Chapter 2 Regional Networks of Vietnamese Communism (1925–39)

 Chapter 2  Regional Networks of Vietnamese Communism (1925–39)

When Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Canton in late 1924, he was largely a stranger to the Asian anti-colonial operations I have described so far. Indeed, Quoc’s arrival in Canton by way of Moscow gave away the fact that he was not of the Dong Du school. When he left Vietnam in 1911, he had first travelled to the West (Di Tay) by way of the Suez Canal, much like the man with whom he collaborated in Paris, Phan Chu Trinh. In Europe, Quoc would improve his French and learn a little English. It was also during his voyage to France that Quoc was converted to communism, convinced that it was the best way of liberating Vietnam from colonialism. In making this choice, however, Quoc would enter into an international revolutionary movement that would send him back to Asia by way of Moscow as one of the most important leaders of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau. He was charged specifically with promoting the revolution not only in Vietnam, but throughout much of what we call Southeast Asia today. Quoc aimed to align himself with the Viet kieu and the Hoa kieu. At the heart of this reorientation was Siam.

TAKING OVER THE DONG DU BASES

Quoc formed his first Asian revolutionary mission in Canton. He named it the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League (Viet Nam Thanh Nien Cach Mang Dong Chi Hoi) in 1925. Under his direct leadership but no doubt with the approval of revolutionary leaders in Moscow, this association marked a notable departure from earlier anticolonial groups. The Youth League attached greater importance to careful organisation and more finely honed political theory. Young Vietnamese studied political propoganda, cell formation and how to create mass bases. The study abroad programme of the Dong Du had never offered such theoretically oriented courses; until this point acquiring Japanese or KMT military techniques had always primed anticolonial minds. Within the confines of the Youth League, a young revolutionary could now take courses on such subjects as ‘National Revolution’, ‘Political Parties’, ‘Imperialism’ and ‘Peasants and Revolution’. Western and Asian foreign languages were also taught. Le Manh Trinh explains in his memoirs that his Youth League education provided him with a firm understanding of the First, Second and Third Internationals; how to mobilise the masses; speak in public; and disseminate effective propaganda. Inside Vietnam, Youth League cells expanded rapidly in urban centres in Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina. Following the Comintern’s Sixth World Congress in September 1928, the League became increasingly proletarianised as members began targeting the working classes in mines, factories and plantations.

Given the effectiveness of the French repression inside Indochina, Nguyen Ai Quoc grasped right away the importance of having bases in southern China and northeastern Siam, close to Vietnam but located just beyond the direct reach of the omnipresent French Sûreté. He also understood that Vietnamese émigrés in both these areas could serve as useful stepping-stones for grafting the Youth League on to the older bases of Dong Du. In practical terms, Viet Quest communities in southern China generated an important source of revenue for financing the Youth League's activities and provided it with a pool of much-needed recruits for underground revolutionary work. Vietnamese émigrés contributed to patriotic collections, helped young revolutionaries find part-time jobs or make the right connections to get into Chinese military academies. In 1925 Vietnamese spies reported to the French that Quoc wanted ‘above all’ to set up Youth League cells among the Vietnamese expatriates, soldiers and secretaries working for the French in southern China. Quoc also found able recruits among the thousands of Vietnamese working the railway between Lao Cai and Kunming or serving in the Garde Indigène in French concessions in China. In one instance, Quoc sent Ngo Than (of the Ngo family in Nakhon Phom or in the province) to contact Vietnamese soldiers working in the French concession of Shamen, while Quoc personally attended to training Vietnamese boys, cooks and sailors in and around Canton. In the form of four easy commandants, a Youth League elder explained to a group of Vietnamese ‘boys’ and ‘cooks’ how they could contribute to the patriotic cause:

1.boys, love one another;

2.don’t gamble and don’t smoke opium;

3.teach your comrades of the loss of our country and the shame that this is for all of us;

4.and organise yourself rapidly, for it is through organisation that the success of the revolution is built.

Like Phan Boi Chau, Quoc also relied on Vietnamese sailors and boys now circulating through the South China Sea in greater numbers to set his plans into motion.

Between 1925 and 1927 Quoc had considerable success in absorbing the Restoration Society’s bases and contacts in and around Canton. Of particular importance were the allies he won over in the persons of Ho Tung Mau and Le Hong Son, both of whom had been trained together in Saigon by Dang Thuc Hua. The first had been a confidant of Phan Boi Chau, while the second was a trusted ally of Prince Cuong De in Japan.7 Both Son and Mau had travelled extensively throughout Japan, Siam and China and knew the geography intimately. According to the French, Ho Tung Mau joined the Chinese Communist Party in March 1926, thereafter assuring a series of liaisons for Vietnamese and Chinese

“communists in Siam and China by way of Laos. Le Hong Son (aliases Le Van Phan and Tan Anh) had also joined the CCP in 1926. By winning the confidence of these two, Quoc was in a much stronger position to win over the support of wary émigré communities whose leaders may otherwise have balked at supporting the more radically oriented Youth League and at cooperating with a Vietnamese arriving from Moscow of all places. Together with Le Hong Phong, these men would become three of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s earliest allies in Asia.”

these contents were all the more important given that another, older patriot, Nguyen Hai Than, was very suspicious of Quoc’s communist credentials and secret contacts with Soviet advisers in Canton. It is often forgotten that Nguyen Hai Than was a man of considerable prestige in China in 1925. He had started his revolutionary career as a liaison agent for Phan Boi Chau. Had years of experience in the Dong Du and the Restoration Society, as well as important family contacts among the Vietnamese patriotic communities in Siam (thanks to his brother) and especially in southern China. Unlike Nguyen Ai Quoc, though, Than was a firm partisan of a violent, exclusively patriotic resistance to French colonialism in the spirit of the Restoration Society or the more militant Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dang or VNQDD). His vision of revolution had also been heavily influenced by the ideas of Sun Yat-sen, given the revolutionary channels within which he had been trained. Though he worked closely with Quoc in 1925 within the Youth League headquarters, it soon became clear that he wanted nothing to do with international proletarianism, the workers’ revolution or utopic talk of land reform.9 Faced with a rupture, it took all of Quoc’s personal skills to keep his relationship with Than on track.

“However, Phan Boi Chau’s arrest by the French in 1925 left close allies like Than in disarray, vulnerable to the effective communist–nationalist propaganda preached by Nguyen Ai Quoc. Than was further disadvantaged by the fact that his counterpart had an international organisation behind him. Soviet officers provided Quoc with a regular job, revolutionary training, the funds needed for his propaganda and organisational work at a crucial moment in the evolution of the Youth League. Soviet backing must also have provided him with a larger theoretical explanation of revolution and the world, no doubt useful in discussions with young Vietnamese intellectuals. Nguyen Hai Than had none of these funds, connections or ideas. Even his links to the KMT were often more troubled than those of Quoc. A spy for the French inside the Thanh Nien’s leadership wrote to his superiors about Quoc as early as in July 1925: 

Nguyen Ai Quoc has found in Canton a milieu absolutely in line with his goals. With Cuong De far away [in Japan] and Phan Boi Chau under arrest, the group of Annamese revolutionaries led by Nguyen Ai Quoc are now in the foreground ... His numerous relationships among the Cantonese military leaders and his knowledge of the Chinese milieu of Canton allow him to play a preponderant role among the anti-French groups.”

“As for Siam, even before Quoc left the Soviet Union, it seems that someone knowledgeable about the country within the international communist movement in Moscow had targeted Bangkok as a useful intersection for building communist operations in Asia. An internal document dated 1924 and entitled ‘Report on Tonkin, Annam and Cochin-China’, an adviser to the Comintern (three historians suggest that it was Nguyen Ai Quoc) asked whether a Soviet consulate at Bangkok would not be strategically well placed ‘at the intersection of the British Ind ies, Dutch Java and French Indo-China’ for promoting regional revolutionary activities. The document also pointed out that the Vietnamese communities positioned outside Indochina could play a central role in building liaisons between Japan, China and Siam. Picking up where Dang Thuc Hua had left off, Quoc saw Siam initially as a western outlet for feeding students to his main base in Canton. The Vietnamese in the northeast would continue to serve as holding centres for identifying the ‘best and the brightest’ of the revolutionary youth. After preliminary screening, qualifying students would then be shipped to Canton by way of Bangkok. Through this remodelled Asian ‘Study Abroad’ programme, Quoc aimed to form a revolutionary elite, safe from direct French repression, but strategically positioned just beyond the Sûreté’s direct reach in the countries peripheral to Indochina. His students tended to come from the upper half of Vietnam, from Nghe-Tinh provinces in particular, where many of the earlier emigrant patriots had left family contacts. Those who did not make the grade in Siam were either left there to fill less important positions or were pushed out of the system entirely.”

“In July 1925 Quoc sent Ho Tung Mau and Le Hong Son to Siam to begin grafting the Youth League to the Dong Du and Restoration Society associations still located among the Viet among communities there. 13 The French confirm that in 1925 Ho Tung Mau was the Youth League’s special delegate to the Ban Dong base in Phichit province. 14 Unsurprisingly, one of the first men Ho Tung Mau went to see was Dang Thuc Hua. Mau must have known Dang Thuc Hua well, given his training in Siam and the fact that their families had been in the outer-Indochinese resistance business for some time. Ho Tung Mau arrived in Ban Dong as two of Hua’s close confidants, Vo Tung and Dang Thai Thuyen, 15 were organising a memorial to commemorate the death of their mutual friend, Pham Hong Thai (who had died following a failed attempt to assassinate the French Governor General in Canton in 1924). Dang Thús niece, Quynh Anh, shared her home with Mau during this period. She later said that his work in Siam accelerated the pace of revolutionary activity among the Viet like through the creation of such organisations as the Youth Cooperative Association (Hoi Thanh Nien Hop Tac Xa). 17 Considering that Mau was one of the earliest and most respected members of the Youth League in this arrival in Ban Dong at this juncture could not have been unrelated to the transformation of the Youth Cooperative Association into the first Youth League branch in Siam some time in 1926. This cell was placed under the direct leadership of the Youth”

“League’s General Bureau (Tong Bo) in Canton. A second branch was subsequently formed in the Udon Thani area, with additional cells in Sakon Nakhon and Nakhon Phanom. 19 Although yet were young revolutionary-minded Viet kieu, such as Ngo Chinh Quoc and Ngo Chinh Hoc, whose father, Ngo Quang, had been one of Phan Dinh Phuong’s closest lieutenants (see Chapter 1). Newspapers were another way of gaining the support of the Viet kieu populations scattered outside Indochina. Eighty copies of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s training manual, Thanh Nien, [Youth] were published in Canton, of which 20 copies were shipped regularly to Siam for training purposes. The rest were divided among bases in Kwantung, Kwangsi and Yunnan provinces. 

