The Formulation of the National Discourse
17
Vietnamese population into a formidable force, and they now had an
opportunity to blend their esoteric dogmas with the more easily understood
nationalist cause of resistance to both the French and the Japanese. The
fatal distraction of French colonialism gave them a chance to acquire a base
area on the Sino-Vietnamese border, from where they concentrated on
building up a revolutionary nucleus, and establishing contacts across the
border with Chinese nationalist leaders, American and Free French liaison
officers, and other anti-Japanese Vietnamese nationalists.
The adoption of communism, as one author wrote, ‘lent the
Vietnamese drive for national liberation a determination and a solidity in the
teeth of massive military opposition which are unique in modern history.’
10
It has been generally assumed that, until the introduction of communism,
nationalism was equated squarely with anti-colonialism. Fighting French
colonial rule in order to regain national independence, without letting
questions of ideology or new political institutions obstruct the path of
decolonisation, such was the basis of all prior anti-colonial movements. But,
following the introduction of communism, nationalism became equated
with ‘revolution’.
11
The anti-colonialist rebel became the nationalist
revolutionary. Not only did he want independence, he also advocated cách
mệnh (revolution). A powerful concept in the Vietnamese political
vocabulary, cách mệnh was complementary to the concept thiên mệnh
(heavenly mandate) or the legitimacy to rule over others as conferred by a
mandate from Heaven. In this sense to go into revolution meant to take
away that mandate. In the usage of the Vietnamese Communists, however,
cách mệnh assumed the connotation of the Western concept ‘revolution’ and
meant more than just the removal of the right to rule. It also meant a total,
radical transformation of the Vietnamese social, economic and political
structure, involving both the destruction of the French colonial rule and the
collaborative Vietnamese monarchy and the building of a new Vietnamese
society.
In its early days, the Communist movement did not consider
nationalism as capable by itself of saving Vietnam from bigger imperial
enemies with modern weapons, partly because what Vietnamese mass
10
John Dunn, Modern revolution: an introduction to the analysis of a political phenomenon (Cambridge
1972) 145.
11
The communist movement is thought to be the only one to know how to mobilize the
vital forces of the nation into the service of the movement of national liberation by linking
the social problems to the national question (see Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese communism).
Nguyễn Thế Anh
18
patriotism could be mobilized was largely anti-modern. Thus
internationalism also became the antidote to the continuing entanglement of
traditional patriotism with an energy limiting ‘feudalism’. The intention of
erasing the old village culture was shown by the Communist stress upon
literacy campaigns, and by the quickness with which the revolutionaries
tried to celebrate the pantheon of their new post-feudal internationalism in
the countryside. In 1931, during the unsuccessful ‘soviets’ uprising in north
central Vietnam, Communist organisers compelled Vietnamese peasants to
hold ‘anniversary weeks’ for Lenin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
12
The ideas Hồ Chí Minh set forth previously in his Ðường Kách Mệnh –
dividing revolution into a first stage of ‘national revolution’ (dân tộc kách
mệnh), which would bring an end to foreign domination with the
collaboration of several classes, and a second stage of world revolution (thế
giới kách mệnh), during which peasants and workers throughout the world
would unite as one family to destroy the capitalist system and bring about
universal unity
13
– were then rejected, including the need to create a broad
alliance with progressive elements throughout the country and the
establishment of an independent Vietnam. Slogans referring to the issue of
national independence were to be supplemented by other appeals reflecting
the issue of class struggle and world revolution. One particular goal to be
attained would be to overthrow old rural social structures and eliminate
private landlordism, in order to end the perceived antagonism between the
old feudal state and the masses.
