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p In the central part of Siam (as Thailand was then called), among picturesque banana groves and palms, some two dozen huts clustered on the hilly bank of the Me Nam. The little village was peopled exclusively by Vietnamese. After dark, they used to gather in the courtyard of the village school, which had a portrait of the Siamese king on one wall and a portrait of young Pham Hong Thai on the other. The patriotic villagers were homesick. They sang Vietnamese songs and listened to the stories of the older men, who had fought some fifty years before in the guerilla detachments of Phan Dinh Phung and Hoang Hoa Tham.

p Recently, an unknown stranger had become the main figure at these 92 nightly gatherings. No one knew where he was Iron), though, judging by the way he spoke, he must have been born in Central Vietnam. He did not look a day over 40, but out of respect, by local custom, they called him Thau Tin, meaning Ivsteemecl Tin. After the villagers sealed themselves in the school courtyard, Nguyen Ai Quoc, for it was him, would go to the centre of the circle and, pronouncing every word carefully, read a newspaper or recite old Vietnamese poetry. Thereupon he would answer the questions people asked him. And, so it seemed to them, he knew practically all the answers how things stood at home in Vietnam, and what was happening in the world.
 

p The idea of organising the political struggle among Vietnamese emigres in Siam had come to Nguyen back in Canton. It was on his initiative that the Association regularly sent its people and printed matter to northeast Siam, where some 20,000 Vietnamese were residing at that time. There were old-timers among them the descendants of the first Vietnamese Catholics. In the early 19th century they had in some way annoyed the emperors Minh Mang and Tu Due, who considered them servants of the while intruders, and they were compelled to flee to Siam. The bulk, however, left Vietnam during the First World War, looking for escape from recruitment in the French army or from hunger. There were those, however, who had come to Siam recently. Those were participants in various patriotic movements who managed to elude the French police. They were eager to return home, lor Siam was for them a temporary asylum, where they gave no thought to revolutionary work among their fellow-countrymen. Not until the establishment of the Association did the echo of the stormy events at home and in South China reach the sleepy Vietnamese settlements. In 1926, Association activists formed a society of Vietnamese emigres in Siam arid called it Than ai (Friendship), with branches opening soon in the Siamese provinces of Udon, Nonkai, Sakonnakon, Nakonikhan and Mukdakhan.

p In April 1927, when it gradually sank in that he would have to leaveChina soon, Nguyen had been thinking of moving to Siam.

p He knew from comrades who had been in Siam that a lot could be done among the Vietnamese there. Doubly so, because the local authorities were not too particular as to what the Vietnamese were doing.

p Nguyen did not stay long in Moscow. In December 1927, he headed for Brussels, where he took part in a General Council session of the AntiImperialist League. The League, formed in February of that year, was the first broad organisation that united the working-class movement and progressive intelligentsia of capitalist states with the freedom lighters in colonial and dependent countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Active in the League, among others, were Sun Yatsen’s widow Sun 93 Chingling. Albert Finstein, Romain Holland, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sen Katayama, and Henri Barbnsse.

p After the session, Nguyen visited France, Swit/.erland, and Italy, and in Naples boarded a ship for distant Siam.

p The Siamese province of Udon was the gathering place of Vietnameseemigres. Here the Association was able to set up a fairly large branch. But on arriving, Nguyen saw that it was functioning in low gear, gripped by pessimism owing to news of the brutal colonial terrorism in Indochina.

p Though members of the Association had livcel in Siam for some years, they wanted no contact with the local people, and had not learned the Siamese language or local customs. At the very first general meeting, Nguyen pointed out these faults and called for action within the framework of the Than ai Society. It should train cadres for the coming revolution, he said. He said political work shoulel be conducted among the local people, who should be won over to the side of the Vielnamese against the cejlemialists.

p One day, a comrade lamented that revolutionary work among Vietnamese emigre’-s held little promise.

p “I’ve he-en to see the thirty Vietnamese families living at the river crossing in Mukdahan,” he said. "The market women curse louder than anyone. And the men drink like [jigs and play cards. Then they go to the temple to pray for forgiveness. And the young ones arc like their elders all they think of is liquor and wenches. No revolutionary propaganda can be conducted among these worthless people. I beg you, give me some other assignment."

