Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution

by Hue-Tam Ho Tai

This work looks at the influence of radicalism on a crucial point in Vietnamese history. It reveals an era of student strikes, debates on women's emancipation, revolt against the patriarchal family and intellectual explorations of French and Chinese politics and thought.

Review
Tai's work is a mixture of riveting evidence and succinctly drawn inferences about the very complex radical milieu in Vietnam during the 1920s and 1930s. The sources are diverse, ranging from archival evidence to personal histories...Tai not only draws the outline, but she fills in the picture with vivid detail and insightful portraiture.
--Marilyn Levine (American Historical Review )

Tai's book sets out to challenge the assumption so prevalent in earlier works which compressed the history of the Vietnamese Revolution into the history of communism. In her quest she marshals an impressive range of material--much of it unknown in the West.
--Al Richardson (Analysis )

Genres: History, Politics

325 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1992

About the author

Position: Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-vietnamese History

Field: East Asia

Specialty: Social and cultural history of modern Vietnam

Current Interests
Public memory and public history; the famine of 1945 in northern Vietnam as experience and memory; telling lives: biography and autobiography.

Selected Publications
*"Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory" in The American Historical Review(2001)
* The Country of Memory:Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (2001)
* "Representing the Past in Vietnamese Museums" in Curator (1998)
* "Monumental Ambiguity: the State Commemoration of Ho Chi Minh" in Essays into Vietnamese Pasts (1995)
* Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (1992)
* Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (1983)

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hue-Tam Ho Tai's study deals with the fundamental transformations that occured in the Vietnamese society of the 1920s and 1930s.

By the 1920s, Vietnam had been under French rule for over forty years. The Vietnamese, who had survived as a people, nation, and culture ten centuries of Chinese rule, were not strangers to foreign domination. Just as they had once borrowed generously from Chinese values, customs, and literature, so the 1920s youth began borrowing from the French. While their parents and teachers still clung to the old norms, young Vietnamese men and women turned away from Confucian principles. Changes in the school system led to widespread student unrest that shocked the older generation used to seeing fidelity and obedience among youngsters. The newly introduced French and Franko-Vietnamese schools differed greatly from traditional Vietnamese education. The Confucian teachers had been regarded as second fathers, whom the students had to listen to and obey their whole lives. Those teachers were involved in each and every aspect of their students' lives and played a role in their upbringing and development that was not less important than the role of parents. In sharp contrast, the often abusive and unjust French pedagogues concerned themselves only with classroom matters. Although their ideas regarding the students' upbringing were not in accord with the parents' beliefs, at the smallest hint of disobedience, fathers were called in to correct their son's or daughter's behavior. A significant part of the students' disillusionment came exactly from the humiliating experience of watching their fathers, which they had been taught to respect, kowtow before the school administration.
The outbreak of a series of student strikes against abusive school teachers in 1927 had its roots in this humiliation exactly. In the School for Native Young Ladies a girl was scolded for speaking too loudly during studying hours and abused verbally by her teacher after she asserted her innocence. After the school administration sided with the teacher and the girl's uncle forced his niece to apologize, all her schoolmates went on strike in protest. Their bold action was soon followed by a whole series of strikes in elite male and female schools in Saigon, Hanoi, and Hue. The French authorities, alarmed by the students' unrest, ordered a severe crackdown, but this only ignited a second series of strikes in the provinces. The radicalization of the Vietnamese youth had begun. By the time, it had become fashionable among the older generation to complain about the younger generation's inactivity. Now the traditionalists were aghast at the youth's rapidly developing interest in politics and rejection of propriety and filial piety. Family was replaced by fraternal love in the list of young Vietnamese's values. The adaptation to French rule and the predominantly French education further estranged the young from the Confucian family norms and pushed them towards European freedom and individualism. They were torn by conflicting ideas instilled in them by their parents and teachers, and those ideas convinced them that their plight is the plight of their country and compelled them to join the revolutionary struggle.

