Ho Chi Minh, original
name Nguyen Sinh Cung, also called Nguyen Tat Thanh, orNguyen Ai Quoc (born May 19, 1890, Hoang Tru, Vietnam,
French Indochina—died Sept. 2, 1969, Hanoi, Vietnam), founder of the Indochina
Communist Party (1930) and its successor, the Viet-Minh (1941), and president
from 1945 to 1969 of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). As the
leader of the Vietnamese nationalist movement for nearly three decades, Ho was
one of the prime movers of the post-World War II anticolonial movement in Asia
and one of the most influential communist leaders of the 20th century.
Early Life.
The son of a poor
country scholar, Nguyen Sinh Huy, Ho Chi Minh was brought up in the village of
Kim Lien. He had a wretched childhood, but between the ages of 14 and 18 he was
able to study at a grammar school in Hue. He is next known to have been a
schoolmaster in Phan Thiet and then was apprenticed at a technical institute in
Saigon.
In 1911, under the name
of Ba, he found work as a cook on a French steamer. He was a seaman for more
than three years, visiting various African ports and the American cities of
Boston and New York. After living in London from 1915 to 1917, he moved to
France, where he worked, in turn, as a gardener, sweeper, waiter, photo
retoucher, and oven stoker.
During the six years
that he spent in France (1917–23), he became an active socialist, under the
name Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”). He organized a group of Vietnamese
living there and in 1919 addressed an eight-point petition to the
representatives of the great powers at the Versailles Peace Conference that
concluded World War I. In the petition, Ho demanded that the French colonial
power grant its subjects in Indochina equal rights with the rulers. This act
brought no response from the peacemakers, but it made him a hero to many
politically conscious Vietnamese. The following year, inspired by the success
of the communist revolution in Russia and Vladimir Lenin’s anti-imperialist
doctrine, Ho joined the French Communists when they withdrew from the Socialist
Party in December 1920.
After his years of
militant activity in France, where he became acquainted with most of the French
working-class leaders, Ho went to Moscow at the end of 1923. In January 1924,
following the death of Lenin, he published a moving farewell to the founder of
the Soviet Union in Pravda. Six months later, from June 17 to July 8, he took
an active part in the fifth Congress of the Communist International, during
which he criticized the French Communist Party for not opposing colonialism
more vigorously. His statement to the congress is noteworthy because it
contains the first formulation of his belief in the importance of the
revolutionary role of oppressed peasants (as opposed to industrial workers).
In December 1924, under
the assumed name of Ly Thuy, Ho went to Canton, a Communist stronghold, where
he recruited the first cadres of the Vietnamese nationalist movement, organizing
them into the Vietnam Thanh Nien Cach Menh Dong Chi Hoi (“Vietnamese
Revolutionary Youth Association”), which became famous under the name Thanh
Nien. Almost all of its members had been exiled from Indochina because of their
political beliefs and had gathered together in order to participate in the
struggle against French rule over their country. Thus, Canton became the first
home of Indochinese nationalism.
When Chiang Kai-shek,
then commander of the Chinese army, expelled the Chinese Communists from Canton
in April 1927, Ho again sought refuge in the Soviet Union. In 1928 he went to
Brussels and Paris and then to Siam (now Thailand), where he spent two years as
a representative of the Communist International, the world organization of
Communist parties, in Southeast Asia. His followers, however, remained in South
China.
Founding of the
Indochinese Communist Party (PCI)
Meeting in Hong Kong in
May 1929, members of the Thanh Nien decided to form an Indochinese Communist
Party. Others—in the Vietnamese cities of Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon—began the
actual work of organization, but some of Ho’s lieutenants were reluctant to act
in the absence of their leader, who had the confidence of Moscow. Ho was
brought back from Siam, therefore, and on Feb. 3, 1930, he presided over the
founding of the party. At first it was called the Vietnamese Communist Party,
but after October 1930, Ho, acting on Soviet advice, adopted the name
Indochinese Communist Party. In this phase of his career, Ho acted more as an
arbiter of conflicts among the various factions, allowing the organization of
revolutionary action, rather than as an initiator. His prudence, his awareness
of what it was possible to accomplish, his care not to alienate Moscow, and the
influence that he already had achieved among the Vietnamese Communists can be
seen in these actions.
The creation of the PCI
coincided with a violent insurrectionary movement in Vietnam. Repression by the
French was brutal; Ho himself was condemned in absentia to death as a revolutionary.
He sought refuge in Hong Kong, where the French police obtained permission from
the British for his extradition, but friends helped him escape, and he reached
Moscow via Shanghai.
In 1935 the seventh
Congress of the International, meeting in Moscow, which he attended as chief
delegate for the PCI, officially sanctioned the idea of the Popular Front (an
alliance with the non-Communist left against Fascism)—a policy Ho had advocated
for some time. In keeping with this policy the Communists in Indochina
moderated their anticolonialist stance in 1936, allowing for cooperation with
“antifascist colonialists.” The formation of Premier Léon Blum’s Popular Front
government in France in the same year allowed leftist forces in Indochina to
operate more freely, although Ho, because of his condemnation in 1930, was not
permitted to return from exile. Repression returned to Indochina with the fall
of the Blum government in 1937, and by 1938 the Popular Front was dead.