p Nguyen said acidly that (he comrade had learned nothing from all the books he had read. Revolutionaries must be with the masses, must teach the people, ami enlist them for the revolution. "II all people were educated and faultless,” Nguyen said, "they would need no political agitators. But even the best jade lias spots on it.” Furthermore, Nguyen added, these "worthless people" were homesick Vietnamese far from their country.

p “Here’s your assignment,” Nguyen conclude-d. "(Jo back, pick the most diflicult family, live with it, and do your best to win their affection, to make them believe in our revolution."

p Nguyen had many irons in the lire. He began putting out a newspaper, and built up its circulation. He obtained permission from the Siamese authorities to start a Vietnamese school. The first such se’hool opened in Udon. It was built by the emigre’-s themselves, and Nguyen pitched in, carrying bricks.

p Though many of the emigres worshipped the saintly ’Fran, and his little Buddhist temple was practically never empty, Nguyen discovered 94 that few of the worshippers knew the fine works of their saint, the great ancient general Tran Hung Dao who had twice defeated the invading armies of the Chinese-Mongolian Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. Nguyen wrote a patriotic poem, "The Song of Fran Hung Dao”, which Tran’s worshippers began to recite during services in the temple.

p Nguyen travelled a lot. He criss-crossed the northeastern part of Siam, mostly on foot. On his trips, Nguyen took along clothes and a ten days’ supply of food, which he carried in baskets attached at either end of a light, springy bamboo pole across his shoulder. He usually walked the mountain and forest paths barefoot, the heavy baskets swinging from side to side, and feet slipping on the smooth rocks. In Siam, Nguyen became a first-class walker, and is said to have covered the 70 kilometres from Udon to Sawang in just a day and a night. The ability to walk long distances stood him in good stead later during the guerilla struggle and the war of resistance.

p It seemed a stone’s throw from Udon to Vietnam, but the news they got from there was meagre and rare. Chiefly, it came by messengers travelling back and forth for the Association, and was both good and bad. A communist movement was emerging fast in the country. By the end of the twenties, the Association had sunk deep root, furthering the spread of Marxist-Leninist ideas among the patriotic clement, notably the youth. The working-class movement was making good headway, and underground communist groups had begun to spring up at industrial enterprises in the big urban centres. By mid-1929 they had formed three independent organisations: the Indochinese Communist Party in Tonkin, the Annamese Communist Party in Cochin China, and the Indochinese Communist Federation in the central regions. No sooner were they formed than squabbling broke out between them. Each claimed to be the sole communist party in the country.

p The strife between the Tonkin and Cochin China organisations was especially serious. In many cases, both had cells at one and the same factory, and occupied themselves entirely in mutual attacks and discussion of unimportant matters. This, plus the absence of a single action programme, sapped their strength.

p One early December day in 1929, a messenger brought Nguyen word from Ho ’Fung Mau and Le Hong Son in Hongkong.

p “They asked me to tell you,” the messenger said, "that the leaders of the different communist groups arc so deeply involved in their conflict that they refuse to listen to reason. I was asked to tell you that only one person, Comrade Vuong of the Comintern, could remedy the situation. The Far F,astern Secretariat of the Comintern, too, is disturbed and wants the squabbling to stop. The rank and file want a single party, and as soon as possible."

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p Nguyen lost no time. He reached Bangkok by train, and boarded a ship to Singapore, where he took another ship to Hongkong.

p The voyage was slow. On the port side some distance away in a blue haze lay the cherished land of his people. This was the first time Nguyen was so near his country since he had left Saigon eighteen years before. He fixed his eyes on the horizon, catching a glimpse of land now and again. Those were Vietnamese islands, and among them the sinister Poulo Condor, a devil’s island where thousands of patriots languished.

p A few dozen of miles away, where the sea merged with the black tropical sky, he glimpsed a barely visible ray of light going on and off. What was it? Was it a natural phenomenon or, perhaps, the light of the famous lighthouse on rocky Cape Saint Jacques.

p Where Indian bean trees rustle in the breeze,
Young plants have grown to manhood...

p These lines of Nguyen Du’s came to his mind. Bean trees had for long been a symbol of his country. They are planted near the houses. How homesick he was, how he longed to see his folks. A pond has a bank, a river has a landing stage, and everyone should have a hearth to call one’s own.

