in terms of its relations with one 'great power' or another. Although the recent disintegration of Soviet-dominated communism in Eastern Europe has led many observers to herald Vietnam's 'return' to a Southeast Asian fold dominated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),4 surprisingly little has been written on Vietnam's ties to the region either during the colonial period or in a time of war.

Until recently, most scholars5 have argued that the Vietnamese knew very little about what went on in Asia. While this may have been the case in the upper reaches of the Nguyen Court on the eve of European colonisation, it would be dangerous to project this Confucian ossification forwards and backwards in time and across all social categories. For anyone who has read Nguyen Truong To's late 19th-century reformist reflections on Siam and Japan; leafed through a few Vietnamese 'revolutionary memoirs' (hoi ky cach mang); glanced at the inventories of the military and colonial archives in Vietnam and France; or perused a few cultural journals like Phu Nu Tan Van [Modern Women's News] or Nam Phong [Southern Wind] is struck by the amount of material on Japan, India, China, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, as well as the maritime and overland routes connecting these points.6 This should come as no surprise.   

This should come as no surprise. Before European domination, Vietnamese rulers, scholars and especially traders and sailors had been in contact with their surrounding Asian world, as well as its cultures, commerce and the ideas it contained. The Indochinese wars of the late 18th century are a case in point. The late Chen Ching-ho has recently studied Vietnam's wartime commerce with Southeast Asia by focusing on the numerous trade and intelligence missions dispatched by Nguyen Phuc Anh (later crowned Gia Long) across the

 Ha Chau, the term used by the Nguyen Court to refer to the area represented by   

 Singapore, Penang, and Malacca.⁷ Unlike any Vietnamese monarch before him,⁸ Nguyen Anh had travelled widely throughout the Gulf of Siam and further in search of aid, troops, and even ideas from regional and international leaders, merchants, missionaries, pirates, and gun-runners.⁹ Yet rarely do we see the Asian context of the Vietnamese civil wars of the late 18th century. Ironically, both French colonial and Vietnamese communist historians forget too often that Pigneau de Béhaine was not the only one to help Gia Long ‘retake’ Vietnam from the Tay Son. The Thai monarch, Rama I, did too, as did Malay pirates and Chinese merchants, to say nothing of the Portuguese. And while Vietnamese nationalists of all ideological colours would later regret Gia Long’s reliance on ‘foreign’ aid, a recent study has shown us how his opponents, the Tay Son brothers, turned to southern Chinese warlords and pirates to procure arms, supplies and, above all, to run their navy.¹⁰ In the 18th century, the regional and political economies of war, perhaps more than anything else, were the driving forces.