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Vietnam Phan Boi Chau and the Rise of Nationalism
By the turn of the century, a whole generation of Vietnamese
had grown up under French control. The people continued, as in
precolonial times, to look to the scholar-gentry class for
guidance in dealing with French imperialism and the loss of their
country's independence. A few scholar-officials collaborated with
the French, but most did not. Among those who refused was a group
of several hundred scholars who became actively involved in the
anticolonial movement. The best known among them was Phan Boi
Chau, a scholar from Nghe An Province, trained in the Confucian
tradition under his father and other local teachers. In 1885 Phan
Boi Chau observed at close range the actions of French troops in
crushing scholar-gentry resistance to the colonial overlords. For
the next decade he devoted himself to his studies and finally
passed the regional examination with highest honors in 1905.
During the following five years, he traveled about the country
making contacts with other anticolonial scholars and seeking out
in particular the survivors of the Can Vuong movement, with whom
he hoped to launch a rebellion against the French. He also sought
to identify a member of the Nguyen ruling family sympathetic to
the cause, who would serve as titular head of the independence
movement and as a rallying point for both moral and financial
support. Chosen to fill this role was Cuong De, a direct
descendant of Gia Long.
In 1904 Phan Boi Chau and about twenty others met in Quang
Nam to form the Duy Tan Hoi (Reformation Society), the first of a
number of revolutionary societies he organized. The following
year, he went to Japan to meet with Japanese and Chinese
revolutionaries and seek financial support for the Vietnamese
cause. The Japanese defeat of the Russian fleet at Tsushima the
month before his arrival had caused great excitement among the
various Asian anticolonialist movements. Phan Boi Chau brought
Cuong De, along with several Vietnamese students, to Japan in
1906. That same year he convinced the other great Vietnamese
nationalist leader of the period, Phan Chu Trinh, to visit him in
Tokyo. After two weeks of discussions, however, they were unable
to resolve their basic tactical differences. Whereas Phan Boi
Chau favored retaining the monarchy as a popular ideological
symbol and a means of attracting financial support, Phan Chu
Trinh wanted primarily to abolish the monarchy in order to create
a base on which to build national sovereignty. Furthermore, he
was greatly influenced by the writings of French political
philosophers Rousseau and Montesquieu, and he believed that the
French colonial administration could serve as a progressive force
to establish a Western democratic political structure through
peaceful reform. Phan Boi Chau, conversely, wanted to drive out
the French immediately through armed resistance and restore
Vietnamese independence.
In 1907 Phan Boi Chau organized the Viet Nam Cong Hien Hoi
(Vietnam Public Offering Society) to unite the 100 or so
Vietnamese then studying in Japan. The organization was important
because of the opportunity it provided for the students to think
and work together as Vietnamese, rather than as Cochinchinese,
Annamese, or Tonkinese, as the French called them. The following
year, however, the Japanese, under pressure from the French,
expelled the students, forcing most of them to return home. In
March 1909, Phan Boi Chau was also deported by the Japanese. He
went first to Hong Kong, later to Bangkok and Guangzhou. Even
during his years abroad, his writings served to influence
nationalist activities in Vietnam. In 1907 the Dong Kinh Nghia
Thuc (Free School of the Eastern Capital [Hanoi]) was founded to
educate nationalist political activists. Phan Boi Chau's writings
were studied and Phan Chu Trinh gave lectures at the school.
Suspecting that Phan Boi Chau was associated with the school,
however, the French closed it in less than a year. The French
also blamed Phan Boi Chau for instigating antitax demonstrations
in Quang Nam and Quang Ngai provinces and in Hue in early 1908.
As a symbol of the movement, the demonstrators forcibly cut off
men's traditional long hair. An abortive Hanoi uprising and
poison plot in June 1908 was also blamed on Phan Boi Chau. In
response to the uprising, the French executed thirteen of the
participants and initiated a crackdown on Vietnamese political
activists, sending hundreds of scholar-patriots, including Phan
Chu Trinh, to prison on Poulo Condore (now Con Dao). A major
expedition was also launched in 1909 against De Tham, a
resistance leader who was involved in the Hanoi uprising. De
Tham, who had led a thirty-year campaign against the French in
the mountains around Yen The in the northeastern part of Tonkin,
managed to hold out until he was assassinated in 1913.
Stimulated by the Chinese Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen in
1911, Phan Boi Chau and the other Vietnamese nationalists in
exile in Guangzhou formed a new organization in 1912 to replace
the moribund Duy Tan Hoi. The main goals of the newly organized
Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi (Vietnam Restoration Society) included
expulsion of the French, recovery of Vietnamese independence, and
establishment of a "Vietnamese democratic republic." Phan Boi
Chau had by this time given up his monarchist position, although
Cuong De was accorded presidential status within the
organization's provisional government. In order to gain support
and financial backing for the new organization, Phan Boi Chau
organized a number of terrorist bombings and assassinations in
1913, to which the French responded harshly. By 1914 the
counterrevolutionary government of Yuan Shi-kai was in charge in
China, and, by French request, Phan Boi Chau and other Vietnamese
exiles in that country were imprisoned.