It was as though his grieving heart divined the bad news: his old father, he would soon learn, had passed away some weeks before. He had died at 66 in the poor quarter of the little town of Caolan in the Mekong delta. Alone, quietly, in the manner of old men, he had, as the Vietnamese say, departed from the carnal world. Nor did Nguyen know then that on November 11, 1929, the imperial court in Vinh had on French orders passed death sentences on seven Vietnamese patriots, and among them in absentia on Nguyen Ai Quoc, and that this would delay his return home for many years.

2

p Hongkong, the Fragrant Bay as its picturesque location was named by its old-time inhabitants, appeared before the eyes of the seafarer quite suddenly.

p The ship steamed slowly into the large harbour enclosed on three sides by brownish-green hills in the light of the rising sun. At the foot of the hills rose white-walled buildings. Dozens of ocean liners were anchored in the roadstead. The agile and swift native sampans slid about between them.

p What people call Hongkong consists of a little island of that name, the 96 southern part of Kowloon peninsula known as the New ’Territories that Britain had leased from China until 1997. and 33 lesser islands adjoining Kowloon. In those days, Hongkong was an open port. No papers were needed to enter it. Democratic organisations could function there in relative freedom and people of different nationalities persecuted for their political views at home found asylum there. The border between Hongkong and Kwangtung Province in South China was practically unguarded.

p Nguyen was met by his old friends, Son and Man, whom he had not seen since December 1927. They handed him a letter of the Comintern Executive to all communist organisations in Indochina.

p “The absence of a single communist party when the worker-peasant movement is in high tide, is fraught with grave dangers for the future of the revolution in Indochina,” he read. "The hesitation of some groups to set up a communist party without further delay, is a mistake... 1 he most important and urgent task facing the Communists of Indochina today is to establish a revolutionary party of the proletariat, that is, a mass communist party."

p It was clear to Nguyen and his friends that immediate action was called for. "Without a combative revolutionary party,” Nguyen observed, "the workers’ liberation struggle will be like a ship without a helmsman.” He suggested setting up a founding committee to prepare a conference at which all communist organisations of Indochina would merge.

p A letter was drawn up to members of the communist organisations in Hanoi and Saigon. It said Comrade Vucmg of the Comintern suggested on behalf of the Comintern Executive that they should hold a unity conference in Hongkong.

p Kowloon was a shack town of tin and cardboard in the mainland part of Hongkong. In an emergency, the comrades could easily cross into China. No less important for the security of the conference was its date. The three friends timed it for Tel, the lunar new year’s holiday. In those parts this most popular holiday lasted several days. At Tel lime, the delegates would be able lo vanish unnoticed from Vietnam, and in Kowloon, too, a gathering would create no suspicion.
 

p Seven people gathered in Kowloon at the end of January: two of them from the Indochinese Communist Party, two from the Annamese Communist Party, Son and Mau from the overseas communist organisations, and Nguyen Ai Quoc from the Comintern. No delegates came from the Indochinese Communist Federation. The first silling ol’lhe unity conference was held in a suite of a second-rate hotel where most of the arrivals were staying. On the table round which ihe representatives of the 97 warring sides had seated themselves lay dice and other gaming appurtenances. Anyone who wondered what (he noise behind their closed door was about, would at once see that a group of men had come for a bit of gambling. As a precaution, (hey held one of (heir sittings in the grandstand of the local football stadium, for the people around them did not know Vietnamese.

p Nguyen Ai Quoc’s presence, as Son and Mau had foreseen, created an atmosphere of comradely trust. Not all ihe delegates knew him in person, but all had heard of him as the leader of a new patriotic movement and as an active member of the French Communist Party and representative of the Comintern. That is why, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s words made a special impact on the younger men at the conference.

p “At first, owing to the recent ferocious squabbles between the Annamese and Indochinese communist parties, most people doubted that the conference would yield any results,” wrote the Vietnamese historian Trung Chinh. "But gradually, as a result of a comradely discussion skilfully directed by Comrade Nguyen Ai Quoc, and thanks to his outspoken and convincing arguments, the delegates reached agreement."

