Context
This past summer, Sông2Sea held a public study series for the Vietnamese diaspora and organizers, focusing on revolutionary history leading to the Vietnamese August Revolution of 1945.
This second of four parts looks at the circumstances that gave rise to revolutionary organizations in the 1920s, their strategies to politicize, organize, and mobilize people, and the repression they faced. This may be of particular interest if you’re an organizer!
We share here a few notes and takeaways and stress that it’s nearly impossible to present complex history on Instagram. We cannot neatly summarize the positions and decisions of historical figures and organizations.
We’ve also left out a few topics explored in our sessions, such as how Chữ Quốc ngữ and the modern printing press were used by the French to administer and control, and by revolutionaries to spread revolutionary ideas.
If we have missed something or you find something unclear or inaccurate, please let us know.
We draw from the following books and articles:
The Nghệ Tĩnh Soviet Movement 1930–1931 by Martin Bernal
Vietnamese Communism 1925–1945 by Huỳnh Kim Khánh
Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution by Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Sông2Sea creates space to learn about liberation movements and freedom struggles, including Vietnamese revolutionary history. You can support our work on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/supportsong2sea
A new era of national struggle
June 19, 1924. Guangzhou, China. Shamian Island, French concession.
Disguised as a journalist, 28-year-old Phạm Hồng Thái, a member of revolutionary group Tâm Tâm Xã, infiltrates a banquet being held for Governor-General of Indochina Martial Merlin and throws a grenade.
Merlin escapes with only minor injuries. To avoid capture, Phạm Hồng Thái jumps into the Pearl River and drowns. He is buried in the Huanghuagang Cemetery alongside 72 Chinese revolutionary martyrs.
The assassination attempt failed but became a powerful symbol of anticolonial resistance. Hồ Chí Minh described the act as “herald[ing] the beginning of an era of national struggle, like the swallows heralding spring.”
Việc đó tuy nhỏ, nhưng nó báo hiệu bắt đầu thời đại đấu tranh dân tộc, như chim én báo hiệu mùa Xuân.
Different paths to liberation
Tâm Tâm Xã (the Society of Like Hearts) was a small militant group whose goal was to unite “people of knowledge” (người có tri thức) to “devote all efforts to restore the Vietnamese people’s rights to be fully human.”
They were a part of a generation of young people who were introduced to anticolonial politics through radicalism, which historian Huệ-Tâm Hồ Tài defines as a reaction to both colonial rule and to Vietnamese accommodation to that rule, without necessarily following a specific ideology.
This radicalism reached a strong momentum in the mid-1920s when hundreds of young, mostly urban Vietnamese traveled abroad to find ways to free themselves and their nation.
They shared the same goal of ending French rule, but their circumstances and the repression they faced took them down different paths.
Let’s take a look at three currents of anticolonial politics during this period.
Radicalism: the personal is political
October 1923. Sài Gòn. 23-year-old Nguyễn An Ninh packed an auditorium, delivering a speech titled “Idéal de la Jeunesse Annamite” (The Ideal of Annamite Youth). Speaking in French, he urged young people to break from traditional authorities and seek out new ideas to transform Vietnamese culture.
For him, French rule operated not only through the law, military power, and economic exploitation but also through the colonial education system, cultural institutions, and claims of a “civilizing” mission.
National liberation, then, required not only overthrowing the French but also freeing Vietnamese themselves culturally and intellectually.
Nguyễn An Ninh founded the journal La Cloche Fêlée (The Cracked Bell) to criticize colonialism and traditional hierarchies, and to awaken the masses of people. In 1926, the French suspended it and arrested him.
“Any people dominated by a foreign culture cannot know true independence if they do not possess an independent culture.” — La Cloche Fêlée, January 7, 1924.
Republicanism: The Vietnamese Nationalist Party
December 1925. Hà Nội. Alexandre Varenne, a French socialist, arrived as Governor-General of Indochina with promises of more labor regulations and expanding schools for Vietnamese.
23-year-old Nguyễn Thái Học began sending letters asking for economic and educational reforms, such as permission for Vietnamese to open schools and to publish a newspaper. His numerous letters went unanswered for two years.
With hopes of meaningful system change fading, he joined Nam Đồng thư xã, an organization that published revolutionary literature, brochures, and translations of political works such as Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. They also held gatherings for students, intellectuals, and political activists.
In 1927, he founded Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (VNQDĐ), the Vietnamese Nationalist Party—influenced by the Kuomintang and Sun Yat-sen—with armed uprising as a central part of its strategy and a vision of establishing Việt Nam as a republic.
