Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution

The events of the 1920s and 1930s were crucial in the evolution of modern Vietnam. Yet our knowledge of this complex period of student strikes, revolt against the patriarchal family, debates on women's emancipation, and the search for a new worldview to replace the bankrupt Confucian ideology has been distorted by a preoccupation with the eventual establishment of a Communist regime there. In focusing on the strikes of the mid-1920s, which triggered student travel to France and China and swelled the ranks of revolutionary parties at home and abroad, this book depicts the political and intellectual options of the beginning, experimental, and most individualistic stage of the Vietnamese Revolution. In the early years of the Revolution radicalism was the dominant force in anticolonial politics. The displacement of radicalism by communism, however, has obscured its role as a nonideological reaction to both colonial rule and native accommodation to that rule. Hue-Tam Ho Tai shows that radicalism arose from the combined national and personal concerns of young Vietnamese, who saw a symmetry between the national struggle for independence from colonial rule and their own efforts to emancipate themselves from the oppressiveness of native social institutions and the deadweight of tradition. Making use of literary sources, archival materials, and the unpublished memoirs of her father, a participant in these events, the author interweaves analysis and narrative, generalized observations and detailed anecdotes to bring to life the personalities and the spirit of the times. Read more