p The conference opened on February 3, and by February 5 all points of dispute had been cleared up. A resolution was passed unanimously to unite all the communist organisations in the country. There would be a single Vietnamese Communist Party. Theses for the Party Programme and Rules, drawn up by Nguyen Ai Quoc, were adopted, charting the line of march.

p As a colony and a semi-feudal country, the Theses said, Vietnam was on the brink of a bourgeois democratic revolution of a new type (later, policy documents of the VCP described it as a "national, people’s democratic revolution”). It would come about under the immediate guidance of ihe working class and lead up lo a socialist revolution. Its purpose was to overthrow the rule of the colonialists and feudal lords, to secure national independence, give land to the peasants, set up a government of workers, peasants and soldiers, win democratic freedoms for the people, and constitute a worker-peasant army.

p The Theses said the Vietnamese Communist Party was the vanguard of the working class, which was poised to lead the mass of the working people. The Party would work to unite the people of Vietnam with the other oppressed peoples of the world, and maintain close relations with the international working class, and notably with brother workers in the metropolitan country.

The delegates promised to end their squabbles, and to cooperate with open hearts in tinning (he communist organisations. A provisional Central Committee was elected lo lake charge of the process. In substance, the unity conference did the job of a congress, for il founded a parly and 98 worked out its basic principles, llie strategic and tactical line ol the Vietnamese revolution, and elected the requisite governing bodies.

3

p After dark on February 5, Nguyen held a modes! dinner party in his hotel room. His dream was coming true a dream he had worked for nearly twenty years, braving all hardships. Now the Vietnamese- revolution had the living Marxist-Leninist doctrine to back it, and a monolithic revolutionary vanguard that would use it with devastating ellect.

p “My brothers,” Nguyen said at the dinner, "today is a historic clay. Great Lenin said only a part) with the foremost theory could be a vanguard lighter. Now we have such a party. Our nation has always been heroic, but never it had a wise:, knowledgeable helmsman. The partol helmsman will now be played by our Party, and I am sure il will lead Vietnam to victory and independence."

p This was the gist of what they put down in their appeal on the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party, signed by Nguyen on behall of the Communist International. It was published in the underground communist newspapers and aroused the democratic people in both parts of the country.

p “The Communist Party of Vietnam has been founded,” it said. "I I is the Party of the working class. It will help the proletariat light for the liberation of the oppressed and exploited. Brothers and sisters, join the Party, follow it, help it overthrow French imperialism and Vietnamese feudalism and the reactionary bourgeoisie, help it secure Vietnam’s independence and establish a worker-peasant-soldier government."

p On the day the Party was founded the Communists in Vietnam numbered 211. They received word of the unity conference with approval. To be sure, the ideological debate did not end. Some of the Communists had narrow nationalist and petty-bourgeois views. Most Communists were prompted by purely patriotic, anti-colonial feelings, and did not realise yel thai the Communist Party was a new type of party with a backbone consisting of members of (he foremost class, the proletariat, and its main ally, the peasantry.

p Hut these unavoidable growing pains were soon remedied. The building of a truly Marxist-Leninist Party went ahead rapidly. New partycells were springing up all over the country, notably at factories. The French secret police got wind of this. The resolution ol the Hongkong conference was received everywhere with great enthusiasm, reported a secret agent. He noted that goodwill on both sides had led to accords even on issues that had only recently created didcrcnces. "They have a provisional central committee, and committees in Tonkin, Annam and 99 Cochin China, and also provincial committees. The old workers’ and peasants’ federations have been expanded, and new ones have sprung up,” he reported.
 

p The founding of the Communist Party was a turning point in Vietnam’s history. At (he junction of the 1920s and 30s, Vietnam was hit by the worldwide economic crisis, which shook up the entire capitalist world. The call for national independence blended ever more with Unsocial demands of the Vietnamese working people.

p In the new situation, the Vietnamese working class let it be known that it was the hegemon of the impending revolution. It was growing into a powerful political force, though the economy of Vietnam, a captive of colonialism, was still exceedingly backward and semifeudal. Despite its relatively small numbers, the working class was quite highly concentrated in the small number of existing factories, and was furthermore homogeneous because no workers’ aristocracy had yet sprung up. 1 hanks lo (his, the Vietnamese Communists had no reformist influences and opportunist ideas to contend with. Besides, the Vietnamese workers had a numerous and dependable ally, the peasantry, which was so terribly despoiled and poor thai most of it was psychologically close to the proletariat.