It is difficult to gauge Nguyen Ai Quoc’s initial rate of success in taking over pre-existing Vietnamese anticolonial organisations in Asia. It was perhaps not quite as smooth as official later accounts would have us believe. There is evidence coming from Vietnamese spies that Ho Tung Mau had actually run into opposition among the Viet kieu in Siam. These Vietnamese were perhaps worried that such increased revolutionary activities would only endanger their already precarious relations with Siamese and French authorities. They had enough problems of their own making ends meet in the rugged northeast. Their hesitation may have also stemmed from fear of a highly effective French agent stationed at the Bangkok delegation, a Vietnamese named Do Hung. He was probably able to dissuade many of these émigrés from aiding the Youth League by playing on their fears of combined Franco–Siamese repression or by manipulating Vietnamese family connections to his advantage. He could also use more persuasive methods; for even hard-core militants feared him. 

It was only when Vo Tung stepped in that an accord was struck to subordinate the Phichit group to the larger revolutionary structure based in Canton. 22 Through problems persisted, by 1927 Vietnamese communities in Siam were slowly becoming the western foundation for Quoc’s Youth League organisation in Asia.”

“The Ties that Bind

Kinship ties between the inside and the outside were at the heart of Quoc’s grafting of the Youth League onto Asian Viet kieu communities. In northeastern Siam and southern China we can identify among the Vietnamese communities located outside Indochina two ‘anticolonial’ families, of which Vo Tung and Ho Tung Mau were respective members.

In Siam, there was the Dang clan represented by Dang Thuc Hua. The anchor of this family was a scholar-patriot named Dang Thai Canh. He was from the province of Nghe An and was a district chief who had participated in the Can Vuong movement before being captured and jailed by the French. Canh had three boys and one girl. The eldest boy, Dang Nguyen Canh, was the father of the famous writer and communist theoretician, Dang Thai Mai.”

“confidant of Phan Boi Chau, Can participated in the Dong Du and the Restoration Society movement until he, too, was captured by the French and sent to Poulo Condor. Dang Thuc Hua was the second oldest.25 Having finished his studies, he went to Japan as part of the Dong Du, before immigrating to Siam, as we have seen. The third son, Dang Quoc Hoa, died early, but fathered one boy and two girls who would play important roles in Vietnamese base-building in Siam. His son, Dang Thai Dau,26 arrived in Siam in 1916, where his uncle Hua quickly put him to work. He was subsequently sent to China to work with Phan Boi Chau. He returned to Siam some time thereafter and entered into a Siamese secondary school. He passed the national exam to study in Germany, at the Military Academy in Berlin. After successfully completing his studies, he returned to Siam with the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Siamese Ground Forces. When war broke out between France and Siam in 1940, he was sent to the upper Lao front by the Siamese Army and would later join the Viet Minh. The other three boys would also work in Siam or travel in the early 1920s. There, they would find Dang Quynh Anh, the niece of Dang Thuc Hua whom we also met in Chapter 1. Anh would go on to serve as one of the most important revolutionaries in Siam well into the 1950s. Moreover, besides being an important member of the Dang family, she was also a good friend of Nguyen Thi Thanh (alias Bach Lien), Nguyen Ai Quoc’s sister. The latter was a member of the Restoration Society in the Nghe-Tinh region. She had played a key role in arranging Anh’s trip to Siam in 1913.27 In the light of these village ties between upper northeastern Siam and Nghe-Tinh provinces, Quoc was perhaps not quite the stranger he may have thought upon debarking in Canton in late 1924.”

“Marriage often sealed these bonds. In the late 1910s, Quynh Anh married Vo Tung (Luu Khai Hong). He would later graduate from Nguyen Ai Quoc’s ‘First Canton Class’ (Khoa tu Dinh) in 1925 and was then sent back to Siam to build the Youth League there.28 Husband to Quynh Anh and son-in-law to Dang Thuc Hua, Vo Tung became the secretary of the Central Committee of the Youth League in Siam in 1926. His wife joined him on the Central Committee.29 Another member of the Dang family married Ngo Chinh Quoc of the Ngo family. Ngo Chinh Quoc was a graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy (Truong Hoang Pho) and had also been trained by Nguyen Ai Quoc in Canton.30 Even Dang Thuc Hua had married a daughter of the Ngo family.

Similar relationships extended to the Vietnamese communities positioned in southern China. In fact, this was one of the reasons Dang Thuc Hua had gone to southern China at the end of World War I. There he searched out the head of another patriotic family line led by Ho Hoc Lam. The latter was born in the province of Quynh Luu in Nghe An province. He was the grandson of Ho Ba On, one of the first scholar-patriots to take up arms against the French and whose failed defence of Nam Dinh cost him his life in 1883. Lam’s mother had been a militant in the Can Vuong movement. More importantly for our purposes…”

“here, Ho Hoc Lam was the uncle of Ho Tung Mau, and as of 1930, he worked in the KMT’s headquarters at Nanking and held the rank of Colonel in the KMT. Fluent in Chinese and trained in a Peking military academy, he had contacts within that army that would prove crucial to building revolutionary organisations among the Viet kieu in southern China until his death in 1942. Both he and Hua had influenced Phan Boi Chau to Japan. But if Dang had gone to Siam in 1909, Lam chose to work in southern China. Like Hua, Ho Hoc Lam had probably married a daughter of the Ngo clan: Madame Ngo Thi Khan [Co] Duy (alias Tran Thai Lan), the sister of Ngo Chinh Hoc and Ngo Chinh Quoc. She was later personally trained by Nguyen Ai Quoc.31

My point in discussing these extremely complicated revolutionary genealogies is to show just how important pre-existing kinship ties between Viet kieu communities on the inside and the inside were to Quoc’s ability to take over the Dong Du’s bases.32 Given the geography of these ties, one can also see why the importation of Vietnamese radicalism to northeastern Siam was a very ‘Nghe-Tinh affair’.33 Nguyen Tai, another of Quoc’s trusted students, based his decision to go to Siam in 1926 on his village ties to patriotic families already in Siam. The Nghe-Tinh link was so strong in northeast Siam that in one instance in 1928 a militant actually took up the challenge to write a patriotic poem using only the central Vietnamese dialect!34 There were few, if any, southern accents to be heard in Vietnamese circles in Udon Thani in the late 1920s.”

“This regional emphasis was reinforced by the fact that the construction undertaken by the French on Colonial Route 9 in the early 1920s tended to dissolve the natural barrier of the Annamese Cordillera running between northeastern Siam and central Vietnam. With the opening of this road across Laos by the late 1920s, travel westwards became much easier for Vietnamese fleeing poverty, repression or both in central Vietnam. Indeed, by the early 1930s, French security chiefs were worried that the opening of these roads and the increasing poverty of Nghe-Tinh provinces would provide Vietnamese revolutionaries in Siam with increased recruits. That is precisely what happened.

On this note, it is worth pausing for a moment to ask why a southern Indochinese revolutionary track never developed, say, among Vietnamese populations living along both sides of the Siamese–Cambodian border or along the coast of the Gulf of Siam. After all, there were Vietnamese communities living in western Cambodia and in the eastern Siamese provinces. Yet neither in Vietnamese communist nor French Sûreté sources have I found any reference to activities along the Siamese–Cambodian border.

Although Vietnamese communist sources do not mention it, it is quite possible that radicals encountered stiff competition from Vietnamese Catholics who dominated Viet kieu communities in southeastern Siam since the 17th century, especially along the coast of the Gulf of Siam running from Ha Tien to Bangkok (see Chapter 1). Part of the answer may also be juridical. Unlike central (Annam) and northern (Tonkin) Vietnam, which were both French protectorates 

“Cochin-China was a French colony. Because of Cochin-China’s special juridical status, young southern journalists sometimes found it easier to manoeuvre legally than their counterparts born in the northern protectorates. As a result, southern activists may have been under less pressure at the outset to set up bases in rugged areas outside Indochina. Another possibility is that young southerners found it easier to study in France in the light of less stringent study-abroad requirements for ‘Cochin-Chinese subjects’. Students from Annam in particular had to meet tough requirements for studying in the Metropole. This may explain why, by the late 1920s, southern Vietnamese largely entered the north as their counterparts studying in France. According to Hue Tam Ho Tai, there were no students from the central Vietnamese protectorate of Annam (among the Nghe-Tinh provinces) in France during the colonial period.39 Any remaining hopes of going to France declined sharply when student strikes swept Vietnam in 1926–27. Scores of students were expelled from schools and blacklisted by the police. Frustrated, many of those in Annam and Tonkin who chose to take up the revolutionary path, found it easier to head for northeastern Siam along the recently completed roads between central Vietnam and upper northeastern Siam or to catch the train from Hanoi to southern China to work in VNQDD or ICP bases.

This gave rise to a revealing dichotomy in the patterns of Vietnamese intellectual emigration: if southern revolutionaries dominated the French segment of Vietnamese radical emigration by the early 1930s, their northern counterparts, often (but not always) from Nghe-Tinh provinces, were in the majority in northeastern Siamese revolutionary laboratories and probably in the classrooms of Quoc’s Thanh Niên and the Whampoa Military Academy in southern China as well.”

Back in Asia, Nguyen Ai Quoc decided that Siam and Kwansi would serve as his two main bases outside Indochina, each centre charged with training 200 students at a time.41 In Siam, the Youth League also sought to organise the education and political orientation of the Viet kieu, with special emphasis on the need for better ‘linking up’ (dong kep) and greater levels of patriotism. Women’s and peasants’ associations were formed. Better contact with resistance outposts in Vietnam was established. Because the majority of the Vietnamese population in Siam lived in the northeast, militants moved the headquarters of the Youth League from Ban Dong to the Udon Thani area, in yet another demonstration of northeastern Siam’s increasing importance in Vietnamese resistance activities. Dang Thuc Hua’s links to younger leaders and his respected work among the Vietnamese throughout Siam made him a valuable asset in this orientation. In Udon on 26 August 1926, he was selected to announce to hundreds of Vietnamese the establishment of the Youth League’s first Viet kieu Friendship Association (Hoi Viet kieu Thanh Ai). Addressing the first Congress of the Viet “kieu, Hua explained to his compatriots the importance of establishing this self-help association in order to better their living conditions and the education of their younger.42 In addition to outlining how the Vietnamese Friendship Association would teach Vietnamese adults and educate their youths, Hua urged the Vietnamese to respect Siamese laws and customs. He advocated the idea of securing permission from Siamese authorities to construct Vietnamese schools. Before ending, Hua turned to economic matters, explaining that because the Siamese were expanding urban life in the Udon area, more jobs were available to Vietnamese bricklayers and carpenters, all positions which Vietnamese émigrés had been filling since the 19th century. Hua urged families to move to his hamlets in Nong Bua and Dong On as a means of increasing mutual cooperation and strengthening base.

