Phan Chu Trinh also known as Phan Châu Trinh (1872–1926) was a famous early 20th century Vietnamese nationalist. He also used the alias Tây Hồ. He sought to end France's brutal occupation of Vietnam. He opposed both violence and turning to other countries for support, and instead believed in attaining Vietnamese liberation by educating the population and by appealing to French democratic principles. Though he failed in this project, Vietnam was later liberated via an armed uprising led by Hồ Chí Minh. Hồ started his political activism working with Phan Chu Trinh and other activists in France.

Biography[link]

Trinh was born in Tay Loc, Quảng Nam Province in Annam, French Indochina on 9 September 1872. He was the son of a rich land owner and scholar. His father was a fighter in the Scholar's Revolt, but in 1885 he was killed by the other leaders in the revolt who suspected him of being a traitor. This left Trinh an orphan at the age of 13. His older brother educated him in classics. In 1901 he got the highest Mandarin degree.^{[citation needed]}

In 1905 Trinh resigned from his post in the mandarin bureaucracy. He had become strongly opposed to the monarchy, traditional Vietnamese court and mandarin system. He called for an end to the monarchy and its replacement with a democratic republic. Having earlier met Phan Bội Châu in 1903, in March/April 1906 he went to Hong Kong and then to Kwangtung to meet with him again. He made his way there disguised as a disheveled common laborer. He then went to Japan with Châu as part of the Ðông-Du movement. They stayed in Yokohama, where they had set up a two-story Japanese house to teach students, which they called Binh Ngo Hien. In June they went to Tokyo to inspect the Japanese education and political system.

Trinh disagreed with Châu's early ideas of asking for military assistance from Japan, as he didn't trust Japan's militarism. He also had other disagreements with Châu's philosophy. Therefore they had a friendly argument for a few weeks before he returned to Vietnam. Back in Vietnam he continued to receive letters from Châu arguing about his opposition to the monarchy and his belief that the French could be used. Trinh continued to campaign with slogans like "Up with Democracy, Out with Monarchy", and "Making Use of the French in the Quest for Progress". This made Châu quite upset and worried that the movement was fragmenting and that fundraising efforts would fail.^{[citation needed]}

In 1906 he wrote to the French Governor General Paul Beau. He asked the French to live up to their civilising mission. He blamed them for the exploitation of the countryside by Vietnamese collaborators. He called on France to develop modern legal, educational, and economic institutions in Vietnam and industrialise the country, and to remove the remnants of the mandarin system. In 1907 he opened a patriotic modern school for young Vietnamese men and women. The school was called Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục (aka Tonkin Free School). He was a lecturer at the school, and Châu's writings were also used.^{[citation needed]} The school carefully avoided doing anything illegal. Its ideas attacked the brutality of the French occupation of Vietnam, but also wanted to learn modernisation from the French. The school required scholars to renounce their elitist traditions and learn from the masses. It also offered the peasants a modern education. After peasant tax revolts erupted in 1908, Trinh was arrested, and his school was closed. He was sentenced to death, but it was commuted to life imprisonment after his progressive admirers in France intervened. He was sent to Côn Đảo island. In 1911, after three years, he was pardoned and sentenced to house arrest. He said he would rather return to prison than have partial freedom. So instead he was deported to France, where the French continued to monitor him.^{[citation needed]}

He went to Paris in 1915 to get the support of progressive French politicians and Vietnamese exiles. There he worked with Hồ Chí Minh, Phan Văn Trường, Nguyễn Thế Truyền, and Nguyễn An Ninh in "The Group of Vietnamese Patriots". The group was based at 6 Villa des Gobelins. There they wrote patriotic articles signed with Hồ Chí Minh's alias, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, "on behalf of the Group of Vietnamese Patriots". He worked as a photograph retoucher to support himself while he was in France. He returned to Saigon in 1925, where he died on 24 March 1926, aged 53. His funeral was attended by 60,000 people and caused big protests across the country demanding the end of French colonial occupation, which would not occur for three more decades.^{[citation needed]}

Debates With Other Nationalists[link]

