By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

As we have seen, the attraction of Marxism in China was not simply its anti-Western character. The transformation of Chinese society produced the Self-Strengthening Movement and later the Hundred Days' reforms in 1898; however, as time went on and defeated after defeat piled on, it became clear that the proposed changes were not fundamental enough. The first decades of the twentieth century thus saw a flowering of movements and anarchist organizations seeking to transform the culture, but as we shall see, none attained the coherence and, by the late 1920s and 1930s, the impressive track record of Communism. Development, not only economic but also social and cultural, was therefore at the center of the appeal of Marxism in China because it offered a way to build a China that could stand up for itself in the world. Marxists shared with other Chinese nationalists and reformists the diagnosis that the causes of China’s humiliation were ultimately internal weakness and corrosion, and China would regain its rightful place in the world only after it had restored its own vitality.

As we have seen on 24 July 1924 five persons were killed in the bomb outrage at Canton when an unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of M Martial Henri Merlin, Governor-General of French Indochina. 

A Chinese newspaper identified the Victoria Hotel assassin before the police did. A package was dropped into the letterbox of the Xianxiang Bao. It contained a photograph and the ‘testament’ of a man called Pham Hong Thai:

I am a Vietnamese who was born under the brutal rule of the French. Since I was young, I began to find certain approaches to resist the French and liberate my homeland. I immediately became a member of the Vietnamese Revolutionary Army after its establishment. In April of 1924, I was ordered to assassinate the Governor-General of Annam [Indochina]. We had around ten members to conduct this task. They were assigned to Japan, Beijing, and Hong Kong to look for opportunities. However, due to certain hardship, I failed to succeed in the assassination until June 19, when the Governor-General arrived in Shamian, Canton. There, I was able to kill him by throwing a bomb … For the evil deeds he did in Vietnam, I had to kill him. However, I apologize to those others who were injured in this incident. I will not be regretful for this deed even if I die. I wish that what I have done will make other nations understand my people's suffering and help us.

The testament was accompanied by a letter from a Korean friend, Seo Hung-a, who had met Pham Hong Thai in Tokyo and been inspired by him, and to whom the latter had entrusted his final message before he had set out to kill Merlin.1

Pham Hong Thai was around twenty-four years old. At an early age, he, left home in Nghe An province in north-central Vietnam for the capital, Hanoi. He turned down the opportunity to join the civil service, trained as a mechanic and worked in sundry trades, as an auto repairman and in a railway workshop (some accounts had him working variously as a ‘cyclo,’ or rickshaw-driver, and a coal miner). In November 1918,he slipped over the hills to Laos and across the border with Siam, through a revolutionary network that stretched from central Vietnam into northeastern Siam and sea to south China.2 These were pathways between safe havens that more and more young radicals were taking to flee French authority. There were attempts to radicalize the young men living in settlements of exile in Siam by a ‘walking teacher,’ Dang Thuc Hua. He set up a route for them to travel through Siam and on to China. On one count, perhaps 100 men made the journey in the 1920s, more than went to the university in Hanoi. In Siam, Pham Hong Thai headed for a village in Phichit province called Ban Dong, where there were sixty or seventy families in exile with a long anti-colonial tradition. He must have spent several years there; local tradition had it that his parents lived there, and he was remembered as ‘Giai Thai’ (‘Willy Thai’), a typical family pet name for a young son. But the locals were close about this, even to Vietnamese outsiders. Pham Hong Thai also left a wife and son in Ban Dong. After the assassination attempt on Merlin, she was forced to flee.3

From Siam, Thai moved to China, where he joined a Vietnamese group based there called the Tam Tam Xa, or the ‘Society of Like Hearts.’ Exposed to Canton's radicalism, the Like Hearts repudiated the more cautious policies of the earlier generation of anti-colonial activists; they looked to direct action. High among Merlin’s crimes was his attempt to silence and eliminate patriots outside Vietnam. And so it came to pass that Thai had undertaken to carry out a ‘death sentence’ on the Governor-General of Indochina.4