World War II and the
founding of the Vietnamese state.
In 1938 Ho returned to
China and stayed for a few months with Mao Zedong at Yen-an. When France was
defeated by Germany in 1940, Ho and his lieutenants, Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham
Van Dong, plotted to use this turn of events to advance their own cause. About
this time he began to use the name Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens). Crossing
over the border into Vietnam in January 1941, the trio and five comrades
organized in May the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi (League for the
Independence of Vietnam), or Viet Minh; this gave renewed emphasis to a
peculiarly Vietnamese nationalism.
The new organization
was forced to seek help in China from the government of Chiang Kai-shek. But
Chiang distrusted Ho as a Communist and had him arrested. Ho was then imprisoned
in China for 18 months, during which time he wrote his famed Notebook from
Prison (a collection of short poems written in classic Chinese, a mixture of
melancholy, stoicism, and a call for revolution). His friends obtained his
release by an arrangement with Chiang Fa-k’uei, a warlord in South China,
agreeing in return to support Chiang’s interests in Indochina against the
French.
In 1945 two events
occurred that paved the way to power for the Vietnamese revolutionaries. First,
the Japanese completely overran Indochina and imprisoned or executed all French
officials. Six months later the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,
and the Japanese were totally defeated. Thus, the two strongest adversaries of
the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh were eliminated.
Ho Chi Minh seized his
opportunity. Within a few months he contacted U.S. forces and began to
collaborate with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS; a U.S. undercover
operation) against the Japanese. Further, his Viet Minh guerrillas fought
against the Japanese in the mountains of South China.
At the same time,
commandos formed by Vo Nguyen Giap, under Ho’s direction, began to move toward
Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, in the spring of 1945. After Japan’s surrender
to the Allies, they entered Hanoi on August 19. Finally, on September 2, before
an enormous crowd gathered in Ba Dinh Square, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam
independent, using words ironically reminiscent of the U.S. Declaration of
Independence: “All men are born equal: the Creator has given us inviolable
rights, life, liberty, and happiness. . . !”
All obstacles were not
removed from the path of the Viet Minh, however. According to the terms of an
Allied agreement, Chiang Kai-shek’s troops were supposed to replace the
Japanese north of the 16th parallel. More significantly, France, now liberated
and under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, did not intend to simply accept
the fait accompli of an independent Vietnam and attempted to reassert its
control. On October 6 the French general Jacques Leclerc landed in Saigon,
followed a few days later by a strong armoured division. Within three months,
he had control of South Vietnam. Ho had to choose between continuing the fight
or negotiating. He chose negotiations, but not without preparing for an
eventual transition to war.
Ho Chi Minh’s strategy
was to get the French to make the Chinese in the north withdraw and then to
work for a treaty with France in which recognition of independence, evacuation
of Leclerc’s forces, and reunification of the country would be assured.
Negotiations began in late October 1945, but the French refused to speak of
independence, and Ho was caught in a stalemate. In March the deadlock was
broken: on his side, Ho Chi Minh allowed parties other than the Viet Minh to be
included in the new government, in an attempt to gain a wider base of support
for the demands made on the French; at the same time, the French sent a
diplomatic mission to China to obtain the evacuation of the Chinese soldiers.
This was done, and some of Leclerc’s troops were also removed from Haiphong, in
the north. Having secured the withdrawal of the Chinese, Ho signed an agreement
with the French on March 6. According to its terms, Vietnam was recognized as a
“free state with its own government, army, and finances,” but it was integrated
into a French Union in which Paris continued to play the key role. Twelve days
later, Leclerc entered Hanoi with a few battalions, which were to be confined
to a restricted area.
The First Indochina
War.
The agreement was
unsatisfactory to extremists on both sides, and Ho Chi Minh went to France for
a series of conferences (June to September 1946) and concluded a second
agreement with the French government. But the peace was broken by an incident
at Haiphong (Nov. 20–23, 1946) when a French cruiser opened fire on the town
after a clash between French and Vietnamese soldiers. Almost 6,000 Vietnamese were
killed, and hope for an amicable settlement ended. Sick and disillusioned, Ho
Chi Minh was not able to oppose demands for retaliation by his more militant
followers, and the First Indochina War began on December 19.
After a few months, Ho,
who had sought refuge in a remote area of North Vietnam, attempted to
reestablish contact with Paris, but the terms he was offered were unacceptable.
In 1948 the French offered to return the former Annamese (Vietnamese) emperor
Bao Dai, who had abdicated in favour of the revolution in August 1945. These
terms were more favourable than those offered to Ho Chi Minh two years earlier,
because the French were now attempting to weaken the Viet Minh by supporting
the traditional ruling class in Vietnam. But this policy was not successful.