Hồ Chí Minh once called Phan Chu Trinh "a conservative, narrow-minded man of letters", in a letter to Phan Bội Châu. Châu describes his meeting with Trinh in Japan like this: "It seems that at that time, deep in his heart, he already had a different aspiration. He and I kept company in Kwangtung for more than ten days. Every day when we talked about the affairs of our country, he singled out for bitter reproach the wicked conduct of the monarchs, the enemies of the people. He ground his teeth when talking about the ruler of the day, who was bringing calamity to the country and disaster to the people; as much as to say that if the system of monarchical autocracy were not abolished, simply restoring the country's independence would bring no happiness."^{[citation needed]}

In Tokyo, Trinh told Châu: "The level of their people is so high, and the level of our people is so low! How could we not become slaves? That some students now can enter Japanese schools has been your great achievement. Please stay on in Tokyo to take a quiet rest and devote yourself to writing, and not to making appeals for combat against the French. You should only call for 'popular rights and popular enlightenment.' Once popular rights have been achieved, then we can think about other things."

Châu commented: "Thereafter over more than ten days, he and I debated time and again, and our opinions were diametrically opposed. That is to say, he wished to overthrow the monarchy in order to create a basis for the promotion of popular rights; I, on the contrary, maintained that first the foreign enemy should be driven out, and after our nation's independence was restored we could talk about other things. My plan was to make use of the monarchy, which he opposed absolutely. His plan was to raise up the people to abolish the monarchy, with which I absolutely disagreed. In other words, he and I were pursuing one and the same goal, but our means were considerably different. He wished to start by relying on the French to abolish the monarchy, but I wished to start by driving out the French to restore Vietnam - That was the difference. However, even though his political view was the opposite of mine, he liked me personally a great deal and we roomed together for several weeks. Then all of a sudden he decided to return to our country."^{[citation needed]}

Legacy[link]

Most cities in Vietnam, regardless of the political orientation of the government, have named major streets after him.^[1]

References[link]

v t e Vietnamese independence movement Events Bombardment of Tourane Capture of Saigon Capture of the Citadel of Saigon Conquest of Cochinchina Ba Dinh uprising Pacification of Tonkin Hanoi Poison Plot World War I 1916 Cochinchina uprising Thai Nguyen uprising Bazin assassination Yen Bai mutiny World War II Second French Indochina Campaign August Revolution Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam First Indochina War Battle of Dien Bien Phu Geneva Conference Organisations Can Vuong Dong Du Duy Tan Hoi Empire of Vietnam Nguyen dynasty Tonkin Free School Viet Nam Quang Phuc Hoi Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang Viet Minh Vietnam Communist Party Vietnamese revolutionaries Cuong De Dinh Cong Trang Ho Chi Minh Huynh Thuc Khang Luong Van Can Ngo Dinh Diem Ngo Duc Ke Nguyen An Ninh Nguyen Dinh Chieu Nguyen Quang Bich Nguyen Quyen Nguyen Thai Hoc Nguyen Than Hien Nguyen Thanh Nguyen Thien Thuat Nguyen Thuong Hien Nguyen Trung Truc Nguyen Xuan On Pham Banh Phan Boi Chau Phan Chu Trinh Phan Dinh Phung Phan Thanh Gian Phan Xich Long Ta Thu Thau Ton That Thuyet Tran Cao Van Tran Trong Kim Truong Dinh Emperors Tu Duc Ham Nghi Thanh Thai Duy Tan Bao Dai French rulers Albert Sarraut Jean Decoux French Indochina Governor-General Collaborators Hoang Cao Khai Tran Ba Loc Nguyen Than

Ngô Văn Xuyết (1913-2005) alias Ngo Van (Vietnamese Ngô Văn) was a Vietnamese Trotskyist leader. Born in Vietnam, he joined the Trotskyist movement as a young man. After the repression of Trotskyism in Vietnam in 1945, he moved to France, where he wrote about his experiences and recent Vietnamese history.