The patriots abroad claimed Pham Hong Thai as a martyr. First among these was the scholar and reformer turned revolutionary and exile, Phan Boi Chau. Now fifty-seven years of age, he was the most celebrated national figure of his generation. When the bomb was thrown, Phan Boi Chau was living in Hangzhou in China, at an even greater distance from French rule. But as he read the news,,,,, his arms and legs began to shake. ‘People throughout the world came to know about Vietnam and the Vietnamese revolutionary movement … In Beijing, the Russian ambassador pounded his desk, saying, “This is what should happen in the cattle ranch of the capitalists!”5 Phan Boi Chau traveled to Canton to assess the movement and capitalize on the moment. He wrote a memorial pamphlet that celebrated Pham Hong Thai as the latest patriot in a long heroic tradition.6 He related how Pham Hong Thai had twice attempted to reach Merlin earlier in the evening.7 First,he had tried to rent a sampan near where Merlin was due to disembark, ‘hiding in the boat like a tiger, waiting for Merlin to step on to the pier to throw his bombs.’ But the Cantonese port authorities had ordered all craft, large and small, away from the pier as a security measure. Pham Hong Thai had then tried, ‘with courage higher than ever,’ to rent a room on the second floor of the Victoria Hotel, directly above where Merlin would be, but he had been turned away. With no other option, he walked directly from the British bridge gate to the hotel with an assured air, posing as a photographer.8 This would later be recalled with triumph:

He was dressed in Western clothes, wearing Western shoes, and carrying a Western cane in his hand … The French police who were guarding the door on both sides all thought that he was a French guest at the reception because his outfit and deportment looked like a Frenchman so they suspected nothing.9

It was not clear that Pham Hong Thai had deliberately taken his own life by plunging into the Pearl River. But Phan Boi Chau saw it as a noble suicide, and within weeks, the legend of Pham Hong Thai and his photograph spread widely. Phan Boi Chau claimed that a turning point in the struggle had been reached, in his tract and a new generation and new methods were coming to the fore.10 He wrote of Pham Hong Thai as ‘a man without a country since his mother’s womb’, that because of French colonialism, he had died for a nation he never had himself experienced. But there was something more to this: the struggles of the new generation were not merely about the Vietnamese nation; in many ways, their lives were lived beyond the nation, in a realm where the Vietnamese situation connected intimately with that of others across Asia.

Pham Hong Thai had followed Merlin to Japan, where he met Korean activists; they found common cause as one of Merlin’s visit to Japan to recognize Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea.11 Thai’s friend Seo Hung-a told the Chinese press that an attack was originally planned for a dinner to be held in Repulse Bay in Hong Kong, but it was called off as there was too much risk of people of other nationalities being hit.12 Pham Hong Thai was assisted in making his bombs (a second device was later recovered) by a Russian sympathizer who taught at Whampoa Military Academy, where a growing number of the overseas Vietnamese were trying to enlist.

Pham Hong Thai’s sacrifice moved the people of Canton.13 One popular Chinese newspaper, in its leader of 24 June, called him a hero. The bomb was strong enough to electrify the whole world, claimed, and caused by the French treating the Vietnamese as barbarians and savages.14 Pham Hong Thai’s remains were buried by the Chinese Water Police, but leading citizens subscribed funds to be reinterred. The French watched in horror as the senior Nationalist official Hu Hanmin personally prepared one of the commemorative stone tablets.15 What is more, Pham Hong Thai was laid in a hallowed spot, next to the tomb of the ‘Seventy-Two Martyrs’ of the earlier 1911 uprising against the Qing, thereby making the Chinese and Vietnamese struggles a common cause against the established order of all kinds. This played on an older theme: fourteen of the ‘72 Martyrs’ had come from British Malaya16 Hu Hanmin’s inscription celebrated Thai as ‘a man of high purpose’. He described how Thai had become convinced that only violence could shake the enemy and fire the people’s revolutionary zeal.17 

The French watched the cult of Pham Hong Thai obsessively from afar, complaining annually at the commemoration the Canton authorities allowed at his tomb on his death anniversary. More Vietnamese were recruited to the radical underground via Canton, as more Vietnamese graduated from Whampoa Military Academy – as soldiers and, even more worryingly, as pilots – a visit to the shrine became a ritual of initiation. Women came too, and one of them later described an emotive scene. In front of old revolutionaries and Whampoa cadets, incense sticks were lit and speeches made. ‘Pham Hong Thai, be content; be at ease in your tomb. We will emulate you and expel the foreign invaders from our land.’ In a formal oath before the tomb, young men and women swore to sacrifice their life, family, and property to the revolution, pledge unquestioning loyalty to the movement, preserve the secrecy of its work,, and not to join any other, under pain of death. It was like a wedding ceremony, but one that strengthened the resolve not to take a spouse but to wed oneself to the cause.18 To the people of Canton, these rites confirmed a new anti-imperialist front of the Asian revolution. 

