Ho Chi Minh: The reluctant communist?
By Karim Raslan
KUALA LUMPUR (JP): Politicians should never be allowed to write their own memoirs. Quite apart from cluttering up book shops, autobiographies tend to be both bombastic and dull.
Moreover, a retired or semi-retired leader is always inclined to set "the story straight" concocting an account of events that is inevitably one-sided as they whitewash their career failures whilst reinforcing (ad nauseam) what they consider to be their key strengths.
By way of comparison, good political history, the kind of writing that really advances one's understanding of a nation's public life and its governance, demands less bias and more scholarship.
As a consequence it's been a great pleasure to come across a recently published historical biography of the fabulously enigmatic and cosmopolitan Vietnamese political icon, Ho Chi Minh, written by American academic William Druiker.
Despite the voluminous research, Druiker manages to bring his mercurial and endearing subject to life. So much so that half way through the book, I found myself rereading Ho's famous Prison Diary, an account of his incarceration by the Nationalist Chinese forces in the early 1940s. Composed in exquisite Tang dynasty quatrains the verse is both funny and poignant. At one point the deeply depressed leader says:
"Throughout the night there's nowhere to lay my head. Perched on the latrine, I await the break of day."
Another equally humorous incident occurs towards the end of the book when Ho, by now seventy-six and having devoted his entire life to the liberation of his people, asks a visiting Chinese communist leader, Tao Zhu to provide him with a young woman from Guandong to serve as his companion.
When questioned as to why no women were to be found locally he explained that everyone in Vietnam called him "Uncle Ho". Sadly, at least for the lonely septuagenarian icon, Zhou En Lai rejected the request and Ho died unmarried, if not unloved.
The image of an aging leader isolated within a popular image of his own making is heart-rending because it reminds us of two things: firstly that he was human and secondly that it is lonely at the top. At a certain point of a politician's ascent to power solitude becomes his or her main companion.
Besides the occasional telling psychological insight, Druiker's book also draws out three main conclusions. The first is that "Uncle Ho" was a nationalist patriot first and foremost. The second was that the French and the Americans misread the post-War scenario in Tonkin and Cochin China to their detriment and the third is that Chinese diplomatic and military support comes at great cost to the recipient nation.
In establishing Ho's nationalist credentials, Druiker makes much of the man's remarkably peripatetic existence. In a period of some thirteen years Ho traversed much of Asia and Europe acquiring new languages with all the aplomb of a university professor. Moreover, in his earlier guise of international political agitator under the name, Nguyen Ai Quoc, Ho became a notorious figure - constantly harassed by the French.
According to Druiker's argument, Ho was converted to Communism only because he found it was broadly in sympathy with his concerns, ascribing a great deal of importance to Lenin's Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, a major attack on the oppressive conditions within the European colonies.
Certainly subsequent events were to reinforce this perception when in later years both Stalin and Mao chastised Ho for what they considered to be his back-sliding on the domestic agenda vis-a-vis his willingness to accommodate the moderate nationalists, the middle classes and his wariness of full-scale agrarian reform.
Secondly, Druiker seems to suggest that Ho was enough of a pragmatist, at least in the immediate post-War period, to have discarded his communist rhetoric had the Americans been willing to throw their support behind his bid for Vietnamese independence.
However, American mistrust of Soviet and Communist Chinese intentions and the need to support the French in Europe forced a number of compromises on Roosevelt's well known commitment to freedom and democracy in Asia.
Furthermore, it was unfortunate that after years of Nazi- German occupation, the returning French forces were so insecure and prickly about their position in the world.
Determined to resurrect national honor and pride, successive French governments failed to achieve a negotiated settlement, exposing themselves to a disastrous debacle at Dien Bien Phu (May 1955) when with Chinese assistance French forces in a remote mountainous stronghold were entirely surrounded and thousands of troops captured.
However, to my mind the most sobering theme that emerges from the biography is Ho's desperate attempts to balance the influence of Vietnam's various allies, occupiers and enemies. For much of the first half of the 20th Century the French were the chief adversary.
When, after the Japanese surrender in 1945, Chinese armed forces marched into Vietnam, Ho was faced with a predicament of being dependent on his people's age-old northern adversary, acknowledging, as one historian describes, "that it was better to sniff French shit for a while than to eat China's for the rest of our life."
The Vietnamese relationship with China exists on many levels. It is both cultural and literary witness of Ho's veneration of Confucius, whose tomb he visited in the 1960s. However, in the 1950s and 1960s Ho's impoverished regime was forced to depend on the Chinese for arms, supplies and training in order to fend off the infinitely better equipped South Vietnamese troops.
Whilst there is no doubt that the Maoist strategy was effective in Vietnam with Ho's Vietminh dubbed as the waiting tiger to the impassive French elephant, victories such as at Dien Bien Phu were extracted at a cost to national sovereignty as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demanded ever greater doctrinal purity from their counterparts in Hanoi. Just as the Vietminh were facing turmoil internationally, the CCP increased their demands for domestic land reforms and political cleansing amongst the military.
Enforced rigorously, these measures destroyed a great deal of the Vietminh's internal support as minority groups such as Catholics, not to mention the middle classes and the intellectuals. became increasingly restive.
It is clear from Ho's biography that whilst he welcomed the CCP's support he chafed at their heavy-handedness and insensitivity to Vietnamese interests.
In many ways Ho's experience presents an interesting historical lesson for Southeast Asia. China's interests will always be larger and more diverse than our own, leading Beijing to adopt diplomatic positions that are invidious to its neighbors. Part of Vietnam's tragedy has been its proximity to this all-powerful nation and its inability to stave off Beijing's pressure peaceably.
That Ho Chi Minh, one of Asia's finest strategist, was unable to achieve this end is testament to the enduring impact of China both on his country and on the rest of the region.
The writer is a Kuala Lumpur based lawyer and writer.