The experience of the 1930-31 revolts had nevertheless shown the
Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) the great dangers of alienating the
wealthy peasantry and landlords by prematurely emphasizing class issues,
and of alienating the peasantry generally by taking a dogmatic attitude
towards traditional culture. In 1941 the national liberation revolution (cách
mạng giải phóng dân tộc) again received priority. The Eight Plenum of the ICP
set up the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Việt Nam Ðộc Lập
Ðồng Minh Hội), or Việt Minh, consisting of members from different social
groups. The Việt Minh front, therefore, was initially conceived as a purely
national liberation movement, not as a ‘New Democracy’ front fighting
simultaneously for national liberation and against feudalism. The Party thus
12
Alexander B. Woodside, ‘History, structure and revolution in Vietnam’, International Political
Science Review 10-2 (1989) 143-157, there 152-153.
13
William J. Duiker, ‘What is to be done? Hô Chí Minh’s Ðường Kách Mệnh’ in: K.W. Taylor
and John K. Whitmore ed., Essays into Vietnamese pasts (Ithaca: 1995) 207-220, there 212.
The Formulation of the National Discourse
19
shed its pre-1941 image of class struggle and proletarian internationalism, in
favour of class cooperation, timeless patriotism, and sublimation within a
national united front. In terms of relations with the villages, one of the
results was the acceptance of the ambiguous coexistence of the modern
revolution with traditional village patriotism, mobilized through the
multiplication of ‘national salvation’ (cứu quốc) associations.
14
Those were
mass organizations, such as the National Salvation Cultural Association
(Hội Văn Hóa Cứu Quốc) established in 1943 with ICP cadres’ assistance to
recruit urban intellectuals to the Việt Minh cause and find ways of
insinuating anti-French, anti-Japanese propaganda into legal newspapers and
journals, the Peasants’ National Salvation Association, the Students’
National Salvation Association, the Women’s National Salvation
Association, the Teenagers’ National Salvation Association, and so on.
Together, these associations acted as a shield to the Party; individually, each
organization translated esoteric Communist slogans into the language of its
group’s members. In theory, then, the Việt Minh front was the coalition of
these National Salvation Associations, through which it could impulse a
broad national movement, uniting large numbers of Vietnamese regardless
of their politics, and reaching down into the masses. The theme of unity and
national salvation (even the Việt Minh’s main newspaper bore the title Cứu
Quốc) enabled thus the Việt Minh to involve local populations in its cause
and the socio-economic reforms it proposed. Talk of a ‘genuine world
republic’ faded; the doctrine of a people’s war, requiring the total
involvement of the Vietnamese population, invoked a revolution based on
nationalism and the national popular culture. The ideology of nationalism
was then given an important role in Vietnam’s political legitimisation. To
strengthen its claim to legitimacy, the Communist movement leadership
capitalized on the compatibility between modern and traditional Vietnamese
14
Faced with the problem of seizing power in practice, the Việt Minh found it very difficult
to devise an effective strategy of revolutionary transformation in the villages. There was
indeed a fundamental contradiction between the revolutionary practice of mobilizing poor
peasants to establish Party control in each village and the ideological principle that rural
power lay in the hands of a landlord class. In many villages in the North and northern
Central provinces, village power, however, was in the hands of people whose actual property
did not justify their classification as landlords, so the question remained to know which local
‘ruling class’ was really to be denounced and disgraced. (See Ralph Smith, ‘Vietnam from the
1890s to the 1990s: Continuity and change in the longer perspective’, South East Asia Research
4-2 (1996) 197-224, there 215.
Nguyễn Thế Anh
20
values, seeking to fuse the legitimacy of the state socialist system with the
legitimacy of Vietnam as a nation.
Yet, for the majority of the rural population, the language of modern
nationalism and socialism required translation. Nationalism was therefore
linked with traditional Vietnamese patriotic spirit (tinh thần yêu nước); to
energize the resistance to French colonialism, the memory of resistance
against the Chinese invasion and the Vietnamese fighting spirit (tinh thần
đấu tranh) was evoked, and the Trưng sisters, Triệu Ẩu, Trần Hưng Ðạo, Lê
Lợi, Quang Trung, et cetera, all of whom fought Chinese invasion, were
called ‘anh hùng dân tộc’, or national heroes. In discussing socialism, complex
Marxist-Leninist terms were avoided; socialism was defined as a system in
which the Vietnamese would ‘have enough to eat and enough clothes to
wear in cold weather’, a system in which there was no human exploitation.