 

The revolt of the houseboys

In 1924 many political struggles across Asia converged on Canton. It was a city of exiles, one of the few apertures in the imperial system. Nationalists, anarchists, communists, revolutionaries of all descriptions all made their way there. It was one of the first cities in which Chinese men had cut off their queues as a gesture of defiance to the Qing empire, and so Vietnamese, Siamese, Japanese, Koreans,, and others could blend in, at least to the eye of an outsider. In the words of a 1913 French report, it was a population of ‘indistinguishable ethnic elements.’19 The exiles were often men and women with no family and open to new solidarities. In their own minds, they were Phan Boi Chau’s words, ‘suffering the same sickness.’20 It was soon reported from the British colony of Singapore that forty Hainanese ‘of the domestic servant class’ had left en masse for Whampoa Military Academy. The head ‘bad boy’ at the Grosvenor House Hotel received Bolshevik literature from Canton.21 From Shamian to Saigon to Singapore, the Asian revolution was a revolt of the houseboys.

Among the new arrivals in Canton were visitors from the Soviet Union. Following a long period of negotiation, and despairing of other alliances, in late 1923,,,, Sun Yat-sen had accepted the aid of Soviet Russia. It came in the form of the Third Communist International, or the Comintern, which had been established by Lenin in 1919 to foster a global revolution of the proletariat, which he saw as essential to the survival of the Bolshevik regime in Russia itself by breaking it free from its encirclement by ‘White’ reactionary forces. To this end, the Comintern sent a series of emissaries and then a large mission to China. It was the Soviet Union’s largest investment in revolution outside its own borders. A veteran Bolshevik headed the mission A veteran Bolshevik headed the mission, Mikhail Borodin, whose own exile from Russia had begun after the 1905 revolution and led him to Britain, the United States,, and Mexico, where he carried with him the aura of being a long-term associate of Lenin. Borodin threw his support behind the founding of Whampoa Military Academy and began to refashion the Nationalists as a revolutionary party. He gave fateful advice to the local Chinese communists that they should work with the Nationalist Party and form a ‘bloc within’ it. The Asian revolution was entering a new phase.22 

The old Tsarist consulate on Shamian Island had been seized by the British, so on arrival in Canton in October 1923, Borodin and his staff operated from an elegant mansion in Tungshan, an enclave where the new republican officials built their villas to mirror and eclipse those of Shamian. It became the focus of numerous comings and goings. On arrival from Moscow was a young man known as Tan Malaka, originally from Sumatra's Sumatra'satra's Dutch possession. He had arrived in December 1923 and was not so impressed by the place. ‘Canton’s only claims to the term “city” were the post office, some electric lighting, and three main roads.’ It was ‘filled with shops and businesses run on feudal lines, lined by narrow, dark streets and overflowing with pedicabs and sampans. It’s true,’ he conceded, ‘as the adage goes, that “everything new comes from Canton.” Had not the social and political revolution started there?’23 He used Canton’s resources to publish tracts aimed at his countrymen in the Netherlands East Indies – including the first blueprint for a new ‘Republic of Indonesia’ – putting the place of publication as ‘Tokyo’ to confuse the Dutch police. 