The Marxist-Leninist Turn
Meanwhile, Nguyễn Ái Quốc—the future Hồ Chí Minh—had traveled widely, working various jobs, most of them manual labor, searching for a path for Vietnamese liberation.
He joined the French Socialist Party but grew frustrated with their lack of concern for colonized people. Together with revolutionaries from other French colonies, he launched the anticolonial journal Le Paria (Người cùng khổ) to publicize their shared struggles and call for solidarity.
Reading Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” would mark a turning point. Lenin argued that workers confronting capitalists in Europe and colonized peoples confronting imperial rule were interconnected struggles.
Nguyễn Ái Quốc later wrote that he cried reading the theses, finding direction and newfound conviction in communism as a viable path to national liberation. In 1923, at 33 years old, he traveled to Moscow to study Marxist-Leninist theory.
Thanh Niên: training cadres, linking national liberation with class struggle
June 1925. Guangzhou.
Nguyễn Ái Quốc founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League (Thanh Niên), drawing upon the idea that one cannot change the world without understanding it and that revolution needs a framework to analyze social forces. Tâm Tâm Xã members became the nucleus. Trainees took an oath at the tomb of Phạm Hồng Thái before becoming members.
In Vietnamese Communism 1925-1945, Huỳnh Kim Khánh noted that while Nguyễn Ái Quốc’s determination to liberate his country was not unique among Vietnamese of the time, remaking “What made Nguyen Ai Quoc’s journey special was his discovery of Marxism-Leninism and his indomitable will to put the newly discovered revolutionary theory at the service of his compatriots.”
Thanh Niên—the predecessor of the Indochinese Communist Party formed in 1930—focused on political education, agitation, propaganda, and building a disciplined organization. It sought to turn worker and peasant grievances such as brutal working conditions and meager wages into a conscious, organized political force.
Evolving strategies
These political currents overlapped, sometimes competing and sometimes reinforcing one another. Revolutionaries modified their approaches.
Nguyễn An Ninh, for example, first appealed to urban, French-speaking young Vietnamese, then to the Sài Gòn underclass and workers, and then to the religious sects in the Mekong Delta.
After his journal was suspended, he traveled throughout the Cochinchina countryside and continued spreading anti-colonial ideas. He increasingly saw the necessity of an organization, noting that a modern political organization of oppression must be countered with a modern organization of resistance.
He was arrested for the last time in 1939 as the French launched a massive crackdown on all anti-colonial and communist activists. His informal network was left adrift, but many who had been inspired by his thoughts would later join organized communist cells or other political parties.
Now let’s look at three major uprisings and their repression in the early 1930s.
Yên Bái Revolt: armed uprising and soldier mutiny
February 1929. Hà Nội. Shots were fired, killing Alfred Bazin, a French labor recruiter for plantations.
These labor recruiters were called “jauniers” (yellow-slave-traders) known for their violent means of recruiting workers, including beating and kidnapping.
A few VNQDĐ members wanted to assassinate Bazin, who symbolized this brutality. Nguyễn Thái Học opposed, believing that it would lead to French crackdowns. He was right. The French pinned Bazin’s death on the VNQDĐ and arrested over 300 members.
In February 1930, under extreme repression, VNQDĐ decided to launch an uprising at the Yên Bái garrison with Vietnamese soldiers serving in the French army, fearing that further delay would leave them too weak to act.
The revolt failed. In less than 24 hours, French forces suppressed it, bombing Cổ Âm village to retaliate. In June 1930, Nguyễn Thái Học and twelve other revolutionaries were guillotined, shouting “Việt Nam” with their last breaths.
Worker strikes: Red Phú Riềng
Impoverished workers were recruited to places like Michelin-owned Phú Riềng rubber plantation in southern Việt Nam.
Here, workers lived in cramped barracks with sheet metal roofs. They worked 14 hours a day and faced chronic hunger, beatings, torture, and rape. They were identified by numbers hung around their necks, a system so dehumanizing that children born on the plantation called their parents by those numbers.
In February 1930, 5,000 workers went on strike with communist organizers who had been living and working alongside them. Workers’ demands included an end to beatings and wage deductions, an eight-hour day, compensation for workplace injuries, and the release of imprisoned workers.
Workers temporarily took control of the entire plantation and won concessions, but were eventually violently suppressed. The strike lasted only about a week, but it became a significant example of class struggle, where workers collectively organized against the ruthless exploitation that fed Michelin’s profits.
Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets: from protest to governing
In the north-central region, Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh’s unreliable harvests, droughts, and typhoons—combined with economic exploitation—created acute vulnerability.
In 1929, communist organizers from Thanh Niên began building party cells and mass organizations, connecting people’s hardship with colonial exploitation.
On May 1, 1930, the communist regional party organized mass demonstrations. French forces opened fire, killing 27. Despite heavy repression, protests continued through the summer. As officials fled, peasant associations took on governing power, forming the Nghệ-Tĩnh Soviets. They canceled debts and taxes, held literacy classes, and redistributed land.
The French responded with aerial bombardments and mass arrests, killing over 1,300 people, with many more dying in detention. By early 1932, the movement was crushed.
The revolutionary Đặng Chính Kỷ wrote:
Không có lẽ ta ngồi chịu chết?... Bên kia đạn sắt bên ta gan vàng
Translation: Surely we won't just sit and wait for death?... On their side iron bullets, on ours hearts of gold.
A few lessons we took away
Agitating and building collective power are connected but not the same. Nguyễn An Ninh raised political consciousness and mobilized people, and Thanh Niên combined political education and mobilizing with building an organization for long-term collective action.
Targeting individuals does not destroy the system. Nguyễn Thái Học remarked that Bazin was a “mere twig on the tree of the colonial apparatus.”
Repression shapes the organizing terrain and forces difficult decisions, as seen by the VNQDĐ launching a revolt before they were fully ready.
Harsh conditions don’t automatically lead to political power. Vietnamese workers and peasants built power through connecting their grievances to a political and economic structure and organizing together (they built class consciousness)
Opposing the same injustice doesn’t automatically lead to a shared political project. Vietnamese revolutionaries had different analyses and approaches. VNQDÐ did not focus on class struggle as a key aspect of achieving national liberation, whereas Thanh Niên connected national liberation to class struggle.
What we were left thinking about
What does it mean to organize? How do we build lasting collective power? Anger and discontent can activate, but all that energy needs structure to sustain. An organization can be stronger with shared political understanding and the capacity to act together, even with the loss of leaders.
What is political education? What is it for? It shouldn’t be just for transmitting history or theory. Having a shared ideological framework allows members to collectively analyze, make decisions, and put theory into practice.
How do we leave room for setbacks and experimentation? How do we learn from them without disbanding or losing faith? Vietnamese revolutionaries made mistakes and faced surveillance, repression, and internal conflicts. They experimented with different methods and evolved their strategies. There was no guaranteed path to success.
“The future we desire today will not come to us in a dream; it is not enough to inscribe in gilt letters on the front of a few public buildings the words 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ for liberty, equality, and fraternity to reign among us.
Fellow countrymen… you demand of others things that they cannot give you, things that it would be dangerous to give to you at the first time of asking, things that you must obtain yourselves…” — Nguyễn An Ninh, December 1924
Next time
In part 3, we will jump ahead to the 1940s and see how the political situation in Việt Nam changed as World War II broke out, leading to the August Revolution of 1945.
Glossary
Note: We offer these partial definitions of the concepts touched on in this post only as starting points. These concepts deserve more study and unpacking than what a brief glossary can provide.
Note: We offer these partial definitions of the concepts touched on in this post only as starting points. These concepts deserve more study and unpacking than what a brief glossary can provide.
Radicalism: Historian Huệ-Tâm Hồ Tài defines this as a reaction to French rule and Vietnamese accommodation to that rule, without a specific ideology, and defined by antagonism or opposition to established institutions and traditions.
Republicanism: A political system that holds that government should be elected by the people, not passed down through a monarchy—not to be confused with the Republican Party in the United States. For example, the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDĐ) sought to overthrow French colonial rule and establish an independent republic, not to restore the Nguyễn monarchy.
Marxism-Leninism: A political tradition based on Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism and Vladimir Lenin's analysis of imperialism and revolutionary organizations. For example, the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League (Thanh Niên) in 1925 used Marxist-Leninist for political education and organization.
Class struggle: the irreconcilable conflict between social classes that have opposing economic interests. For example, rubber plantation owners wanted to maximize profits by keeping labor costs extremely low, while workers fought for higher wages, shorter working hours, and better conditions. These interests are in direct conflict with each other because of their positions in who owns the land and who must work to survive—and not due to individual moral positions.
Class consciousness: the recognition that people who belong to the same social position have shared interests and struggles—and that their problems are connected to an economic and political system.
Sông2Sea creates space to learn and engage with liberation movements, including Vietnamese political history. You can support our work on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/supportsong2sea