World War I began shortly thereafter, and some 50,000
Vietnamese troops and 50,000 Vietnamese workers were sent to
Europe. The Vietnamese also endured additional heavy taxes to
help pay for France's war efforts. Numerous anticolonial revolts
occurred in Vietnam during the war, all easily suppressed by the
French. In May 1916, the sixteen-year-old king, Duy Tan, escaped
from his palace in order to take part in an uprising of
Vietnamese troops. The French were informed of the plan and the
leaders arrested and executed. Duy Tan was deposed and exiled to
Reunion in the Indian Ocean. One of the most effective uprisings
during this period was in the northern Vietnamese province of
Thai Nguyen. Some 300 Vietnamese soldiers revolted and released
200 political prisoners, whom, in addition to several hundred
local people, they armed. The rebels held the town of Thai Nguyen
for several days, hoping for help from Chinese nationalists. None
arrived, however, and the French retook the town and hunted down
most of the rebels.
In 1917, Phan Boi Chau was released from prison. He spent the
next eight years in exile in China, studying and writing but
exerting little direct influence on the Vietnamese nationalist
movement. In 1925 he was kidnaped by the French in Shanghai and
returned to Hanoi, where he was tried and sentenced to hard labor
for life. The sentence was later changed to house arrest until
his death in 1940. Vietnamese historians view Phan Boi Chau's
contribution to the country's independence as immeasurable. He
advocated forcibly expelling the French, although he was not able
to solve the problems involved in actually doing it. He suggested
learning from other Asian independence movements and leaders,
while realizing that in the end only the Vietnamese could win
their own independence. His greatest weakness, according to many
historians, was his failure to involve the Vietnamese peasantry,
who composed 80 percent of the population, in his drive for
independence. Rather than recruiting support at the village
level, Phan Boi Chau and his followers concentrated on recruiting
the elite, in the belief that the peasant masses would
automatically rally around the scholar-gentry. Future Vietnamese
independence leaders took inspiration from the efforts of the
early nationalists and learned from their mistakes the importance
of winning support at the local level.
An important development in the early part of the twentieth
century was the increased use of quoc ngu in the northern
part of the country through a proliferation of new journals
printed in that script. There had been quoc ngu
publications in Cochinchina since 1865, but in 1898 a decree of
the colonial government prohibited publication without
permission, in the protectorate areas, of periodicals in quoc
ngu or Chinese that were not published by a French citizen.
In 1913 Nguyen Van Vinh succeeded in publishing Dong Duong Tap
Chi (Indochinese Review), a strongly antitraditional but pro-
French journal. He also founded a publishing house that
translated such Vietnamese classics as the early nineteenth
century poem Kim Van Kieu as well as Chinese classics into
quoc ngu. Nguyen Van Vinh's publications, while largely
pro-Western, were the major impetus for the increasing popularity
of quoc ngu in Annam and Tonkin. In 1917 the moderate
reformist journalist Pham Quynh began publishing in Hanoi the
quoc ngu journal Nam Phong, which addressed the
problem of adopting modern Western values without destroying the
cultural essence of the Vietnamese nation. By World War I,
quoc ngu had become the vehicle for the dissemination of
not only Vietnamese, Chinese, and French literary and
philosophical classics but also a new body of Vietnamese
nationalist literature emphasizing social comment and criticism.
In the years immediately following World War I, the scholar-
led Vietnamese independence movement in Cochinchina began a
temporary decline as a result, in part, of tighter French control
and increased activity by the French-educated Vietnamese elite.
The decrease of both French investments in and imports to Vietnam
during the war had opened opportunities to entrepreneurial
Vietnamese, who began to be active in light industries such as
rice milling, printing, and textile weaving. The sale of large
tracts of land in the Mekong Delta by the colonial government to
speculators at cheap prices resulted in the expansion of the
Vietnamese landed aristocracy. These factors in combination led
to the rise of a wealthy Vietnamese elite in Cochinchina that was
pro-French but was frustrated by its own lack of political power
and status.
Prominent among this group was Bui Quang Chieu, a French-
trained agricultural engineer, who helped organize the
Constitutionalist Party in 1917. Founded with the hope that it
would be able to exert pressure on the Colonial Council of
Cochinchina, the governing body of the colony, the party drew its
support from Vietnamese who were large landowners, wealthy
merchants, industrialists, and senior civil servants. The
Colonial Council, established in 1880, was controlled by French
interests, having only ten Vietnamese members out of twenty-four
by 1922. The demands of the party included increased Vietnamese
representation on the Colonial Council, higher salaries for
Vietnamese officials, replacement of the scholar-official
administration system with a modern bureaucracy, and reform of
the naturalization law to make it easier for Vietnamese to become
French citizens.
When the party failed to gain acceptance of any of these
demands, it turned to its most pressing economic grievance, the
ethnic Chinese domination of the Cochinchinese economy. While
French investors exercised almost exclusive control over industry
and shared control of agriculture with the Vietnamese, the ethnic
Chinese were sought out by the French to act as middlemen and
came to dominate rice trade and retail business in both urban and
rural areas. A boycott of Chinese goods organized by the party,
however, was largely unsuccessful. By the mid 1920s, the
Vietnamese entrepreneurial elite and the Constitutionalist Party
had grown increasingly critical of the French. However, more
progressive groups had displaced them in the Vietnamese
nationalist movement.
The mid 1920s brought a period of increased activity among
the growing Vietnamese worker class, and pedicab drivers, dye
workers, and textile workers launched strikes with some success.
In August 1925, workers belonging to an underground union struck
at the Ba Son naval arsenal in Saigon-Cholon, ostensibly for
higher pay but in actuality to block two French naval ships from
being sent to Shanghai to pressure striking Chinese workers. The
strikers were successful in their demands and, in November, held
massive demonstrations in Saigon to protest the arrest of Phan
Boi Chau in Shanghai.
Data as of December 1987
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