Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory

Introduction

Introduction In 1926, Nguyen Ai Quoc, a Vietnamese Comintern agent working for the liberation of his people from French colonialism, who would become known in the 1940s as Ho Chi Minh, sent two associates from Canton (Guangzhou) in southern China to Sai Gon. Sai Gon was the capital of the French colony of Cochinchina, an artificial entity the French had created in the 1860s by cutting away the southern third of the Vietnamese kingdom of Dai Nam. To the Vietnamese, “Cochinchina ” remained simply Nam Ky, the South.1 During the previous year, in 1925, Nguyen Ai Quoc had begun organizing anticolonial Vietnamese youths living in southern China in the Viet Nam Thanh Nien Cach Mang Dong Chi Hoi, the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League (hereafter Thanh Nien or VRYL). This radical party is usually seen as the “proto-communist” forerunner to Vietnamese communism, which would not formally organize itself as such until 1929/1930. In 1926, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s two emissaries were to establish a southern Thanh Nien branch in Cochinchina and actively recruit new members. In Sai Gon, they soon came into contact with a trained mechanic, Ton Duc Thang, who was reputed to be leading lively efforts in organizing the city’s growing numbers of workers. In early 1927, at age thirtyeight , Ton Duc Thang was admitted into Thanh Nien. A little over two years later, in the summer of 1929, Ton was arrested by the French, along with scores of his fellow Thanh Nien members and other southern anticolonial radicals. Tried and then incarcerated at the infamous Con Lon Island penitentiary off the Vietnamese coast, he would remain jailed for more than sixteen years. The Vietnamese Revolution of August 1945 finally freed him. A committed communist, Ton subsequently became one of the bestknown leaders of the Communist Party-led, independent Vietnamese state. Despite his prominence, what triggered his arrest and imprisonment in 1929 is a well-kept secret of the party. The episode has thus xv far remained murky and requires a lot more diligent research, but from several, partially conflicting versions, the following sketch is drawn:2 Once admitted into the party in 1927, Ton Duc Thang became a member of the Sai Gon party cell. Much to his own surprise, he was promoted after three months to become the representative of the VRYL’s Cantonese Central Committee with the party’s Regional Committee of Cochinchina. The chairman of the latter committee, Le Van Phat, who supposedly was a professional practitioner of traditional medicine , soon became Ton’s rival. Ton believed that he had a more justified claim on the leading VRYL post in the south because of his seniority and experience. Le Van Phat in turn arrogantly urged him to abandon his wife and children for more effective party work, a demand that almost made Ton Duc Thang quit the VRYL. For a time Le Van Phat even had Ton put under surveillance. In 1928, a young woman, Tran Thu Thuy, joined the VRYL, and either Ton himself, as the French claimed then, or, as Vietnamese historians insist now, another party member, Do Dinh Tho, fell in love with her. However, she was soon forced by Le Van Phat to live with him and become his mistress. After several unsuccessful attempts to bring the matter before the Regional Committee, Ton and a few close comrades accused Le Van Phat of abuse of a “sister” and of violations of party rules. With like minds from both the Regional and the Sai Gon Committees, a party court was convened. Although Ton himself might have opted for sending Le Van Phat to Canton to be disciplined by the Central Committee of the VRYL, a majority decided that Le Van Phat had to be eliminated. On 8 December 1928, Le Van Phat was first drugged by Nguyen Trung Nguyet 3 and then killed by Tran Truong, Tran Van Cong, and Ngo Thiem in a house in Sai Gon’s rue Barbier. Ton afterward gave the assassins instructions to make the murder look like a crime of passion. Highly disturbed by the incident, the VRYL’s Central Committee dissolved the Regional Committee in the same month. It also sent Pham Van Dong, a trusted lieutenant of Nguyen Ai Quoc who much later would become prime minister of independent Viet Nam, to Sai Gon to build a new regional party organization in Cochinchina. It is possible, but hitherto unsubstantiated, that Ton Duc Thang actually left the VRYL in...