But ‘unity’ was not as forthcoming as later writers might like us to believe. Worried by the negative effects of the disparate and divide tendencies of the Vietnamese living in Siam, a ‘group of Vietnamese from Canton’ circulated ‘A Call for Unity’ to the Viet kieu in Siam. They called on émigrés to unite as the Hoa kieu were doing throughout Southeast Asia. These Canton-based Vietnamese decried the ‘egoism’ and ‘mutual distrust’ that reigned in Siam. ‘In order to remedy this situation’, they wrote:

we have moved towards creating an Association in Siam that will reunite all of our compatriots located in this country. This association will have the goal of tightening the ties of friendship among its members; to encourage them to aid one another in difficult times; to develop business opportunities; and to move along the path of happiness and progress so that [the Viet kieu] may perpetuate the race and to make it known and respected abroad. 

“At about the same time, one of the Sûreté’s best spies reported that Ho Tung Mau and Vo Tung were returning to Siam with important funds to strengthen the organisation.45 These efforts were not without success. By the end of the decade, the Vietnamese Friendship Association in Udon numbered 600.46 Vietnamese arriving from Siam reported to the headquarters in Canton that the Friendship Associations in Phichit numbered at least 100 members. In Sakon, there were more than 50 members, while Nakhon Phanom offices totalled 150 (though more than 20 Vietnamese émigrés were openly hostile to the organisation). The Nakhon Phanom operation served as a reception base for partisans coming out of Vietnam, accepting 70 Vietnamese from the interior in around 1927. Membership subscriptions went almost entirely to caring for these Vietnamese and to sending them further down the revolutionary pipeline. The French Sûreté estimated in 1928 that there were around 1,000 Vietnamese political refugees in Siam at the time (though this number seems exaggerated).

 A French spy reported in March 1927 that Vietnamese revolutionaries in Canton agreed that they would focus their primary efforts on ‘organising the Annamese on the outside, by only admitting the purest and discarding without pity the corrupted. Then the proven cadres would be sent to organise the Annamese on the inside. [48] According to an internal Party history edited in early 1948, ‘at least’ 250 cadres had been formed on the ‘outside’ (ngoi quoc) by May 1929, of whom 200 had already been sent back to Vietnam. In order to smuggle students to the outside, Nguyen Ai Quoc organised three major exit routes. From Tonkin, one left by the Dong Dang–Tam Lung Pass on the Chinese border or by the Haiphong–Hong Kong corridor. In Annam, students travelled across the Ai Lao Pass and sometimes straight down Colonial Route 9 to Saibayankhet and Thakehk, two towns which fed directly into major Youth League bases in Nakhon Phanom and Sakon Nakhon. Lastly the sea routes running between Saigon and Hong Kong and Saigon and Bangkok channelled activists by boat across Asia. As Paul Arnous, Indochina’s master policeman in the 1930s and early 1940s described these routes in 1929: combined in this way the Party’s affairs work like a charm, even more so given that they are facilitated by the movements of world communism.

The inverse also seems to have been true. Trained by Quoc in Canton, Le Manh Trinh indicates in his memoirs that after each political training class of the Youth League was finished, ‘one or two delegates’ were sent to Siam from Canton to work among the Vietnamese there. Even those students who were not appointed to work in Siam had to travel through the northeast before returning to Indochina during this time; this gives an accurate indication of the stringent French monitoring along the northern Indochinese border. 

In Siam, the dissemination of information was another way in which the Youth League leadership hoped to win over the support of the Vietnamese. To do this, though, revolutionaries had to make sure the local Vietnamese could actually read. This was not such an easy task when one considers that many immigrants had married Siamese and saw little incentive to teach Vietnamese to their children, especially when fluency in Thai was the key to economic success and national integration. For adults, in 1927 a Vietnamese newspaper in Ban Dong appeared called Dong Thanh [Unity]. It reported on the living conditions of the Vietnamese in Siam, published patriotic poetry and short stories, and reported on regional and international events.52 One could also learn qng nu? there.

Through Siam, the Youth League also spread into Laos via these Vietnamese communities spanning the Mekong.53 Given the geography and demography of Vietnamese revolutionary base-building on the eastern part of mainland Southeast Asia up to this point, the Vietnamese importation of radicalism to Laos is hardly surprising. First, the internal momentum of the Vietnamese revolutionary network outside Indochina, especially in northeast Siam, had always been based on Viet kieu communities running from Bangkok to Nakhon Phanom – not on the ethnic Lao constituting the majority there. Second, coming from eastern Indochina, young, mainly urban Vietnamese radicals making their way to Siam had few, if any, links to the Laotian (or Cambodian) peasants prior to 1945. What interested them most was getting to the Vietnamese bases along the Mekong, or getting back into Vietnam. Third, the urban nature of Vietnamese immigration to Laos in the 1920s and 1930s reinforced the stepping-stone role of the Viet kieu pockets running both ways between northeast Siam and Nghe-Tinh provinces. Fourth, for cultural reasons to which we shall return below, Siamese, Laotian and Cambodian intellectuals did not always share the interests of their Vietnamese neighbours in Western notions of radicalism or even the ideas of Sun Yat-sen (whose thinking first entered Vietnam by way of overseas Chinese publishing houses in the ports of Haiphong and Saigon).

Of course, mixed Viet–Lao marriages could have served as a conduit for bringing ethnic Lao into the Vietnamese Youth League. However, the patterns of predominantly male Vietnamese immigration to Laos during the 1920s would only start producing potential, adult Lao–Viet métis revolutionaries in the mid-1940s (Kayonse is a good example). More often than not, Vietnamese revolutionary contacts with ethnic Lao and Khmer nationalists would come from inside Indochina, from the French classrooms of the University of Hanoi, Chasseloup-Laubat or the Indochinese bureacracy of the 1930s (Sophonhuangvong is a good example). This was in contrast to the mechanics of Vietnamese migration to Siam, which had already started producing valuable Vietnamese–Thai mixed marriages and métis children by 1930. In 1928, for example, the French Sûreté learned from the interrogation of a Vietnamese militant that Thai-Viet children — lok krung in Thai/Lao — were acting as guides for Vietnamese militants.

Some ranking liaison agent confirmed the high level of mixed marriages among Vietnamese men living in northeast Siam. Most of the Vietnamese men there, he said, had Siamese wives. The Viet Minh would later target these mixed marriages and their offspring to run their external war trade and intelligence operations (see Chapter 5).”

“For all of these reasons, the Viet kieu remained the central revolutionary agents for the Youth League’s expansion eastwards across the Mekong into Laos. In 1927 a Vietnamese representative was sent from Siam to Lao to set up League branches and a Vietnamese Friendship Association among the Viet kieu there. A base in Savannakhét was linked to its counterpart in the Saigon town of Mukdahan, as was Thakkhet to Nakhon Phanom and Vijantie to Nong Khai. This was the first effort by Youth League radicals to organise and to integrate the Viet kieu in Laos into their Asian operations. It was thus the Vietnamese – not the ethnic Lao – who introduced radicalism to Laos. And they did this via their bases in northeastern Siam, not from western central Vietnam. In short, by the late 1920s the Youth League had succeeded in extending itself from southern China to northeastern Siam, to make its way into Indochina’s Laotian backdoor by way of the Viet kieu. By 1927 the Siamese section of the Youth League had ‘made enormous progress’, as Vietnamese cadres arriving from Bangkok reported to their superiors in Canton.”

“SHIFTING THE NETWORK FROM SOUTHERN CHINA TO NORTHEASTERN SIAM

The same could not be said for Quoc’s activities in southern China. In April 1927 Youth League operations in China were severely disrupted by the outbreak of a violent dispute between Chinese communists and nationalist. Nguyen Ai Quoc was caught directly in the cross-fire, given the nature of his activities in southern China since 1925 and his increasingly precarious relations with Nguyen Hai Thanh in particular. On 5 May 1927 Quoc left Canton for Shanghai, when Nguyen Hai Thanh appears to have denounced him to the KMT authorities. Quoc escaped just in time to Hong Kong, then on to Vladivostok, where a member of the French Communist Party suggested that he eventually return to Siam via Paris to rebuild the Vietnamese movement with assistance from the French Party. Quoc agreed and conveyed his compliance to the Comintern in a letter. He then returned to Moscow, where he requested funds for a return ticket to Vietnam via Siam.

The KMT’s severe repression of the Chinese communists directly jeopardised the Youth League’s activities in Canton, with a number of Vietnamese cadres captured during this period. As activities in China came under increasingly tight surveillance, the strategic attention of Vietnamese resistance leaders shifted naturally to Siam. A Soviet biography of Nguyen Ai Quoc says that Siam was an attractive alternative to Quoc from this point. Reports from cadres there indicated that ‘a lot could be done among the Vietnamese’. Moreover, they said, local authorities ‘were not too particular as to what the Vietnamese were doing’.63 These favourable conditions could not have been better timed. In November 1927, on instructions from the Comintern, Quoc left Moscow for Paris. There French communists would help him finalise his plans to rebuild the revolutionary movement in Indochina through the formation of an external base in Siam.

Reinforcing the Vietnamese reorientation towards Siam was the fact that Chinese communists were thinking in similar terms. From mid-1927, following Chiang Kai-shek’s severe crackdown on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), many Chinese communists escaped to Bangkok and Singapore (and possibly to Kampot province in coastal Cambodia) to form revolutionary bases among the large Hoa kieu populations there.65 Nguyen Ai Quoc, not unlike Phan Boi Chau before him (see Chapter 1), stood to gain from this reorientation of Chinese revolutionary activities towards Southeast Asian ports. Ho Tung Mau and Le Hong Son’s membership in the CCP and their liaison tasks for both parties must have provided valuable contacts, a question to which we shall return shortly.

This shift towards Siam had already been in the making for the Vietnamese, when Quoc began dispatching a number of trusted cadres to Siam. One young activist sent to work in Siam was Hoang Van Hoan, one of Quoc’s students from the Canton class of 1926. In late May 1927 Quoc crossed the Mekong into the northeast, where he was assigned to work in Nong On with his Canton classmate, Le Manh Trinh.66 They were followed by their maitre. Some time in mid-1928 Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Siam for the first time. According to a French Sûreté report written in January 1931, he left Russia before the Comintern Congress of July 1928 and had gone clandestinely to Siam by way of Berlin (where the Western European Bureau of the Comintern was stationed). The French claimed that he had been instructed by the ‘Executive Central Committee of the Third International’ to form a communist party for Indochina.