The Viet Minh army, commanded by Giap, was able to contain the French and Bao
Dai’s forces with guerrilla tactics and terrorism, and by the end of 1953 most
of the countryside was under Viet Minh control, with the larger cities under a
virtual state of siege. The French were decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu on
May 7, 1954, and had no choice but to negotiate.
The Geneva Accords and
the Second Indochina War.
From May to July 21,
1954, representatives of eight countries—with Vietnam represented by two
delegations, one composed of supporters of Ho Chi Minh, the other of supporters
of Bao Dai—met in Geneva to find a solution. They concluded with an agreement
according to which Vietnam was to be divided at the 17th parallel until
elections, scheduled for 1956, after which the Vietnamese would establish a
unified government.
It is difficult to
assess Ho’s role in the Geneva negotiations. He was represented by Pham Van
Dong, a faithful associate. The moderation exhibited by the Viet Minh in accepting
a partition of the country and in accepting control of less territory than they
had conquered during the war follows the pattern established by the man who had
signed the 1946 agreements with France. But this flexibility, which was also a
response to pressures exerted by the Russians and Chinese, did not achieve
everything for the Viet Minh. Hanoi lost out because the elections that were to
guarantee the country’s reunification were postponed indefinitely by the United
States and by South Vietnam, which was created on a de facto basis at this
time.
North Vietnam, where Ho
and his associates were established, was a poor country, cut off from the vast
agricultural areas of the south. Its leaders were forced to ask for assistance
from their larger Communist allies, China and the Soviet Union. In these
adverse conditions Ho Chi Minh’s regime became repressive and rigidly
totalitarian. Attempted agricultural reforms in 1955–56 were conducted with
ignorant brutality and repression. “Uncle” Ho, as he had become known to the
North Vietnamese, was able to preserve his immense popularity, but he abandoned
a kind of humane quality that had distinguished some of his previous
revolutionary activities despite ruthless purges of Trotskyists and bourgeois
nationalists in 1945–46.
The old statesman had
better luck in the field of diplomacy. He traveled to Moscow and Peking (1955)
and to New Delhi and Jakarta (1958), skillfully maintaining a balance between
his powerful Communist allies and even, at the time of his journey to Moscow in
1960, acting as a mediator between them. Linked by old habit, and perhaps by
preference, to the Soviet Union, but aware of the seminal role China had played
in the revolution in Asia, preoccupied with using his relations with Moscow to
lessen China’s influence in Asia, and, above all, careful to assert Vietnamese
rights, Ho Chi Minh skillfully maintained a balance between the two Communist
giants. When the war was resumed, he obtained an equal amount of aid from both.
Beginning about 1959,
North Vietnam again became involved in war. Guerrillas, popularly known as the
Vietcong, were conducting an armed revolt against the U.S.-sponsored regime of
Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Their leaders, veterans of the Viet Minh,
appealed to North Vietnam for aid. In July 1959, at a meeting of the central
committee of Ho Chi Minh’s Lao Dong (Worker’s Party), it was decided that the
establishment of socialism in the North was linked with the unification with
the South. This policy was confirmed by the third congress of the Lao Dong,
held shortly thereafter in Hanoi. During the congress, Ho Chi Minh ceded his
position as the party’s secretary-general to Le Duan. He remained chief of
state, but, from this point on, his activity was largely behind-the-scenes. Ho
certainly continued to have enormous influence in the government, which was
dominated by his old followers Pham Van Dong, Truong Chinh, Vo Nguyen Giap, and
Le Duan, but he was less actively involved, becoming more and more a symbol to
the people. His public personality,which had never been the object of a cult
comparable to that of Joseph Stalin, Mao, or even Josip Broz Tito, is best
symbolized by his popular name, Uncle Ho. He stood for the essential unity of
the divided Vietnamese family.
This role, which he
played with skill, did not prevent him from taking a position in the conflict
ravaging his country, especially after American air strikes against the North
began in 1965. On July 17, 1966, he sent a message to the people (“nothing is
as dear to the heart of the Vietnamese as independence and liberation”) that
became the motto of the North Vietnamese cause. On Feb. 15, 1967, in response
to a personal message from U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, he announced: “We
will never agree to negotiate under the threat of bombing.” Ho lived to see
only the beginning of a long round of negotiations before he died. The removal
of this powerful leader undoubtedly damaged chances for an early settlement.
Ho Chi Minh’s
importance
Among 20th-century
revolutionaries, Ho waged the longest and most costly battle against the
colonial system of the great powers. One of its effects was to cause a grave
crisis in the national life of the mightiest of capitalist countries, the
United States. As a Marxist, Ho stands with the Yugoslav leader Tito as one of
the progenitors of the “national Communism” that developed in the 1960s and (at
least partially) with Communist China’s Mao Zedong in emphasizing the role of
the peasantry in the revolutionary struggle.
Most of Ho Chi Minh’s
writings are collected in the two-volume Selected Works, published in Hanoi in
1960, in the series of Foreign Language Editions.
Written by: Jean
Lacouture