In addition to relying on the rural population to achieve its goals, the
leadership also tried to enter into an alliance with both non-communist and
communist intellectuals trained during the French colonial period.
15
Because
of the Party's anti-nationalist and anti-bourgeois revolutionary line of the
1930s, the Communists had failed for more than a decade to attract
students, intellectuals and other urban petit-bourgeois elements into their
ranks. To remedy this situation, the ICP resolved during its Plenum of
February 1943 to launch a ‘cultural front’ (mặt trận văn hóa) to enlist the
support of these urban elements.
16
A document entitled Ðề cương văn hóa
Việt Nam (Theses on Vietnamese culture) was the direct consequence of
this resolution.
17
Published at a time when both the French colonial
government and the Japanese occupying forces were outdoing each other in
competing for popular Vietnamese support, it was a deliberate attempt to
compete with the French and the Japanese for the collaboration of
Vietnamese intellectuals. Containing less than 1,500 words, Ðề cương văn hóa
was a brief document, prepared in the form of an outline, with ideas left
incompletely developed. Divided into four main parts, this document
summarized Vietnamese literary and cultural development during the early
15
This alliance would crumble when the Party leadership imported Maoist practices of
ideological rectification (chỉnh huấn).
16
Trần Huy Liệu, Lịch sử tám mươi năm chống Pháp (History of the eighty-year resistance
against France) vol. II, book 2 (Hanoi 1961) 105.
17
Trần Huy Liệu et al., Tài liệu tham khảo lịch sử cách mạng cận đại Việt Nam (Reference
materials on the history of the contemporary Vietnamese revolution) vol. X (Hanoi 1956-
1957) 90-95.
The Formulation of the National Discourse
21
decades of the twentieth century; called attention to the danger of nefarious
‘fascist’ influences of the French and the Japanese; discussed the importance
of a cultural revolution and the relationship between a political and a
cultural revolution; and elaborated the urgent tasks of Vietnamese writers
and artists. It emphasized the importance of Party leadership in this cultural
revolution. A new Vietnamese culture, ‘national in character and democratic
in content’, was thus postulated, and the campaign for this new culture was
to be based on three principles: 1) national (opposing all enslaving and
colonialist influences, allowing Vietnamese culture to develop
independently); 2) mass (opposing every tendency that would go against the
masses or away from the masses); 3) scientific (opposing anything that
would render cultural activities anti-scientific and counter-progressive). To
this end, a socialist culture was to be created, in which all cultural activity
was to be measured according to the degree that it stimulated
simultaneously a sense of patriotism, mass consciousness, and scientific
objectivity. This meant the adoption of a strict position that allowed no
concept of literary and artistic ideological neutrality: the cultural medium
(the printed word, music, painting, film, et cetera) had no value in itself,
except in its utility as a conveyor of an ideological message. Neutrality
would be considered immoral, if not as an act of treason, when the country
was caught in a struggle for survival as an independent nation.
18
For Communist activists, the Ðề cương văn hóa became an important
guideline in their propaganda activities. Several non-Communist writers –
18
The themes of Ðề cương văn hóa Việt Nam were to be elaborated further in July 1948 in an
official report of the Central Committee of the ICP (then non-existent on paper) read by
Trường Chinh, the Party's Secretary-General, at the Second National Congress. The report,
entitled Chủ nghĩa Mác và văn hóa Việt Nam – Marxism and Vietnamese culture (see Trường
Chinh, Chủ nghĩa Mác và văn hóa Việt Nam (second edition, Hanoi 1974) – approached
frontally the many theoretical issues concerning Vietnamese literature and the arts: the
relationship between material life and spiritual life, between economic and political reality
and cultural development; possibility of artistic neutrality; relationship between art and
propaganda, et cetera. It repeated all the themes that had been outlined in the earlier
document: the need for a cultural revolution to complement the political revolution; the
denial of literary and artistic neutrality in a society fighting for political survival; the necessity
of socialist realism as the ‘correct’ approach to literary and artistic expression; and finally, the
importance of the three guiding principles of the Vietnamese revolutionary culture: national,
mass, and scientific. As a statement of objective of a Communist party-in-power, this
document was to become an authoritative guideline for Vietnamese literary and artistic
endeavour for many years to come, channeling Vietnamese writers and artists into one
direction, that of serving the prevalent revolutionary line of the Communist party.