In the midst of these arrivals, the gaze of the French focused on one person in particular. In November 1924, a man known as ‘Ly Thuy’ took up residence in ‘the Borodin House.’ He also came from Moscow, ostensibly as a journalist for the Soviet news agency, ROSTA, and as an occasional translator. He was mysterious about his role; he claimed to be Chinese and wrote articles under the pseudonym of a woman to avoid identification. There was a subterranean mystique about him. A young Russian woman working as a translator to the mission later recalled: 

We jokingly called him Li An-nam (Annam was the name of the French colony in Indochina). He was thirty-six years old. He was unimpressive in appearance; there was something wrong with his lungs. I can remember his small, spare figure in a white linen suit of European cut, which hung loosely on him, his attentive, somewhat sad gaze, and the walk of a very tired or sick man. He spoke French, English, and Cantonese well and knew Russian. I took Vietnamese lessons from him,and he willingly taught me. He was friendly towards us but reserved,, and he never told us what his work was and what he had done in the past. We knew nothing about him except that for his capture, the French imperialists had offered a great sum of money and that the Kuomintang government had given him political asylum. He was quite at home in Borodin’s house.24 

Ly Thuy grumbled in letters to friends in Moscow that he spent most of his time, and a good deal of his money, on Canton’s Vietnamese exiles. He, too, was to eulogize Pham Hong Thai and seek to exploit the excitement that his martyrdom had fostered among the young Vietnamese in the city. But his political message was very different from Phan Boi Chau and the earlier radicals, and even from that of Pham Hong Thai himself. He urged the young men he sought out at Whampoa and elsewhere to turn away from the ethos of individual self-sacrifice and martyrdom to embrace revolutionary theory and party discipline.25 

The French security service, the Sûreté Générale, had a Vietnamese informer, codename ‘Pinot,’ who worked as a photographer in Canton. He probably led the French to the second bomb that Pham Hong Thai had failed to explode. He also alerted them to Ly Thuy. With his cover, Pinot had ample opportunity to photograph groups of Vietnamese. One such snapshot of a group outing on bicycles gave the Sûreté a likeness of a man to the left of its center, dressed in white, wearing a dark fedora: Ly Thuy. 

By early 1925 Pinot had identified Ly Thuy as a Vietnamese. On the evidence of the photographs and a missing part of the man’s left ear, the Sûreté traced Ly Thuy’s movements back in time and across vast distances. This led them all the way to Paris itself, and to 6 villa des Gobelins, a townhouse in a small but well-appointed side street in the 13e arrondissement. In the summer of 1919, a man matching the description of Ly Thuy had begun to lodge there with some other Vietnamese émigrés.26 

In June 1919, a petition started to circulate in Paris among delegations to the Versailles peace conference. One of a great many into which were decanted the hopes of entire peoples, it was headed ‘Demands of the Annamite People’ and was signed ‘Nguyen Ai Quoc.’ It was received by the president of the republic, by the US president, Woodrow Wilson, and other diplomatic missions, and by August, it had reached the streets of Hanoi. It seemed clear that Nguyen Ai Quoc – ‘Nguyen the Patriot’ – was a pseudonym, a Vietnamese Marianne or John Bull.27 But in the coming weeks and months, Nguyen Ai Quoc began to take a more solid form as the name was used to lobby various delegations and newspapers across Paris. 

The Sûreté sent its Vietnamese agents in Paris to eavesdrop on conversations, open mail to uncover Nguyen Ai Quoc’s origins. The man came from a floating world that seemed to stretch across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. There were traces of him in the United States and England. They followed him across Paris to public meetings, newspaper offices, libraries, cafés,, and lodging-house bedrooms. Then, in mid-1923, they lost him. Over the coming months and years, the French authorities continued to search for him. They never wavered in their belief that he was important in some way. This surveillance and notoriety was the making of Nguyen Ai Quoc. The police of other imperial powers were enlisted to follow the man’s every move for the next fifty years as he roamed across an imperial underground in which the fate of Asia was ultimately decided. 

In late 1923 there was another photograph, this time taken in Moscow. This,, too,, passed through the hands of the police of all the imperial powers. In its center was Grigory Zinoviev, the leader of the Comintern. Seated on Zinoviev’s right in the photograph was the veteran Japanese anarchist and socialist Sen Katayama. Then, next to him, on the end of the front row, was Nguyen Ai Quoc, in the improvised uniform of a commissar of some kind. Behind him, third from the left, staring directly into the camera, was Tan Malaka. He had been expelled from his homeland in 1921 to the Netherlands; he too was watched by the police but had disappeared in 1922. The tall man beside him had traveled still further. He went by the name ‘M. N. Roy.’ His path to Moscow had begun several struggles and many identities earlier, in Bengal in 1915, and led through Southeast Asia, Japan,, and China to the United States. He was the first Asian recruit of Borodin, but they had originally met in Mexico City. 