First, however, he had to re-evaluate the state of his remaining Asian bases following the KMT’s crackdown. It did not take him long to understand that Siam was all he had. Arriving in Bangkok some time in mid-1928, Quoc secretly contacted Chinese ‘comrades’ (dong chi) to track down the appropriate Vietnamese channels.68 He then travelled to Ban Dong in Phichit province. There, he bided his time in the home of Vo Tung and Quynh Anh, insisting that they not reveal his true identity to others (Quynh Anh was a close friend of Quoc’s sister and would have thus recognised him).69 To this end, he used at least six secret names while in Siam. After giving training courses in Ban Dong, Quoc, now travelling under the alias Thao (Venerable Old Man) Chin, made his way by foot to Udon Thani.70 Arriving in Udon, he met with a number of his Canton graduates, including Hoang Van Hoan.71 In a move that consolidated the leadership of Vietnamese resistance activities in Siam under a central authority, Quoc formed the Udon Provincial Committee (Tinh uy Udon).72 As for Dang Thuc Hua, Quoc dispatched him to northern Siam to set up new bases, symbolising both his continued usefulness and his less important role in leadership matters. Hua died, still on the move, on his way to Udon in 1932.73 He was given a hero’s funeral, as we saw at the opening of our story. The indefatigable work of Dang Thuc Hua had facilitated Nguyen Ai Quoc’s revolutionary success rate in Siam.

Siam at the Intersection of an Emerging Asian Communist Network

In May 1928 the Sixth Congress of the Comintern was convened. With the KMT’s attack on the CCP as well as internal political concerns in mind, Stalin ordered communist parties in colonial areas to abandon their alliances with bourgeois nationalist parties. He simultaneously called for an increased proletarianisation of revolutionary movements across the world. Although the Youth League was not yet a formal communist party, three Vietnamese delegates attended this Congress. One of them, Nguyen Van Tao, was a member of the French Communist Party. He urged Vietnamese radicals to form their own communist party and to promote revolution among the working class in Indochina.

The events leading to the formation of the Vietnamese and Indochinese Communist Parties have been covered elsewhere. In brief, in May 1929 the Youth League’s General Bureau convened the First National Congress in Hong Kong in a bid to create one unified communist party recognised by the Comintern.

A split occurred, however, when it came time to dissolve a number of competing revolutionary parties. In November 1929 Quoc received word from partisans in Hong Kong that his services were badly needed to resolve rifts. In late November or early December 1929 Quoc left Siam for Hong Kong, where he arrived on 23 December.75 According to Hoang Van Hoan, Quoc met with leaders of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau (Dong phuong cuc Quoc TeCong San in Sino–Vietnamese) and was ‘charged with the mission of uniting Vietnamese communist groups’ into one party. Quoc convened the meeting in Hong Kong shortly thereafter, from which the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) was born.

But if much has been written on Vietnamese communism in Vietnam, much less attention has been paid to the role played by Vietnamese communists outside Vietnam. For Quoc’s Hong Kong trip went beyond simply unifying the Vietnamese Communist Party. During his visits to Hong Kong and Shanghai in late 1929 and early 1930, Quoc took over as the Comintern’s Chief of the Far Eastern Bureau based in Shanghai, under the direction of Hilaire Naoulen,77 His major task was strengthening communism across much of what we call Southeast Asia today, but which was then still largely referred to by the Chinese term, 南洋, meaning South Seas. To this end, he returned to Hong Kong to form a sub-office of the Far Eastern Bureau, to be known as the ‘Southern Bureau.’78 The Southern Bureau may also have been home to the CCP’s headquarters for administering the southern Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Kwangi and Kwangtung.79 In any case, Quoc worked through the Southern Bureau and its CCP agents to conduct much of his business in Southeast Asia.

Quoc was well suited for the Comintern’s job. He had the language skills, the major Asian contacts of the Dong Du, the Restoration Society and Youth League, the immigrant communities in northeastern Siam and to a lesser degree in southern China. He also commanded an increasingly impressive mix of Vietnamese and Chinese sailors working on ships traversing the South China Sea. And of course, he was also known within the inner chambers of the French and Soviet Communist Parties (and perhaps the Chinese one thanks to his French contacts).

On assuming this job, Quoc acquired revolutionary jurisdiction for all of the ‘South Seas’ (Nanyang), which the Comintern honed down to British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina and Siam. In Hong Kong, Quoc contacted local Chinese communists for the addresses of Chinese militants in Siam. His instructions were clear: he was to place the Vietnamese Communist Party under the direction of the Comintern’s Singapore office; transform the Nanyang Communist Party into the Malayan Communist Party; attach the Nanyang’s Central Committee in charge of ‘South Seas’ communist movements to the Singapore Section of the Comintern; and to create the Siamese Communist Party by combining Chinese communists attached to the Nanyang branch in Bangkok with their Vietnamese Youth League counterparts in the northeast. These decisions were in line with Comintern directives calling for a party in each colonial state and Siam.

Apparently, Nguyen Ai Quoc disagreed with the Comintern’s desire to attach the Vietnamese Party to the Nanyang Secretariat based in Singapore.82 He argued that Vietnam’s proximity to China made it wiser to place the Vietnamese organisation under the Far Eastern Bureau in southern China, together with the other more Confucian-minded Communist Parties of China, Japan and Korea.83 Geographically, Quoc continued, Vietnam was more closely linked to China, given the long-standing maritime and land links connecting the two countries. In a letter to the Comintern, dated 18 February 1930, he argued that northern Vietnam was propitiously positioned at the tip of a revolutionary thrust extending southwards from Russia across China to Tonkin:

The Singapore Section has insisted to us that the Annam [communist] Party will be under the direction of Singapore. But considering [the] geographical situation (Russia–China–Annam) as well as [the] political situation (Party more strong [sic], industries more developed in Tonkin than [in] Cochinchina), I propose that ANCP [Annamese Communist Party] shall [sic] be directed from Shanghai via Hong Kong.

However, even if Quoc inclined towards ‘East Asia’ for building Vietnamese communism, the ‘Nanyang’ nature of his internationalists tasks ensured that his movements would have to be linked to Singapore. For this reason, Quoc was quick to add, “I ask the Chinese C[ommunist] P[arty] [for] a letter of introduction so that we may send an Annamese comrade to work with Singapore.”85 Indeed, Nguyen Ai Quoc counted on using the CCP’s overseas organisations in the Nanyang zone to execute his Comintern’s directives. With this idea in mind, some time in March 1930, Nguyen Ai Quoc returned to Bangkok by boat for the second time. Once again, he met with Chinese communists first before moving on to Viet kieu strongholds along the Mekong. There, he met with members of his Provincial Committee in Udon Thani.86 It was a nice reflection of how overseas Chinese and overland Vietnamese immigration were inscribing his revolutionary movements across the peninsula.

In their memoirs, Hoan and Trinh tell us that Quoc explained to the Udon Provincial Committee the international situation; the recent unification of the Vietnamese Communist Parties in Hong Kong; and relayed the Comintern’s desire to establish a Siamese Communist Party.87 Quoc made it clear in secret discussions that the Comintern had issued instructions calling for the participation on the part of all cadres in the proletarian revolution in whichever Asian state they might reside, regardless of ethnic distinctions. For this reason, he insisted, Vietnamese cadres in Siam now had the responsibility of helping the Siamese masses (quan chung) make a revolution in the “spirit of international proletarianism”. Nguyen Ai Quoc called on the Udon Committee to select appropriate members from the Youth League section to become communists and to foster the establishment of the Siamese Communist Party, separate from the VCP. In another meeting, Quoc explained that Siam was still a feudal country and a semi-colony. It had not reached the stage of a socialist revolution. It first had to pass through a democratic period and then, with the help of the international communist movement, it would reach the stage of a socialist revolution. Vietnamese militants in Siam, he said, now had to reorient their attention towards the Siamese in order to promote a world revolution. 

This must have sounded strange to a number of longstanding Vietnamese patriots. After all, this was the first time that Vietnamese resistance leaders had been asked to pay any real attention to the matter of Siamese internal affairs, apart from maintaining amicable relations with regional authorities in order to safeguard their own patriotic activities. Now Nguyen Ai Quoc himself was telling them that Siam was only ‘semi-independent’, exploited by the ‘feudalist’ and badly in need of a workers’ revolution.89 In meetings with the leaders of the Udon Provincial Committee, Quoc outlined concrete steps for creating a Siamese Communist Party. He specifically suggested that the Udon Committee become a communist Provincial Committee. This occurred some time in March or April 1930, with Vo Van Kieu taking over as Secretary of the Committee following Dang Thai Thuyen’s arrest. Some of Quoc’s audience argued that the Viet kieu would be reluctant to support a movement that did not concentrate on the ‘Vietnamese revolution’. All Hoang Van Hoan tells us in his memoirs, though, is that Nguyen Ai Quoc ‘answered their questions one by one until they were in agreement with, presumably, the Comintern line Quoc was bringing to Siam.’90 From early 1930, a dual track began to emerge in Vietnamese communist policy towards Siam: on one hand an internationalist credo instructing Vietnamese radicals to promote a Siamese revolution as part of a larger, world revolution; on the other hand the conception of Siam as a western gateway vital to the national liberation of Vietnam. In both cases, tapping the Viet kieu communities was central to the success of these revolutionary enterprises. Such a double track, as we shall see, also lent itself to destructive contradictions.

Unsurprisingly, Nguyen Ai Quoc used Vietnamese émigré communities spanning the Mekong to introduce communist to Laos. Hoan, who travelled with Quoc in Siam during this time, said that on one occasion in 1929 Quoc travelled to Nakhon Phomom, where he ‘was most interested’ in establishing a liaison with Vietnam via Laos. According to Hoan, from there Quoc took a boat across the Mekong with Nguyen Tai to inspect the Youth League’s revolutionary activities among the Viet kieu in Laos.91 In an article Tai penned in 1986, he confirmed that their trip was designed to create a liaison with central Vietnam and to investigate revolutionary potential in Laos.92 Hoan recalled that, during a subsequent meeting in Siam, Quoc met with Viet kieu cadres summoned from Laoang towns to discuss what to be done in Laos and how they could ‘strengthen liaisons with the Siamese side in order to mobilise the revolution in Vietnam’.93 During his brief return to northeast Siam in March 1930, Quoc instructed the Udon Committee to help Vietnamese branches of the Youth League in Laos make the transition to communism. 