p It so happened that in colonial Vietnam the working class grew into a serious political force before the national bourgeoisie did. By the early 1930s, the bourgeoisie was slill small in number, and exceedingly weak politically and economically. There was no other tangible force save the Communist Party to head the national liberation struggle. The old Confucian and other feudal parties had long since lost their anti-colonial thrust. And after the arrest of Phan Boi Chan they had, in ellect, withdrawn from the political arena. A Nationalist Party replaced them in the mid-twenties, but it embarked on the road of reckless, extreme left actions. In the beginning of 1930, in a bid to sei/e the initiative, it started an uprising in Tonkin, and failed. As a result, it was almost completely destroyed, and those of its leaders who survived fled to China, where they espoused the political programme of the Kuomintang and gradually degenerated into a reactionary force hostile to llie Vietnamese revolution.

p The period thai followed the founding of the Vietnamese Communist Party was highlighted by unprecedenledly large demonstrations and strikes. Led by Communists, they involved both workers and peasants, who combined economic and political demands. The peak of this surge came al the end ol 1930, when 1 Hi villages in Nghe-an and Hatinh followed llie example of the Russians and formed Soviets the lirsl bodies of 100 national revolutionary power in Vietnam, mostly headed by Communists.

p The Nghe-Tinh Soviets, as the people called them, were for nearly a year little enclaves of freedom and independence in colonial Indochina. They dismantled the local colonial administrative machinery, and drove out the feudal landowners and village headmen. Democratic reforms were carried out, namely: taxes established by the French were repealed, communal lands were redistributed among the land-hungry peasants, and landlords were ordered to reduce the ground rent and to claim no additional duties. Leaflets with the hammer and sickle were circulated all over the country, calling on the working people to follow the example of the people of the Soviet Union.

p “The Nghe-Tinh Soviets,” Ho Chi Minh pointed out later, " demonstrated the spirit and revolutionary capacity of the Vietnamese working people. Though the movement failed, it paved the way for the triumphant August Revolution."

p In October 1930, at the height of the uprising in Nghe-an and Hatinh provinces, the Party’s Central Committee held its 1st plenum. Nguyen Ai Quoc could not take part. After the unity conference, he had returned to Siam, and had then gone to Malaya on Comintern business. The plenum was chaired by his associate Tran Phu, a former trainee at the political courses in Canton and then a student at Moscow’s Eastern University. He had just returned from Moscow with Comintern recommendations concerning the political objectives of the newly-formed party.

p The plenum approved Tran Phu’s theses on the bourgeois democratic revolution in Vietnam. They became the Party’s political programme, which took account of the Comintern resolutions on the national-colonial issue, on the one hand, and the concrete conditions in Indochina, on the other. The theses said the revolution in Indochina would proceed in two stages. The first would see a bourgeois democratic revolution of a new type, under working-class leadership. It would depose the colonialists and feudal lords, secure national independence, and give the land to its tillers. The anti-imperialist and anti-feudal objectives of that revolution, the programme said, were intimately linked. Its main driving force were the working class and the peasantry. The Communist Party would strive to win the broadest possible segments of the people to the side of the revolution, and then, by revolutionary force establish people’s power through an armed uprising.

p The second stage, that of socialist revolution, would begin after these objectives were attained. The theses said that once they will have seized power, the peoples of Indochina, helped by countries where proletarian dictatorships were already established, would begin to build socialism by-passing the stage of capitalist development.

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p The plenum elected Tran Phu the first General Secretary of the Party, and renamed it the Communist Party of Indochina (CPIC). This was done on the recommendation of the Comintern, since French Indochina was at that time politically and geographically a single whole, and the working people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia had the same goals, attainable only if they worked together and had close ideological and political ties.

The first glorious months of the new party, its firm guidance of the stormy actions against colonial oppression and social inequality that shook up the country in 1930 and 1931, Ho Chi Minh later described in the following terms: "Ever since it came into being, the Communist Party of Indochina was a Leninist and militant party of the young Vietnamese proletariat, which in due course succeeded in uniting under its banner the vast masses of peasants and working people."