Nguyễn Thế Anh
22
such as Nam Cao, Ngô Tất Tố, Tô Hoài, and Nguyên Hồng – later claimed
to be much influenced by this document.
19
With it, the goal of creating a
‘new culture’ was proclaimed by the Việt Minh. Nevertheless, care was
taken in the ensuing years to avoid that the educational efforts in the
countryside to generate a new culture and new attitudes should not be
couched in terms of class struggle, and that peasant and minority
superstitions and cultural traditions should be treated with respect. Educa-
tional cadres were encouraged to go out of their way to understand and
respect local customs in order to ‘create an atmosphere of sympathy’; only
on this basis should they then put forward new ideas and encourage the
people ‘to abate their superstitions’. The point that the revolutionary
struggle at this stage was purely patriotic and had no class-based ingredient,
was going to be given even greater force in November 1945, when the
Indochina Communist Party was officially ‘dissolved’. Moreover, being
conscious of the need to compensate for ‘breadth’ of patriotic appeal by
‘depth’ of political education, it was understood that if the ideological
coherence of the revolution was to be preserved, the leadership pursued
what might be called a policy of ‘anti-feudalism by stealth’, involving among
other things a campaign for literacy, the introduction of universal
elementary education, and recognition of the equality of nationalities and
the equality of sexes.
20
Clearly, the new culture was not simply designed by
the Communists to ‘democratise’ the Vietnamese countryside and wipe out
feudal attitudes; it was also designed to generate at the grass-roots level the
beginnings of an irresistible momentum towards a socialist mentality and a
socialist society. As Trường Chinh would put it, Vietnamese society was
undergoing a ‘metamorphosis’ from the age-old Confucian values of the
traditional society to the beginning of the adoption of a newly imported
ideology.
19 Nguyễn Hưng Quốc, Văn học Việt Nam dưới chế độ cộng sản (Stanton CA 1991) 89-107.
20 Clive J. Christie, Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia, 1900-1980 (Richmond 1995) 95. In
August 1946, Trường Chinh offered an analysis of the theoretical basis of the Vietnamese
revolution in an essay entitled The August Revolution (Hanoi 1962), particularly emphasizing
the need to initiate a genuine cultural revolution in the minds of the Vietnamese peasantry: it
was necessary that the mobilization of the peasantry should be deep-rooted and based, not
simply on patriotic fervour, but on the notion that their lives would be entirely changed for
the better, in order to nurture the ‘subjective’ factor of the revolutionary will of the people as
a whole.
The Formulation of the National Discourse
23
The blurred image of the new state of Vietnam
By the turn of 1945, the Japanese judged that a coup de force against the
French in Indochina would be indispensable, and on 26 February 1945 a
final plan for the coup was agreed upon, which projected to purge the
French and give ‘immediate independence’ to the three Indochinese
nations. After the coup had been actually carried out on 9 March 1945, Lt.
General Tsuchihashi Yūitsu, the newly appointed commander in chief of
the occupation forces in Indochina, suggested to Bảo Ðại to declare the
abolition of the 1884 protectorate treaty.
21
Two days after the Japanese coup, on 11 March 1945, a royal
ordinance was promulgated, acknowledging Japan’s ‘liberation’ of Vietnam
and noting proudly that there was now an independent Vietnamese
government after eighty years of French protectorate:
In view of the world situation and of the situation of Asia in
particular, the government of Vietnam proclaims publicly that as of
today, the protectorate treaty with France is abolished and that the
country takes back its rights to independence.
Vietnam will endeavour with its own means to develop so as to
merit the status of an independent state and will follow the directives
of the common Manifesto of Greater East Asia to bring the help of
its resources to common prosperity.