Nguyen Ai Quoc, Tan Malaka, M. N. Roy,,, and others were at the heart of the modern age's modern age's greatest missionary undertaking. In Asia, nothing like it had been seen since the Jesuits attempted to convert India, China, and Japan in the sixteenth century. There were few representatives of the colonial world at the first meetings of the Comintern. Lenin had looked instead to the working classes of the advanced industrial nations of western Europe to provide a lead, rather than the ‘backward’ peasantries of Asia. But the failure of the revolution in Germany in 1918–19 and the passivity of the working classes in Britain led Lenin to look to the east to address the West's failures. Allies, particularly from Asia, were sought and by 1923 were found in growing numbers. As Moscow-trained communists returned to Asia, they attempted by their words and example to awaken vast societies and set them in motion. Their paths were to cross in the coming revolutionary struggle in China and throughout Asia. 

There were many such pathways and trails laid by an entire generation in motion. Nguyen Ai Quoc, so far as anyone could say for sure, was born in 1890, Tan Malaka in 1897, M. N. Roy in 1887. They were among the first to travel in large numbers far beyond their own countries, to meet each other across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and to begin to explore what they had in common. Their itineraries might begin in Saigon, Sumatra, or Calcutta. Still, they then dispersed across three oceans to Tokyo, Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco, New York, Berlin, and Moscow, before converging again in Asia, in Canton, Shanghai or Singapore. If is age of travel's iconic imagetravel's iconic image was the modern splendor of the great ocean liners, these travelers often experienced its underside. Although not all of them and not all of the time – traveled as seamen, laborers, servants, entertainers, students, and, most often, as exiles. They tended to travel light, often under false names and nationalities, with banned literature, illicit currency, or encoded messages hidden in their luggage. They experienced a world of connections and a world upside down: the underbelly of the great port cities of the empire where they found they were able more freely to organize and act. The sites of their struggles were the waterfront, the lodging house, the coffee shop, the clandestine printing press in the back alley.28 They made these places centers of global awareness. Theirerience of a secret underworld of empire helped shape a spectrum of radical ideas – about class and national identity, the position of women, the function of art and literature, and the and history of the future. 

This was when local nationalisms were still nascent and when the political future of the colonial world seemed uniquely open. Many of these men and women believed that the solidarities they made – born from a shared history of oppression and exploitation and negotiation of borders and exclusion – would prevail over the narrowness of nations and usher in a common utopian destiny. Although many were loyal disciples of Lenin and Stalin, they molded Marxist-Leninist doctrine to Asian realities in innovative ways. And when it was unyielding, they often broke with it: such ideas were a method not an iron dogma. A new generation of intellectuals sought to weave together seemingly irreconcilable doctrines – anarchism, nationalism, communism, even religious revival – in the name of unity and opposition to western imperialism. They shared a central dilemma regarding how far violence could be employed for political ends and what arguments might legitimize its use. They shared a conviction that Asia was to lead the struggles for human freedom from subjugation and impoverishment: what Tan Malaka was to call ‘100 percent independence’. He also gave the future a name: ‘Aslia’ – a new unity within a world order remade. This was just one of many such visions. 

The itineraries of these dangerous men and women repeatedly converged in some of the most monumental events of the twentieth century as seen from the west: the two world wars and the rise of communism. But they often experienced this history through a very different lens, a different sense of time and place. As a different kind of story altogether: that of a contest between western empires and their most dedicated opponents, fought across the globe by a generation whose intertwined lives gave their experience a unity. Theirs were some of the first truly global lives of modern times, and their ideas were distinctive in the extent to which they were forged by the experience of global travel and exile. Many would not live to see the freedoms for which they fought; they would perish or fall by the wayside. Those who survived the tempests would witness a narrower nationalism prevail, freedom far short of ‘100 percent independence’, and their footprints washed away. Yet, they were pathfinders for a world without empire and for an Asian future in many ways. 