On this note, Quoc may have wanted to form a separate Laotian Communist Party, given that he had already formed a ‘Vietnamese’ one in February and not an ‘Indochinese’ one. Hoang Van Hoan gives credence to this hypothesis, writing in his memoirs that in April 1930 Nguyen Ai Quoc directed the Udon Provincial Committee to help its Laotian counterpart to become a ‘Laotian communist cell’ (chi bo con sg Lao).95 To my knowledge, there is no evidence of Quoc issuing parallel instructions to Viet cadets in Siam to build revolutionary links to the Viet kieu in western Cambodia.

But if Quoc had relied on the Viet kieu in upper northeast Siam to build overland contacts with Laos and central Vietnam, he recruited Vietnamese and Chinese sailors working on the ships plying the South Seas to fulfil maritime duties for the Comintern. In the personal documents that the British Special Branch seized from Nguyen Ai Quoc in the wake of his arrest in June 1931 were detailed lists of Vietnamese and Chinese liaison agents – ‘boys’, sailors, laundrymen, cooks and servants. In several of Quoc’s logs, we follow sailors across the sea lanes connecting the ports of Singapore, Hong Kong, Canton and Bangkok, and on to Vladivostok and Marseilles.96 In a file marked ‘List I’, we find a table of ship movements of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, one of the largest shipping companies in the world at the time. The dates for the Company’s ships’ arrivals and departures from major Asian ports are noted meticulously by Quoc for the months of February to August 1931. Accompanying them are coded lists of corresponding Vietnamese and Chinese maritime agents. Sifting through these documents, one gets an idea of how militants were trying to place both age-old and colonial patterns of Chinese and Vietnamese immigration in Asia in the service of regional revolution. While some French officials were disappointed not to find ‘more important’ documents on Quoc in June 1931, seizure of his lists of Vietnamese and Chinese sailors allowed combined European and Asian police forces to strike the Comintern’s revolutionary operations from below. Within weeks, the French were picking up dozens of Chinese and Vietnamese sailors.

In early 1930, however, Quoc was still free. Having formed the Vietnamese Communist Party and voiced the need to form a ‘Laot' communist cell’, in April 1930 he and Tran To Chan (Tang or Tran Van Chan), on behalf of the Vietnamese communists, returned to Bangkok to meet with their Chinese counterparts concerning the formation of a Siamese Communist Party. No mention was made of meeting Siamese representatives – probably because there were none. On 20 April a meeting was held among Vietnamese and Chinese cadres in Bangkok. Quoc chaired the meeting on behalf of the Comintern.98 Fu Ta Chang, a Chinese member of the CCP’s Southern Bureau, also helped Quoc put the Siamese Party together. Under direct instructions from the Third International, this meeting officially approved the establishment of the Siamese Communist Party (Dang Cong San Xiem; hereafter, SCP) and appointed a Bangkok-based Provisional Central Committee, which became the Central Executive Committee of the Siamese Party.Tran To Chan served on the SCP’s Central Committee as a member of the Udon Committee along with Ngo Chinh Quoc and later Le Manh Trinh (alias Tien).101 After having barely escaped capture by the French thanks to a tip-off from an apparent double agent working for Do Hung, Quoc went undercover disguised as a Buddhist monk before taking to the sea to preside over the formation of the Malayan Communist Party in Singapore (see below). Shortly thereafter, Tran To Chan returned to Udon to report to the Provincial Committee on the formation of the SCP and the new responsibilities of the party in northeast Siam. According to decisions made by the Siamese Commission, the Udon Provincial Committee would now be responsible for activating the revolution in northeast Siam given the preponderance of the Viet kieu there, while the Chinese would tend to the Party’s affairs in Bangkok in the light of the CCP’s stronger implantation among the Hoa kieU. At another meeting, some (unnamed) members of the Provincial Committee again voiced reservations about the idea of the Vietnamese helping the Siamese to start a revolution, fearful that this would only invite repression by the Siamese authorities. They were overruled by those advocating Quoc’s Comintern line. An ‘international duty’ (nhiem vu quoc te) could not be shirked.

In October 1930, as the Vietnamese Communist Party was being renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (Dang Cong San Dong Duong) on instructions from the Comintern, the Provincial Committee in Udon Thani convened a meeting of Vietnamese members from Udon Thani, Sakhon Nakhon and Nakhon Phanom provinces to determine their future course of action in Siam. During this meeting, a representative of the Siamese Commission informed them of the establishment of the SCP and announced that the Udon Provincial Committee was now a Party Section (Dang bo) of the SCP responsible for northeast Siam. To widen membership, decisions were made to increase the intake into the SCP of youths from the Youth League’s Cooperative Associations. These youths were instructed to learn Siamese in order to “link” more closely with the Siamese masses. As one of those increasingly at ease in Thai, Hoang Van Hoan was assigned to run a “Communist Youth League” among them. In 1931 Hoan’s influence increased even more when he replaced the Secretary of the Udon Provincial Committee, Vo Van Kieu, following the latter’s death.

The timing of Quoc’s role in the creation of a Vietnamese Party (in Hong Kong), a Siamese one (in Bangkok), and a Laotian one (from Nakhon Phanom) between February and April 1930 merits our attention; for his appointment to head the Far Eastern Bureau in January of that year cannot be divorced from a larger Asian policy being pursued by the Comintern. While Hoang Van Hoan suddenly becomes quiet in his memoirs concerning Quoc’s Southeast Asian mission after forming the SCP, intelligence reports from the British Straits Settlements Police help us add a few pieces of information to this puzzle. First, shortly after forming the SCP, Quoc left Bangkok by ship to make his way to Singapore where he attended, on behalf of the Far Eastern Bureau, the Third 

Representative Conference of the ‘South Seas Communist Party’ held in April 1930. Under Quoc’s direction, the South Seas Communist Party was dismantled, as ordered by the Comintern, and rebaptised as a separate Malayan Communist Party (MCP) in what must have been the last week of April or early May (given the formation of the SCP by Quoc on 20 April and the time it would have taken him to travel clandestinely from Bangkok to Singapore by boat). The MCP was also put in charge of communist parties in Siam, British North Borneo, and the Dutch East Indies until they could stand on their own feet under the direction of the Far Eastern Bureau. ‘The whole aim of this reorganisation, a Special Branch report said, was to free the South Seas movement from the direct “central” control which was making of it a purely Chinese movement.’ Under the Far Eastern Bureau, it was hoped that each individual [colonial] state would progress along racial lines. Relying largely on captured archival documents, the Special Branch reported that the Comintern’s failure to promote communism via CCP channels was one of the main reasons for the dispatch of Serge Lefranc (alias Ducroux) and the appropriation of $100,000 Straits dollars to reorganise the Nanyang parties ‘along racial lines’. 

In his address to this conference, Quoc pointed out to the predominantly Chinese audience the need to study the Malay language and to enlist ethnic Malay recruits in the Party, echoing themes he had already raised with his own revolutionary compatriots in Siam a few weeks earlier. It is hard to believe that the irony of this was lost on Quoc, the ethnic Vietnamese creator of the MCP and the SCP. His internationalist Chinese colleague, Fu Ta Chang, became a member of the MCP at this time.

This account of the formation of the MCP is largely corroborated by Cheah Boon Kheng and Yong Ch'ing Fatt. They confirm that this reshuffle in the Far Eastern Bureau’s favour was designed to be ‘a shift away from the CCP’ and its control over Malayan communism.110 A Southern Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party was thereafter formed in Hong Kong to administer separately Chinese communist affairs in southern China and among the ethnic Chinese in the Far East, though it probably continued to act as a liaison between the Far Eastern Bureau and the MCP.

Further details of Quoc’s activities in Singapore at this time are hard to come by. He would, however, leave an important Vietnamese (or Sino-Vietnamese metis) agent behind in Malaya, known by the pseudonym of Lai Tek. He had been a Comintern liaison chief in Hong Kong before becoming the Secretary General of the MCP in 1938. He held this office until 1947.112 In August 1945, British military intelligence sources confirmed that Lai Tek, known secretly as ‘Mr Wight’ to the Allies during the war, was the former Secretary General of the Malaya Communist Party prior to World War II and was still a member of the Central Committee after the war. The British identified him as an ethnic Vietnamese, as well as the MCP’s ‘most secret and revered personality… He is a shrewd and clever man, but no fanatic’.113 Lai Tek, according to Malayan

government sources, was in fact an informant passed by the French Sûreté to the British Special Branch in 1934 or 1935. According to this version, he became Secretary General of the Malayan Communist Party in 1938, a post that he would hold until 1947.

Having played the leading role for the Comintern in the formation of the VCP, SCP and MCP, Nguyen Ai Quoc turned his attention to rebuilding communism in Java. It was well known that since the uprisings of the Indonesian Communist Party in the mid-1920s, the Parti Kommunist Indonesia (PKI) had been severely suppressed by the Dutch.115 Quoc reported in 1931 to the Far Eastern Bureau that he had recruited a young Javanese intellectual, ‘Bassa’, aged 27 and well versed in Chinese, English, Malay and Japanese. Quoc hoped to enlist him as a propaganda and liaison officer to handle revolutionary affairs between the Far Eastern Bureau headquarters and the Southeast Asian parties which Quoc had recently created. In July 1932 the Special Branch discovered the presence in Singapore of a Javanese organisation in direct communication with Shanghai under the direction of Tan Malaka, who was himself a former Director of the Far Eastern Bureau as well as one of the most important Indonesian revolutionaries at the time. Tan Malaka was eventually arrested on 10 October 1932 in Hong Kong on his way from Shanghai to Bangkok to meet the leaders of the Republican Party of Indonesia. In August 1930, the ‘Communist Party of the Philippine’ islands came to life.

THE SINO–VIETNAMESE NATURE OF PENINSULAR RADICALISM

My point in detailing the Asian networks formed by Dang Thuc Hua (Chapter 1) and reactivated by Nguyen Ai Quoc (Chapter 2) is to underscore how regional Vietnamese radicalism was from the outset. Second, this study of the relationship between the shift in the VCP and CCP’s external bases from southern China to Southeast Asia following the outbreak of the Chinese civil war in 1927 helps us to understand better how the Comintern’s mainland movements acquired a very Sino–Vietnamese tack by 1930. Third, the concentration of the Hoa kieU populations and the CCP revolutionary organisations in mainland ports goes a long way towards explaining why overseas Chinese communists played the dominant role in forming and running the SCP and the MCP in Bangkok and Singapore, respectively, whereas Vietnamese internationalists could use overland Viet kieu communities located along the Mekong to develop communism in northeastern Siam and to oversee its transplantation to Laos (and later to Cambodia: see Chapter 8). According to the British Special Branch, the Comintern’s idea in creating the Far Eastern Bureau was to establish more direct contact with each regional country rather than relying entirely on the CCP’s Nanyang networks, which hitherto had been the main instrument in the dissemination of communism in Eastern Colonial countries.117 Dissociating the importation of mainland communist from its overseas Chinese and Vietnamese networks would, however, be easier said than done.