Therefore the government of Vietnam has confidence in Japan’s
loyalty and is determined to collaborate with this country to reach the
aforesaid objective. ( )
Huế, the 27
th
day of the 1
st
month of the 20
th
Bảo Ðại year.
22
The declaration was followed on 17 March by Bảo Ðại’s first edict as an
‘independent’ Emperor, which established the principle dân vi quí, meaning
‘the most precious thing is the people’, as the basis for his reign from that
point on. The expression was borrowed from Mencius: ‘the people are
precious, the country is ranked second, and the ruler is of little value.’ The
21
It was widely touted then that Cường Ðể would make a triumphant return to Vietnam to
replace Bảo Ðại on the throne. But Tsuchihashi stated that his principle was not to interfere
in Vietnam’s domestic affairs, and that Bảo Ðại’s fate should not be decided by Japan, but by
a formal institution such as Vietnam’s national assembly.
22
S.M. Bao Dai, Le dragon d’Annam (Paris 1980) 104.
Nguyễn Thế Anh
24
ordinance stated that Bảo Ðại would take control of the government and,
with the help of men of talent and virtue, work to rebuild the country.
23
This was clearly a historic moment and historic opportunity. However, Bảo
Ðại admitted in his memoirs that the situation was far from favourable, as
his bureaucracy, weakened over the years by French control, simply did not
have the capacity to run the country: ‘For many, the idea of independence is
linked to the disappearance of all regulation. Taxes are no longer collected,
protests spread. Authority deteriorates. ( ) Yet the government does not
have at its disposal any force to assure order. Devoid of officers, the police
services and the militia are incapable of intervening. Only the Japanese
forces would be in a position to restore order, but I refuse to ask them to
do so.’
24
At any rate, the significance of the circumstances did not escape Bảo
Ðại. ‘We have seen the realization of the dream which patriots have held for
so long,’ he exclaimed, as he vowed that his own wish was ‘to cultivate a
national and patriotic spirit and guide the youth in taking responsibility for
opening up the country, raising the people’s standard of living, and increas-
ing production.’
25
Regretting that he had been unable to have direct
contacts with ‘the nation’ as he had wished, he challenged the Vietnamese
to ‘unite into one national bloc’ in order to work toward the ‘total
independence’ which they would have to earn. In an address read on 8 May
1945, he promised a constitution whereby the ‘co-operation between the
ruler and the people’ would mark the transition from absolute monarchy to
a form of government where the people’s rights are clearly recognized.’
26
Bảo Ðại also appealed to the Allies to acknowledge the independence
of Viet Nam. As the Gaullist Government had made its intention to restore
the French colonial system in Indochina clear through its declaration of 24
March 1945,
27
only a fortnight after the Japanese coup, he sent a special
23
Bruce M. Lockhart, The end of the Vietnamese monarchy (New Haven 1993) 137. Bảo Ðại's
edict raised hopes for a wider popular participation in government in order to ‘set limits’ on
royal power and preserve the people’s rights without having to depend on the benevolence
of a particular ruler (Ibidem 145).
24
Bao Dai, Le dragon d’Annam, 113.
25
Lockhart, The end of the Vietnamese monarchy, 142.
26
Ibidem, 144.
27
‘The Indochinese Federation will comprise, together with France and the other sections of
the community, a French Union whose foreign interests will be represented by France.
Indochina will have a federal government of its own, presided over by a governor-general
who will be chosen from either the natives or the French nationals resident in Indochina.’
The Formulation of the National Discourse
25
message to General de Gaulle, a message vibrant with patriotic emotion and
declaring without ambiguity his nation’s will for self-determination:
I am addressing the people of France, the country of my youth. I am
addressing also her leader and liberator, and I wish to speak as a
friend rather than as a chief of state.
You have suffered too much during four deadly year for you not
to understand that the Vietnamese people, who possess twenty
centuries of history and a often glorious past, no longer want to, no
longer can undergo any foreign rule or administration.