One of the most crucial transformations was the new perception of women's role in society. No one was more constrained by Confucian norms than Vietnamese women. They were confined to their parents' homes and later to the homes of their husbands and did not receive any education. Their behavior was stringently dictated by a whole set of rulebooks that had constituted a separate genre in Vietnamese literature since the 15th century. The many rules, which were usually written in stances to facilitate memorization, included "Do not talk to a man who is not relative," "Do not alter your clothing without reason," "When alone, do not sing or declaim poetry," "Do not shrug, do not sigh; Do not laugh before you have even said a word; When laughing, do not show all your teeth," and the almost ridiculous "Do not look out the window with a pensive air."
However, the nationalistic youth of Vietnam came to realize that such conservative ideas regarding women had no place in the revolutionary movement, where young women and young men had to interact and work together. The uneducated, weak, and home-bound Confucian woman was now perceived as a burden on modern society. The old notion that women's job was not to ignite revolutions gave place to the idea that a woman could be just as useful for the revolutionary struggle as a man. The communist youth movement in Vietnam was especially supportive of this new Vietnamese womanhood and invested a lot of effort in educating women and recruiting them into its ranks.

Interestingly, it was romantic fiction that gave impetus to female liberation and created a link between the old, stifling Confucian values the new nationalists rejected and French colonial oppression. Although translated Western prose had been available in Vietnam for years, it had failed to capture the attention of Vietnamese readers, for they could not connect with the experiences and problems of Western characters. With the emergence of native fiction in the 1920s, however, novels became a vehicle of cultural transformation. Predominantly romantic, the new books offered a liberated view of love as separate from the forced marriages Confucian families imposed on their children. In them, family members were usually portrayed as tyrants, hindering their sons' and daughters' way towards love and freedom. While critics lamented the eroding influence of such books on the young generation, the youth admired this new fiction for rejecting the old portrait of women as obedient and silent and for giving voice to the "oppressed." As the French authorities often suspected, the domineering patriarchal family that played the role of the antagonist in this novels was in fact a stand-in for the cruel colonial regime. While at first glance the Vietnamese were reading love stories, in reality those stories were clandestine critiques of colonial society.

No less crucial for the transition from moderate urban-elite nationalism to radicalism were the new nationalistic newspapers. The reason for their emergence was the French economy of corruption. The French governor's monopolies over the alcohol, opium, and salt trade in Vietnam were intensely hated by the Vietnamese population. The colonial government enforced its alcohol monopoly by arresting those who dared to brew alcohol at home – a popular practice – and increased profits by punishing villages where alcohol consumption was low. Opium consumption was incouraged through similar means. Salt, on the other hand, was sold at outrageous prices, and fishermen could often do nothing but let their fish back into the sea because they could not afford to buy the salt needed to cure it. As the situation got worse with every year, it ignited great resentment among the Vietnamese, and monopoly-related scandals became a daily topic of the rising Vietnamese journalism. Educated Viets, who had spent years in Paris and absorbed Marxist-Leninist and other revolutionary ideas there, channeled their activity into publishing newspapers similar to those they had read in France. Circumventing strict colonial censorship, they distributed nationalistic newspapers in the city and in the countryside, calling their readers' attention to the unbelievable extent of French corruption and strenghtening their already raging anti-colonial sentiment.

All of the aforementioned transformations prepared the ground for the rise of Ho Chi Minh's communist movement that swept the country in the late 1920s and gained a large support base from all over Vietnam. The communists represented all the radical and the liberated the young Vietnamese revolutionaries were yearning for and could not find in the urban nationalism of the early 1920s. The essential changes that modernized Vietnamese society so that it came to reflect the progressive ideas of France prepared the youth for the moment when it had to leave the Confucian mindset behind for good and embrace radicalism.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai has written a marvelous study of the tumultous changes that engulfed Vietnam and its people in the second and third decades of the 20th century. Through her impressive attention to details and through her persuasive arguments, the author demonstrates her in-depth knowledge of the subject. The book is concise but immensely informative and, in my opinion, crucial for the understanding of Vietnam's quick transition from Confucianism to Communism. Highly recommendable.

[Wendy G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great history text about Vietnam during the French period, when Vietnamese were struggling against a repressive colonial system, but divided about the solution to the problem of colonialism. Ho Tai makes an argument that other historians have made of other places and times: the solution that the Vietnamese ultimately chose (Marxism/Leninism) was not the first and only decision. There was a period in the 1910s-1920s when Vietnamese were many other approaches to colonialism (including Anarchism, neo-traditionalism, Constitutionalism, and Trotskyism). All of those approaches failed, and ultimately Vietnam followed the Marxist/Leninist path, which ultimately led to Civil War.

[Quynh Anh]

From reading "Print and Power"