This is not to say that the Siamese, Lao or Khmers remained inert. On the contrary. But it is more likely that intellectuals in these three Buddhist countries were following a separate set of more religious itineraries that did not bring them into contact with the communist ideas entering the mainland by way of the overseas Chinese and Vietnamese (see Chapter 8). As the Sûreté’s best observer of communism in Asia, Do Hung, later reflected on the strength of precolonial Buddhist bonds during the colonial period:

Along the Mekong and the Cambodian frontier, there was always a coming and going of Buddhist monks. The ease of their circulation was due to the fact that they were authorised to travel freely without a passport. The monk’s laissez-passer is the sacred character of his yellow robe. It facilitates his journey in ways to which the secular could not have access. Siamese monks come to Cambodia and Laos to make fact-finding trips to the temples. The Cambodians and Laotians go to Siam to learn Pali and theology in the numerous monasteries there. The monasteries number more than 17,408, of which there are 391 Pal schools and 4,050 theological schools. ... In the large Siamese monasteries, special buildings are reserved especially for the Cambodian and Laotian monks who come for religious studies. One can find within the recesses of Wat Maham in Bangkok two immense wooden buildings, each home to a hundred or so monks of these two nationalities.

Reinforcing this was the fact that these Buddhist peregrinations sent the Cambodians and Laotians back to their homelands after their religious training. They returned to the village, Do Hung pointed out, and as such served as ‘superior agents for Siamese propaganda’ in Indochina. Buddhist monks left the idea of pursuing higher universal instruction in Moscow or Rome to the Vietnamese and the Chinese. Moreover, peninsular Buddhism had historically never been particularly receptive to more universalist world views such as Catholicism, as had the Sinoidist worlds of Vietnam and Korea. This ‘cultural resistance’ on the part of Buddhists may provide another clue explaining why the Comintern, not unlike the Catholic Church long before it, had no other choice but to turn to overseas Chinese and overland Vietnamese communities to implement communism to non-Confucian parts of the Buddhist mainland. Even in Burma, it was Indian and Bengali immigrants who played an important early role in the formation of the Burmese Communist Party, not the ethnic Burmans. While the Indonesian Communist Party is an important case apart, extending beyond the scope of this book, it is none the less worth noting that Tan Malaka, like Nguyen Ai Quoc, had to be proficient in Chinese to carry out his international duties at the head of the Far Eastern Bureau, a revolutionary interchange dependent on overseas Chinese for its liens.

What remains less clear, but no doubt worthy of further investigation, is the role played by ethnic Chinese communists in the evolution of Vietnamese communism. A postwar French study claimed that the first trace of the CCP in southern Vietnam appeared in 1927, when a certain Ho Pe Siang tried,unsuccessfully, to form the Association of Overseas Revolutionary Partisans in Saigon. In 1932, an effort was made by a colleague to revive it in another form, but to no avail. It was apparently only in 1938 that a ‘section’ of the CCP was officially formed in Saigon (and not in Haiphong) under the leadership of Li Yeu Tcheng. But he and his collaborators soon fled to Siam following their participation in the ICP’s failed uprising in the south in 1940 (see Chapter 3).123 Another source claims that Lin Yung Fu was the Secretary of the CCP in Vietnam in the late 1930s. However, his participation in the events of 1940 led to his arrest by the French. Freed by the Japanese in 1945, he would allegedly serve as an important counsellor to the DRV in 1946 and an even more important one on Chinese affairs in Nam Bo in 1950.

In any case, severe French surveillance and repression in the 1930s must have made Sino–Vietnamese communist liaisons in Vietnam difficult. Moreover, the KMT’s longstanding presence among the Hoa kieU populations in the Saigon/Cholon area, in southern coastal congregations extending into Cambodia, and in Hanoi and Haiphong complicated things for the communists. In short, the CCP met stiff competition for the revolutionary high ground among the Hoa kieU in Vietnam’s Chinese quarters.125 All these factors help to explain why Quoc had to begin his internationalist work for the Comintern in 1930 via the CCP’s networks running from Hong Kong and Shanghai to Singapore by way of Bangkok, rather than via Saigon or Haiphong. The CCP’s increasing presence among the Hoa kieU in Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong from 1927 must have facilitated Quoc’s port movements.

But more research into these connections is needed before we can reach any firm conclusions. While it seems that of the CCP’s prewar Nanyang organisations, the Vietnamese branch was weakest, Nguyen Ai Quoc reported none the less to the head of the Far Eastern Bureau, Hilaire Noulens, that of the ICP’s total membership of 1,740 in late 1930, there were 190 ethnic Chinese. Ho Tung Mau, a member of the CCP, revealed in a letter in November 1929 that in southern Vietnam there were a hundred or so CCP members, who ‘will later introduce us to their group’.127 Mau added that he wanted to ask CCP officials to serve as advisers for the Hong Kong unification meeting. Indeed, when Vietnamese radicals began making efforts to create a unified party, it was decided that the Youth League would receive its directives from the Comintern via the CCP’s branches in southern China. A detailed French police report on the steps taken by Nguyen Ai Quoc to form the Vietnamese Communist Party from the outside confirms that Quoc had collaborated with a Chinese representative of the Far Eastern Bureau in the organisation of the Hong Kong meeting. This report also noted that because of the large numbers of overseas Chinese in Vietnam, two places were actually set aside for ethnic Chinese members within the envisioned Vietnamese Central Committee (Trung Uong). And according to one Vietnamese militant, after Quoc’s arrest in 1931, the only way the ICP could re-establish contact with the Comintern and the CCP was via Chinese

commnist organizations in Indochina and Siam. This was not the last time Vietnamese revolutionaries would organise their revolutionary liaisons in Asia in such terms (see Chapter 7).

In sum, whatever the extent of the CCP’s involvement in the creation of the ICP, we can see from our first two chapters how a deeper set of interconnected geographical, historical, demographic and even cultural factors made sure that Vietnamese radicalism was linked to the surrounding Asian region, especially the mainland. If much has been written on how internationalism was ‘grafted’ on to the ‘stock’ of Vietnamese patriotism, nationalist historians in Vietnam and elsewhere have been remarkably less willing to discuss how ethnic Vietnamese (and Chinese) internationalists served as the early agents for the introduction of Western-derived radicalism to ethnically non-Vietnamese parts of the peninsula in Malaya, Siam, Laos (and later in Cambodia: see Chapter 8). If there were historic Vietnamese ‘nationalist’ objections to the presence of Chinese cadres within the inner chambers of the Vietnamese Party in 1930 (and I do not think we should be too hasty to project post-1975 or even post-1950 breaks into the past), such Vietnamese ‘internationalists’ would have had a very hard time justifying their own role in the formation of the Siamese, Lao, Khmer and Malayan revolutionary organisations only a few weeks later. Like their Catholic counterparts, Vietnamese communists were both nationalists and internationalists. Both relied on longstanding Sino–Vietnamese communities and the networks holding them together for their evangelizing missions, Moreover, for both catholics and communists, revolutionary results in buddhist Southeat Asia prior to 1945 were anything but successful.

THE FAILURE OF THE SIAMESE COMMUNIST PARTY

In compliance with the Comintern’s instructions conveyed by Nguyen Ai Quoc, Vietnamese internationalists in Udon Thani and Bangkok began work on the Siamese revolution. Hoang Van Hoan says that a Siamese cadre, referred to by the Vietnamese as Van, “was influenced by the Party” and helped in the dissemination of propaganda against the Bangkok government in the early 1930s. According to the memoirs of a Vietnamese cadre who worked in Siam, five to seven Siamese were actually admitted into the SCP at some point. One such Siamese cadre was a Nai Hom, who sent to Moscow for training, but was held up for unknown reasons in China, returning subsequently to work in Laos. Another member, Nai Thum, allegedly got as far as the Soviet Union, but remained idle upon his return to Siam. A third member, known to the Vietnamese as “Su Riu,” worked in France. These ethnic Thai members occupied only low-level Party positions.

Propaganda among the Siamese masses was the chief way by which the Party hoped to promote a Siamese revolution. One of those in charge of this task was Hoang Van Hoan, whose language skills in both Siamese and Chinese probably account for his appointment as a propagandist. Hoan tells us in his memoirs that he spent much of his time translating documents and pamphlets written by Chinese members into Siamese, for the commemorations of International Women’s Day, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and other important workers’ dates. The SCP’s propaganda efforts targeted such groups as rice millers, tramway workers, rickshaw drivers and railway workers, many of whom were forming unions or striking for better conditions. Again, most were Chinese.

The June 1932 change of government in Siam which ended the absolute monarchy was a major political development for the SCP leadership. But if the SCP held out the hope that Siam would soon join it in the world movement towards socialist revolution, the People’s Party, led by Pridi Phanomyoem, turned out to be its most formidable competitor. As the SCP informed the Malayan Communist Party, the new government was a ‘dictatorship of the People’s Party’ which was working to prevent a revolution of the masses. Another document prepared for a Lenin’s Day celebration on 21 January 1933, said that the new government was no different from the monarchy, although it is employing crafty techniques to trick the people, to make sure that they do not start to believe in socialism … In consequence, we feel that the People’s Party is more oppressive than ever. There was to be no united front at this point between Quoc’s SCP and Pridi’s People’s Party.

The ethnically un-Thai character of Siamese communism at the outset is the most important reason for its early failure. A communist letter intercepted by the British from the Siamese Executive Committee to the Malayan Communist Party reveals that the SCP’s total membership in 1932 was about 325. Its Executive Committee administered two provincial committees, four divisional committees, five branches and three special cells. The Party’s activities were urban, largely limited to Bangkok. There were few links with rural areas, with the sole exception being one provincial committee, but even that was said ‘not to be functioning as it should’. Of the 325 party members most were industrial and estate workers, who were said to be ‘of poor quality’, unable to carry out their tasks effectively. Ethnically, there were 55 Vietnamese and 20 Cantonese. The rest were Hainanease. A November 1932 article in a Party paper summed up the SCP’s major weaknesses:

Our Party is called the Communist Party of Siam, but in truth our Party has only Chinese ... The basis by which we can change Siam comes down to a method by which we can bring Siamese into the Party. This is not a new problem. The same measure was discussed at our meeting last year ... where we decided that the first step was for members to study Siamese in preparation for contacting Siamese. It was decided to seek results in six months, but from that time to the present it has been a year and not a single branch has announced progress.