This article reads like a review rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject. Please help improve this article to make it neutral in tone and meet Wikipedia's quality standards. (December 2007)

Ngo Van left his village at the age of 14 to work in a metallurgical works in Saigon, and soon became involved in the strikes and demonstrations and strikes that erupted periodically against the French colonial power in support of freedom of assembly, of the press, of travel and of education. There was already a history peasant revolts against colonialism, which were brually repressed, by the execution of leading activists, or their deportation to the infamous penal colony of Poulo Condore.

He was forced to end his formal education, but, enrolled under a false name, he read Marx in the Saigon municipal library after work. He came into contact with the Trotskyist left opposition group in Saigon opposed to the general line of the Indochinese Communist Party, emphasizing the importance of a movement based on the working class as against the nationalist oriented policy of Nguyen ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh).

In Saigon, the Trotskyists and Stalinists cooperated for three years (1933-36) in a united front around the legal newspaper La Lutte, which was published weekly in French to get around laws banning publications in the vernacular quoc nu or Vietnamese. Their candidates were elected to the municipal council. But after the French (she says the Popular Front govt was only from 1936) government signed a pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union in May 1935, the French, and soon the Indochinese, Communist Parties gave up their opposition to French militarism and colonialism. Following the October group led by Ho Huu Tuong, Ngo Van and some activists formed the League of Internationalist Communists for the Construction of the Fourth International, while other Trotskyists remained in the La Lutte alliance. Ngo Van set type for the new group’s clandestine literature.

Ngo Van also organised amongst workforce in his factory, who met under the guise of wedding and birthday parties – as all gatherings of more than 19 were illegal – and found himself the spokesperson when a strike for better wages broke out. Militant friends were arrested one after the other. The longer Van remained at liberty, the more acutely he appreciated their courage under torture.

At the age of 24, Ngo Van was arrested in the factory storeroom, where he secretly discussed anti-colonialist campaigns with other activists and hid underground literature and revolutionary publications from abroad. Van was imprisoned in the dreaded Maison Centrale in Saigon, where he, too, was tortured. Stalinist and Trotskyist prisoners were held together: Van later recalled that relations between them were wary, but civil, to avoid provoking tension to the advantage of the common enemy. He joined in a hunger strike demanding political prisoner status equal to that in France.

As a consequence, the prisoners were occasionally allowed French newspapers. This was how they learned about the Moscow Trials, in which Stalin was destroying what remained of the leadership of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. The Trotskyists were ‘overcome with a profound unease, and a thousand questions without answers kept going round in our heads’, Van wrote in his memoirs. In 1937 the Vietnamese Stalinists, under orders from Moscow, abruptly left the La Lutte group and denounced the Trotskyists as ‘agents of fascism’.

Van and his comrades were constantly being arrested, tortured, imprisoned then briefly freed once more. Once, he was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment simply for recommending books by Trotsky to a friend in a letter, and greeting in the street the well-known Trotskyist Ta thu Thau. Exiled to Travinh, in an island in the Mekong delta, at the end of 1940, he found himself in the middle of a peasant uprising that had engulfed western Cochinchina. Almost 6000 were arrested, over two hundred publicly executed, and thousands killed by bombing authorised by the Vichy governor general, Decoux. At about this time, Van discovered that he was suffering from tuberculosis.

The Japanese moved into south Vietnam in March 1945 and imposed a regime of martial law; allied forces bombed Saigon. The north of the country was by this time controlled by the Vietminh, as the armed front led by the Communist Party was called. They advocated an alliance with the imperialist Allies as a road to ‘national liberation’; the Trotskyists denounced this as an illusion and called on workers and peasants to rise up against all imperialist oppressors, of whatever nationality. Van and his comrades were elated when 30,000 miners in the Hon gai-Cam pha region set up elected councils to run the mines, public services and transport, and organised a literacy campaign.

Books[link]

• Việt Nam 1920-1945, révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale (1997)
• Revolutionaries they could not break, the fight for the Fourth International in Indochina 1930-1945 (1995)
• In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (2010)

External links[link]

• A short biography of Ngo Van
• Books by Ngo Van
• Short bio of libertarian socialist Ngo Van
• In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary

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