You would understand still better if you could see what is
happening here, if you could feel this desire for independence which
is in everyone's heart and which no human force can any longer
restrain. Even if you come to re-establish a French administration
here, it will no longer be obeyed: each village will be a nest of
resistance; each former collaborator an enemy, and your officials and
colonists will themselves ask to leave this atmosphere which they will
be unable to breathe.
I beg you to understand that the only way to safeguard French
interests and France’s spiritual influence in Indochina is to recognize
frankly the independence of Vietnam, and to give up any idea of re-
establishing French sovereignty or a French administration under any
form whatsoever.
We could so easily reach an agreement and become friends, if you
would cease to claim to become our masters again.
28
It remains that, while reclaiming Vietnam’s rights of independence, Bảo
Ðại’s proclamation said that Vietnam now considered itself to be an
‘element’ in Japan’s Greater East Asian system. His declaration of
independence, on the other hand, directly concerned only north and central
Vietnam. Although it inspired hopes in Cochinchina, it had for the time
being no formal effect on the political situation in that region. Reminding
the Vietnamese that Japan's definition of ‘independence’ was a severely
limited one, Governor Minoda would state on 29 March 1945 that no one
should misunderstand the fact that Cochinchina was under Japanese
(See Isoart, L’Indochine française 1940-1945, 46). From the start, the French government’s
declaration was totally outdated and contained all the germs of the future disagreements
between the French and the different Vietnamese parties. The unity of Vietnam was not
acknowledged, and the terms ‘nation’ or ‘state’ appeared nowhere.
28
Bao Dai, Le dragon d’Annam, 114-115.
Nguyễn Thế Anh
26
authority. Thus, the Japanese failed to recognize the critical divergence
between their own notion of independence (dokuritsu) and the independence
that the vast majority of the Vietnamese population were looking for: the
concept of an independent Vietnam that was free from French colonial rule
but functioned within Japan’s Greater East Asia was essentially
incompatible with the ideals of most Vietnamese, for whom independence
should not only be from France, but also from any form of foreign rule.
Trần Trọng Kim, a respected figure who had been in exile since the
beginning of 1944, was offered the premiership, and his cabinet was formed
on 17 April. The Trần Trọng Kim government’s first policy statement was
to call on Vietnamese of all social classes to unite and develop their patriotic
spirit. It promised to free imprisoned ‘patriots’, to do everything possible so
that ‘politicians still in exile’ could return home, and vowed to avoid abuses
and corruption, to strengthen the country's independence, and to ignore
personal or partisan interests.
29
However, the government of Trần Trọng
Kim was, in a sense, living on borrowed time from the moment of its
inception, since much of its political authority and all of its military security
were tied to the Japanese – there was no Ministry of Defence in the
Cabinet, and the government general, now taken over by the Japanese,
continued to take decisions concerning Vietnam. Moreover, the regime was
confronted with a cataclysmic famine in the north, caused by a combination
of bad weather, French and Japanese requisitions of peasants’ rice and the
disruption of transportation between various parts of the country caused by
Allied bombing of Indochina.
30
The worsening of the famine to crisis
proportions coincided with the Japanese granting of independence to
Vietnam in March, so that the problem of hunger in the north was an
ongoing concern during the early weeks of the existence of the Trần Trọng
Kim government. Despite serious attempts made to deal with the famine,
bringing at least partial relief, 500,000 to 600,000 people died by June 1945
in the Red River Delta alone.
Having broken as much as possible with the administration established by
the French, the new government lacked most of the resources and the
29
Lockhart, The end of the Vietnamese monarchy, 148.
30
Nguyễn Thế Anh, ‘Japanese food policies and the 1945 Great Famine in Indochina’ in:
Paul H. Kratoska ed., Food supplies and the Japanese occupation in South-East Asia (Houndmills
1998) 208-226 and Motoo Furuta, ‘A survey of village conditions during the 1945 Famine in
Vietnam’ in: Paul H. Kratoska ed., Food supplies and the Japanese occupation in South-East Asia
(Houndmills 1998) 227-237.
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