Hoang Van Hoan, who was a member of the SCP’s Executive Committee by this time, told his superiors in Hong Kong in 1935 that upon its founding in 1930, the SCP was a Chinese and Vietnamese creation. Echoing the complaints of Catholic missionaries working in Siam in the 17th century, Hoan admitted that other than the Chinese, the Vietnamese and some Vietnamese–Siamese mixed marriages and métis offering, ‘there were not that many comrades who were truly Siamese’ (dong chi thuc su la ngnoi Xiem thi ngong co may). The same could be said of Malayan, Laotian and Cambodian communism before World War II.

 Another reason cited for the failure of the SCP to effect change among the Siamese masses was the success of the military government in promoting a ‘narrow nationalist line among the workers’. As for the peasant class, the ‘democratic bourgeoisie’ (read the People’s Party) was allied with them, using such tools as the press and nationalism to win them over. To make matters worse, relations among SCP leaders were anything but smooth. Some SCP members were criticised for their ‘egoism, respect for the upper class, romanticism, thinking only of one’s … country, self, … and opportunism.’ The leaders were said to ‘talk too much and work too little.’ In 1934 a Special Branch report went on to say that the Chinese members of the SCP were ‘quite unconnected’ with Vietnamese radicals in Siam, and the liaisons which functioned in maritime Nanyang did so thanks to Haitian émigrés (who constituted 90 per cent of the MCP and probably a similar majority in the SCP). According to an internal 1968 Vietnamese study of Thai communism, the SCP’s activities were limited to the dissemination of Marxist propaganda among the workers and the different working classes. Though it was called a Party, it was really only a group of loosely bound Marxist groups, not yet an official, united Party with a clear revolutionary fighting programme.

Clearly the formation of the SCP was no easy matter. In February 1932 the Comintern had to ask the French, Indian, Chinese and Malayan Communist Parties to assist communists in Siam to organise a Communist Party in correct accordance with the policies of International Communist. On 20 August 1935 Pravda printed a speech by a communist with a very un-Siamese name, ‘Rashi’, who said that the Siamese Party was not yet a ‘section of the Communist International’, but wanted to bring its possible admission to the attention of world communists.

If Vietnamese, Chinese and Siamese radicals did meet in the early 1930s it was probably in France not Asia (although the possibility of Japan should not be ruled out prematurely). Pridi Phanomyoem claims he met with Chinese and Vietnamese intellectuals during his study in France between 1920 and 1928. As head of the Association of Siamese Students in France, he developed a particularly good relationship with the President of the Association of Annamese Students, Duong Van Giao. Together, they helped form the ‘Association pour l’Amitié et Solidarité Asiatique’ in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Later, Duong Van Giao would work as a political adviser in Pridi’s Cabinet. In Paris, Pridi apparently met Zhou Enlai and Nguyen Ai Quoc. While these French connections would come in handy after World War II (see Chapters 4 and 6), in comparison to the Chinese and Vietnamese, there were very few Siamese intellectuals who converted to communism in France or the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and probably even fewer in southern China.

The overseas Chinese and Vietnamese nature of Siamese communism made it all the easier for the Siamese police to strike at the SCP. Hoa kieh and especially Viet kieu enclaves were well known and easy targets. Police operations began in earnest from April 1933, when the Siamese government passed strict anti-communist legislation. The 1933 ‘Act Concerning Communism’ meted out heavy sentences of up to ten years for political agitation or unrest caused by words or writings or printed documents or by any means [which] advocate communism. There were various politically motivated reasons explaining the promulgation of this tough law (some of which had nothing to do with communism), but the propaganda efforts by Nguyen Ai Quoc’s partisans calling for the overthrow of the new government certainly did not help. From the day the SCP’s handbills went out announcing a workers’ strike in August 1932, Siamese authorities were armed heavily, ‘under the impression that the people will begin an uprising.’

Vietnamese communists in Siam suffered the most for trying to convert the masses. According to two studies published in 1938 by a Vietnamese Party paper, Le Travail, over 600 Vietnamese had been arrested in Siam since 1933. in October 1936 a peaceful demonstration in Khon Kaen was broken up by the Siamese police, during which around 200 more Vietnamese were arrested. A large number were indeed communist agitators, including Quynh Anh and Tran To Chan. Several were not. All of them, however, found themselves time served with 3,000 other prisoners at the maximum security jail just north of Bangkok, the infamous Bang Khwang. As of February 1935, there were 40 or more Vietnamese incarcerated at the Udon jail, dozens at the Khon Kaen prison and another 80 Vietnamese political prisoners were held at the Lathudth prison in Bangkok. 

The increased numbers of Vietnamese serving time in Ban Kwang were an accurate barometer of the declining state of Vietnamese revolutionary activities in Siam by 1935. Some Vietnamese leaders of the SCP were increasingly worried by the large-scale Siamese arrest of their ethnic Vietnamese leaders and the effect of this on their capacity to aid the Vietnamese nationalist revolution. In their view, these internationalist exhortations were badly out of touch with local realities. One of these sceptics was Hoang Van Hoon. In early to mid-1935, he left Siam for China citing genuine health reasons, but also with the secret intention of meeting with ICP leaders to discuss the problem of the Siamese ‘revolution’. In China, Hoan explained to the ICP’s Overseas Directing Bureau that despite the large Vietnamese population in Siam, the number of ‘active’ revolutionaries was now quite small. He added that because Vietnamese communities were concentrated in precise, known locations in the northeast, it was easy for the Siamese police to arrest them. If we can believe Hoan, ‘almost all of the Party’s main cadres’ had been arrested. He cited the Phichit incident of July 1930, when 26 important Vietnamese communists were rounded up and revolutionary bases there were destroyed for good. This was in addition to the earlier arrests of leading communists Vo Tung and Dang Thai Thuyen on 4 June 1930. If things continued deteriorating at this rate, Hoan warned, the capacity of the SCP to aid the Vietnamese revolution would be severely undermined. That is precisely what happened.

REINING IN INTERNATIONALISM: NORTHEAST SIAM AND THE VIETNAMESE REVOLUTION

In 1930–31, workers’ strikes, peasant demonstrations and boycotts were common in Vietnam. Beginning in the last half of 1930, autonomous ‘red villages’ (sometimes called ‘soviets’) were set up in the Nong-Thein area under the encouragement of local ICP branches. The French struck back by sanctioning a violent crackdown on the villages in this area and the communist leadership in particular. By mid-1931 not only had the ‘Soviet’ movement been crushed, but the ICP apparatus in Vietnam had suffered badly with a large number of its leaders either killed or imprisoned. Many of those able to escape found their way to Siam and sought support from the SCP’s Vietnamese-run Provincial Committee in Udon. On the outside, Nguyen Ai Quoc and several other top-level ICP leaders had been arrested.The head of the Far Eastern Bureau, Noulens, was in jail, and so was the man sent by the Comptroller to rebuild the ICP, Ducroux.

As cadres were bringing news of the repression to Udon, Le Hong Son arrived in Siam from China by way of Burma. Son was a close associate of Quoc and a top-level Vietnamese communist, who had first come to Siam in the early 1920s with Le Hong Phong (Le Huy Doan) and had had a hand in the formation of the Youth League in Siam and the VCP in Hong Kong. In meetings in Udon Thani that Son held with ICP members who had recently fled Vietnam and Vietnamese leaders of the SCP Provincial Committee, it was decided that some sort of organisation should be created to assist the Indonesian revolution inside Vietnam. In charge of this committee would be Vietnamese members of the SCP and some of those revolutionaries who had fled to Siam. The Siamese Commission supported the Provincial Committee’s moves on internationalist grounds and gave the Provincial Committee this specific responsibility. The fact that Vietnamese cadres held important leadership posts in both certainly helped.

To achieve the above-mentioned goals, in early 1932, the Udon Committee instructed cadres to organise what soon became known as the Indochinese Assistance Section (Dong Duong Vien Tro Bo). After a while this section was able to provide shelter to cadres seeking refuge in Siam as well as to provide funds for their travel requirements. Because a majority of those seeking refuge in Siam lacked revolutionary training, centres were again set up in such places as Ban May to give instruction in revolutionary theory. In fact, the political programme and regulations of the ICP were reportedly brought to Siam for the first time during this period.

This external section was key to the survival of the ICP. Le Hong Son told his Sûreté interrogators in 1932 that he and Ngo Chinh Quoc had tried to procure a letter of introduction from the CCP’s Hoa kieu organisation in Siam in order to make contact with Chinese party leaders and, with their help, recontact the Comintern.165 The French Sûreté noted a year later that it was after receiving of a letter from the CCP that the Indochinese Assistance Section accelerated its work to rebuild communism in Vietnam. Le Hong Son took a boat to China, but was arrested before he made it into the inner chambers of the CCP buried somewhere in the backstreets of Shanghai.

The Indochinese Assistance Section sought to rebuild the party inside Vietnam via northeastern Thailand and Laos, probably without any formal instructions from above. Things were so bad that in late April or early May 1933, Vietnamese members of the Siamese Communist Party organised a General Assembly of the Indochinese Communist Party at Ban Mai. One participant reported that the Siamese Executive Committee of the SCP ‘had agreed to form the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party in order to administer the affairs of the Indochinese Party directly’. A five-member Provisional Executive Committee of the ICP was elected at this meeting. Not until later,however, did Hoan understand that the Bangkok Executive Committee’s policy was only to assist those who had come to Siam to make contact with the ICP, but not, presumably, to form a new ICP Central Committee on Siamese soil (which is uncommon in communist practice).170 Working on captured documents, the French Sûreté concluded that this ‘provisional Central Committee’ was replaced by the Indochinese Assistance Section (Ban Vien Tro Bo Dong Duong) during the ‘Third Meeting of the Representatives of Udon’, held on 28 September 1933.171 Working via this Siamese-based organisation, Vietnamese radicals along the Mekong were able to expand their work back into Laos, where a Territorial Committee (Xu Uy Ai Lao) was formed on 9 September 1934. This in turn facilitated the real work of the Indochinese Assistance Section: the reconstruction of revolutionary organisations in central Vietnam. In March 1935, Tran To Chan, working on orders from Le Hong Phong, successfully created a Territorial Committee in upper central Vietnam.

What is important here is to emphasise that the outside was crucial to the survival of Vietnamese communism on the inside, given the heavy blow communism had suffered inside Vietnam and across Asia in 1930–31 at the hands of European and Asian police forces. In May 1931, the Comintern’s representative for the Far East, Mr Ducroux, wrote that the ICP was in such sorry state that the Far Eastern Bureau would have to subsidise its finances if it were to stay afloat. It did. He added that ‘the direction of the Indochinese Party was almost nonexistent’. This was also accurate. What was left of it was holed up in northeastern Siam or on the run in southern China. The Indochinese Section in Siam was, as a Sûreté report put it, ‘the point of departure for the reorganisation of the ICP’.

