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Vietnam The Nghe-Tinh Revolt
Strikes grew more frequent in Nam Bo in early 1930 and led to
peasant demonstrations in May and June of that year. The focus of
reaction to the worsening economic conditions, however, was Nghe
An Province, which had a long history of support for peasant
revolts. Plagued by floods, drought, scarcity of land, and
colonial exploitation, the people of Nghe An had been supporters
of the Can Vuong movement and the activities of Phan Boi Chau. By
late 1929, the ICP had begun organizing party cells, trade
unions, and peasant associations in the province. By early 1930,
it had established a provincial committee in the provincial
capital of Vinh and had begun to found mass organizations
throughout Nghe An. French sources reported that by mid-summer
1930 there were about 300 Communist activists in Nghe An and the
neighboring province of Ha Tinh. This figure rose to 1,800 a few
months later. The communists helped to mobilize the workers and
peasants of Nghe-Tinh, as the two-province area was known, to
protest the worsening conditions. Peasant demonstrators demanded
a moratorium on the payment of the personal tax and a return of
village communal lands that were in the hands of wealthy
landowners. When the demands were ignored, demonstrations turned
to riots; government buildings, manor houses, and markets were
looted and burned, and tax rolls were destroyed. Some village
notables joined in the uprisings or refused to suppress them.
Local officials fled, and government authority rapidly
disintegrated. In some of the districts, the communists helped
organize the people into local village associations called
soviets (using the Bolshevik term). The soviets, formed by
calling a meeting of village residents at the local dinh,
elected a ruling committee to annul taxes, lower rents,
distribute excess rice to the needy, and organize the seizure of
communal land confiscated by the wealthy. Village militias were
formed, usually armed only with sticks, spears, and knives.
By September the French had realized the seriousness of the
situation and brought in Foreign Legion troops to suppress the
rebellion. On September 9, French planes bombed a column of
thousands of peasants headed toward the provincial capital.
Security forces rounded up all those suspected of being
communists or of being involved in the rebellion, staged
executions, and conducted punitive raids on rebellious villages.
By early 1931, all of the soviets had been forced to surrender.
Of the more than 1,000 arrested, 400 were given long prison
sentences, and 80, including some of the party leaders, were
executed. With the aid of other Asian colonial authorities,
Vietnamese communists in Singapore, China, and Hong Kong were
also arrested.
The early 1930s was a period of recovery and rebuilding for
the ICP in Vietnam. Reorganization and recruitment were carried
on even among political prisoners, of whom there were more than
10,000 by 1932. In the prison of Poulo Condore, Marxist
literature circulated secretly, an underground journal was
published, and party members (among them future party leaders
Pham Van Dong and Le Duan) organized a university, teaching
courses in sciences, literature, languages, geography, and
Marxism-Leninism
(see Development of the Vietnamese Communist Party
, ch. 4;
Appendix B). The
party also began to recruit
increasingly from among Vietnamese minorities, particularly the
Tay-Nung ethnic groups living in the Viet Bac. Located along
Vietnam's northern border with China, this remote mountainous
region includes the modern provinces of Lang Son, Cao Bang, Bac
Thai, and Ha Tuyen
(see
fig. 7).
This period also marked the rise of a Trotskyite faction
within the communist movement, which in 1933 began publishing a
widely read journal called La Lutte (Struggle). The
Comintern's hostility toward Trotskyites prevented their formal
alliance with the ICP, although.
informal cooperation did exist. In 1935 a combined slate of ICP
members and Trotskyites managed to elect four candidates to the
Saigon municipal council. Cooperation between the two groups
began to break down, however, when a Popular Front government led
by the French Socialist Party under Leon Blum was elected in
Paris. The Trotskyites complained that, despite the change of
leadership in France, nothing had changed in Indochina. From the
communist viewpoint, the major contribution to Vietnamese
independence made by the Popular Front government was an amnesty
declared in 1936 under which 1,532 Vietnamese political prisoners
were freed.
Data as of December 1987
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