Perhaps the French colonial officials who followed the traces of Nguyen Ai Quoc, alias Ly Thuy, alias Li Annam, had a vague premonition of this, of lurking menace and coming nemesis. All empires were prey to fears of overreach, decline, and fall, and each had its inner demons. The lines the French police traced on their maps in 1919 and 1924 led back to Indochina's colony and the very moment of imperial fulfillment. 

 

1. We have used the account and the translation in Hwang Eunshil, ‘“Sharing the Same Predicament”: Mutual Perceptions and Interactions between Korean and Vietnamese Intellectuals, 1900–1925’, Ph.D. thesis, National University of Singapore, 2016, pp. 126–8. 

2. Doan-Bich, Famous Men of Vietnam, 3rd edn, Hanoi, Vietnam Council on Foreign Relations, 1970, p. 37. 

3. Private collection, Interviews by Andrew Hardy and Đào Thế Đúc, Chiang Mai, 22 and 25 July 2004. Shared and quoted by kind permission of Andrew Hardy. See also: ‘Gặp ngu’ò’i con trai liệt sỹ Phạm Hống Thái,’ http://cand.com.vn/Phong-su-tu-lieu/Gap-nguoi-con-trai-liet-sy-Pham-Hong-Thai-171649/ (last accessed 25 August 2019). 

4. Doan Bich , Famous Men of Vietnam, 1970, p. 37. 

5. Phan-Bội-Châu, Overturned Chariot: The Autobiography of Phan-Bội-Châu, trans. Vinh Sinh and Nicholas Wickenden, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1999, p. 253.

6. France, Archives Nationales d'outre-mer (henceforth ANOM), INDO/GG/65533, ‘Histoire de Pham Hong Thai’, a translation of the work marked ‘Secret’.

7. China Mail, 24 June 1924. 

8. David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1971, p. 257. 

9. Phan-Boi-Chau Phan-Boi-Chau, Nicholas Wickenden, et al.Overturned Chariot: The Autobiography of Phan-Boi-Chau ,1999, p. 256. 

10. David G Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885-1925, 1971, pp. 75–7. 

11. Doan-Bich, Famous Men of Vietnam, p. 37. 

12. China Mail, 26 June 1924. 

13. Daniel Y. K. Kwan, Marxist Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor Movement: A Study of Deng Zhongxia (1894-1933) (Jackson School Publications in International Studies), 1997, p. 93. 

14. As reported in Hong Kong Daily Press, 26 June 1924. 

15. ANOM, INDO/GGI/65533, Governor-General Monguillot to Minister of Colonies, 23 May 1925. 

16. Png Poh-seng, ‘The Kuomintang in Malaya, 1912–1941’, Journal of Southeast Asian History, 2/1 (1961), pp. 1–32, at p. 7. 

17. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 66–7. 

18. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Passion, Betrayal, and Revolution in Colonial Saigon: The Memoirs of Bao Luong, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2010, p. 50.

19. Paterson, ‘A Vietnamese Icon in Canton’, pp. 64–95, esp. description and quotation at pp. 67–8. This essay is an excellent dissection of the multiple meanings of the incident as seen at the time.

20. Quoted by Firuta Motoo, ‘Vietnamese Political Movements in Thailand: Legacy of the Dong-Du Movement’, in Vinh Sinh (ed.), Phan Bội Châu and the Dộng-du Movement, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 150–81, at p. 150. 

21. TNA, CO 537/931, MBPI, April 1925. 

22. Dan N. Jacobs, Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1981; and see later chapters below. 

23. The ‘adage’ he quotes is a Chinese saw. All quotations are from Tan Malaka, From Jail to Jail, trans. And ed. Helen Jarvis, Athens, Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1991, vol. II, p. 109. 

24. Vera Vladimirovna Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 1925–1927, trans. Steven I. Levine, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 229. 

25. Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 29–39. 

26. Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941, London, Hurst, 2003, pp. 69–80. 

27. For this point, Hue-Tam Ho Tai , Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution,1996, p. 69. 

28. See Sunil S. Amrith and Tim Harper, ‘Introduction’ in Harper and Amrith (eds), Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 1–9.

 

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