Between mid-1931 and 1934, the Indochinese Assistance Section was thus the only link between surviving revolutionary cells inside Vietnam on the one hand and the Comintern and the ICP leadership positioned abroad on the other. This changed on 14 June 1934, when Le Hong Phong formed the Overseas Directing Bureau of the ICP (Ban chi huy o hai ngoai cua Dang) in Macao, on orders from the Comintern and with the ‘ardent support’ of the Chinese Communist Party. Since arriving in Kwangsi in April 1932, Phong’s job for the Comintern was clear: to save the ICP. To this end, he had the support of the Siamese Communist Party, the Comintern and the French Communist Party, thanks to Tran Van Giau’s increasingly active, if competitive, work in southern Vietnam (see below).

Although Le Hong Phong (Litvinov) had been trained in the ‘Stalin School’ in Moscow, unlike Tran Van Giau, he had begun his revolutionary career in Udon Thani and Canton under Dang Thuc Hua and Nguyen Ai Quoc. He spoke Chinese ‘perfectly’, according to the Sûreté, and no doubt had some Thai. Following the arrest of Le Hong Son in 1932, the SCP had sent Tran To Chan to Macao and southern China to help Le Hong Phong rebuild the ICP from both sides of French Indochina on behalf of the Comintern. It was only in 1934 that the Mekong-based Indochinese Section was eclipsed by the Overseas Directing Bureau of the ICP in Macao. It was this Macao-based internationalist organisation, led by the Comintern, that formally resurrected the ICP. It was, however, Vietnamese communists in the SCP and the Indochinese Assistance Section that had kept the ICP alive until links with the Comintern, the CCP and the FCP were re-established. Thanks to all these external organisations, meetings were finally held in Macao in 1935, resulting in the formation of a new, unified Central Committee for the ICP.178 The Overseas Directing Bureau was put in charge of monitoring the ICP’s Central Committee in collaboration with the Comintern, the FCP and a mysterious ‘directing organism’, which the Sûreté thought to be the Central Committee of the CCP at Shanghai; as, we know from a Vietnamese communist source, the latter had helped form the Overseas Directing Bureau itself.179 Tran To Chan joined its Central Committee.

This was the situation Hoang Van Hoan encountered upon his arrival in China in 1935. But he could not have been happy about the internationalist line that still prevailed at the Macao meeting that year. As a 31 March letter to the SCP from an ICP Central Committee delegate at the Macao ‘Congress’ read:

We ask that the Siamese Communist Party lead the revolutionary struggle of the Siamese working masses enthusiastically and develop it fully. The revolutionary activities in every region are a part of the world revolution. All are class brothers in the capitalist, colonial and semi-colonial regions.

BRINGING RADICALISM TO WESTERN INDOCHINA

Laos lay in the middle of the revolutionary route running from Macao back to the provinces of Nghe-Tinh. Unsurprisingly, the strengthening of revolutionary bases in Laos had been a specific responsibility of the Vietnamese-run Provincial Committee in Udon and the Indochinese Assistance Section.181 Since 1930 the Udon Provincial Committee had helped the Youth League branch in Vientiane make the change over to communism ‘as part of the Indochinese Communist Party’.182 In the early 1930s, the Indochinese Assistance Section dispatched representatives to Laos to work among Vietnamese miners in Boneng and Phong Chiu. Links were also formed with Vietnamese bases in Thakhek, Savannakhet and Pakse. By September 1934, the Indochinese Assistance Section was in charge of Party bases in Vientiane, Phongchiu, Boneng, Thakhek, Savannakhet and Pakse. If the Chinese constituted the proletariat for the SCP in Bangkok, the Viet kieu made up the working class in Laos. As noted, the Indochinese Assistance Section also fostered the creation of the Provisional Laotian Regional Committee (Xu Uy Ai-lao Lam thoi) in a bid to help rebuild the ICP in central Vietnam.183 The tasks of this Laotian-based committee were:

1.to organise the Laotian section of the ICP;

2.to work with the Indochinese Assistance section in Udon Thani; and

3.to link up with the Annam section of the ICP in central Vietnam.

The Sûreté remarked in private that this was ‘the first time, to the knowledge of our security services, that communist propaganda has touched the natives of Laos’. Tran To Chan was specifically in charge of Laos and Annam (Trung ky). To hold the SCP together, the Comintern despatched Nguyen Tri Thuc (alias ‘Datty’) to Bangkok at the same time as Le Hong Phong and Tran Van Giau.

To the southeast, Tran Van Giau called upon Viet kieu radicals in Phnom Penh to form a parallel ICP Territorial Committee in Cambodia.186 Giau had first tried this via the Transbassac Committee, subordinate to his semi-independent Southern Indochinese Federal Committee in 1934.187 Unlike his Nghe-Tinh counterparts, though, Giau had no bases among the Viet kieu in southeastern Siam and internal dissension among southern Vietnamese communists probably diverted him from concentrating as effectively on Cambodia as Tran To Chan was doing in Laos. Communists in the western part of southern Vietnam were opposed to Giau.188 Moreover, the fact that Tran Van Giau, a young southerner trained in France and Moscow, was in much closer contact with French Communist Party agents in Asia than those of the CCP and SCP would not have helped in Kampot province, where many Hainanese communists had fled after the Canton violence of 1927. Giau spoke no Asian foreign language.

In any case, based on the evidence available, there was little response from ethnic Lao and Khmer populations to this prewar Vietnamese evangelising. In 1934, Vietnamese communists noted the danger of letting the Viet kieu play the dominant role in building a Laotian communist section. ‘There is little reason to wonder’, one Vietnamese said of the Viet émigrés in the Laotian section, ‘at the scant progress [made] among the local [Lao] masses’. As of 1934, Vietnamese communists had yet to recruit an ethnic Lao into their Party apparatus. They would however convert two in 1935.

Moreover, given the state of Siamese and European repression since 1930, the Vietnamese were hardly in a position to introduce communism to the Indochinese masses at this point. This was one of the things Hoan wanted to tell the ICP leadership in southern China so badly. This he did finally in 1935. The subsequent shift in the SCP’s and ICP’s line away from world revolution — promulgated in mid-1936 and stressing the importance of a broad-based political and social front for national liberation — was, at least in part, in response to the resounding internationalist failures in Siam and elsewhere and the damage this had done to the ICP’s ability to tend to Vietnamese affairs. As Le Manh Trinh nicely captured the bigger picture: from 1933 the Siamese and KMT’s anti-communist attitude allowed the French ‘to succeed in cutting the links between the revolutionary movement inside Vietnam and on the outside’.191 The ICP would encounter a remarkably similar situation after World War II (see Chapters 4, 6 and 7).

By 1936, the ICP’s Overseas Directing Bureau in Hong Kong had lost most of its links with the Siamese Commission because the majority of the SCP’s bases in Siam had been destroyed and its leadership imprisoned. The Comintern’s representative to the SCP, Nguyen Tri Thuc (Datty), was apprehended. From 1935, Vietnamese organisations in Siam ‘were dissolved one by one’.192 In 1938, the Siamese Commission decided that the ‘Siamese revolution’ would have to be realised through the work of the ethnic Thai. According to Hoan, it was approved that ‘foreign nationals could only participate in their own patriotic organisations’. In other words, Vietnamese could not carry out a revolution for the Siamese, at least not for the moment.193 It was only after World War II that Vietnamese internationalists would try again to spread communism outside of their national borders, this time overland to western Indochina, to Laos and Cambodia — but not to Malaya or Siam (see Chapter 8).

Noted

1 On the Thanh Nien, see: Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982; Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Modern Vietnam, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976; and William J. Duiker, The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam, 1900–1941, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976.

2 ‘Anniversaire de Pham Hong Thai et Pham Hong Thai et l’Histoire d’Annam’, Thanh Nien, no. 49 (12 December 1926); ‘Abrégé de l’histoire des révolutions mondiales’, Thanh Nien, no. 15 (11 October 1925) and no. 16 (18 October 1925); ‘Histoire de la révolution annamite’, Thanh Nien, no. 81 (29 February 1927); Unsigned, ‘La Patrie’, Thanh Nien, no. 77 (23 January 1927); ‘Partis politiques. Qu’est ce qu’un parti politique?’, Thanh Nien, no. 5 (19 July 1925); ‘Qu’est ce que l’impérialisme?’, Thanh Nien, no. 35 (3 March 1926) and no. 40 (4 April 1925); and ‘Les paysans et la révolution’, Thanh Nien, no. 40 (4 April 1925).

3 Educated by Quoc in Canton, Le Manh Trinh confirms the proletarian aspect of his Thanh Nien education. Le Manh Trinh, ‘Dans le Kouang Toueng et au Siam’, pp. 100–02, 108.

4 The French estimated in 1912 that there were 2,000 Vietnamese in Yunnan province. They worked in French bureaux, as servants in European homes, as small traders or as vagabonds. 435 were employed in the Compagnie française des Chemins de fer de l’Indochine et du Yunnan. There were around 600 living in Hokeou; 313 in Mongtseu; and 250 in Yunnanfou (Kunming). See: Consulat de France à Mongtseu, (Beauvais (Mongtseu) à Georges Picot (Pékin)’, 12 August 1912, in d. 18551, GG/A, CAOM.

5 ‘Annexe no. 1 à la note Noël, no. 146 (extrait) B compte rendu de l’entretien Pinot Noël du 6 avril à 10H du matin chez Mr Maurice sans témoins’, d. 1925, Nguyen Ai Quoc, c. 365, SPCE, CAOM.

6 ‘Gouverneur Général de l’Indochine à M. le Ministre des Colonies: Propagande révolutionnaire en Indochine’, Hanoi, no. 3193/SG, Hanoi, 28 October 1925, d. 1925, Nguyen Ai Quoc, c. 365, SPCE, CAOM and ‘Que devons nous faire?’, Thanh Nien, no. 47 (6 June 1926), all translated by the French and held in c. 16, SLOTFOM, série V, CAOM.

7 Gouvernement Général de l’Indochine, Service Central de Renseignements et de la Sûreté Générale, ‘Phan Boi Chau’, no. SG2, Hanoi, October 1925, d. no. 2, Phan Boi Chau, c. 353, SPCE, CAOM; ‘Note sur un entretien secret qui a eu lieu le 12 novembre 1932 entre le Chef de la Sûreté et Phan Boi Chau’, signed by Sogny, Secret, Hue, 12 November 1932; and Index des noms figurant dans les déclarations de [Le] Hong Son du 24 octobre 1932 et des jours suivants, both in d. PBC, renseignement d’agents, c. 351, SPCE, CAOM.