Hô Chi Minh (Nguyen Tat Tanh) (1890–1969) ERWIN S. FERNANDEZ A united Vietnam became inevitable only through the pragmatic vision of its great revo- lutionary and patriot, Hô Chi Minh. Vietnam, the “smaller dragon,” had been the locus of imperialist and colonial incursions prior to and afer 1884, frst by the Chinese, second by the French, and fnally by the Americans (Buttinger 1958). Unlike other colonies in Southeast Asia, Vietnam achieved a unifed state under an independent monarchy that lasted for nine centuries in a long struggle for national identity and survival but marred by civil war between the northern and southern ruling families. Tus, French colonialists would encounter the Can Vuong (Save the King) movement, a monarchist efort to reinstall the deposed emperor who had been replaced by a more pliable personality. But Vietnamese intellectuals including Hô Chi Minh, who sipped from the cup of European liberalism, quickly perceived the inadequacy of the status quo. It was certain then that the French, later the Americans, found them- selves in a confict between the old and the new, in a bitter struggle between tradition and modernity (McAlister & Mus 1970). THE PATRIOT-REVOLUTIONARY Born in 1890 as Nguyen Sinh Cung in Hoang Tru village, Nghe An province, Hô was the second son of a Confucian scholar and a local teacher’s daughter. His childhood was marked with the growth of his patriotic feel- ings as imbued by his father and his daily interactions with the people around him. Te International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Edited by Immanuel Ness. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Important at this stage was his acquaintance with the reformist Phan Boi Chau of the scholar-gentry class, who led an abortive uprising and who established the Duy Tan Hoi (Modernization Society) whose goal was to oust and supplant the French with a constitutional monarchy modeled afer Japan. Chau failed to recruit Hô for the same movement, now known as the Dong Du (Journey to the East). While at Quoc Hoc (National Academy) in Hue, Hô and his brother were involved in underground political activities. Te foremost of these happened in 1908 when peasant discontent led to a demonstration before the ofce of the French résident supérieur. Hô acted as the interpreter in a negotiation between the demonstrators and the ofce, causing his dismissal from the school. Afer engaging in various odd jobs, Hô decided to embark on a trip abroad to the “belly of the beast,” France. Using the alias Ba, Hô lef in 1911 aboard the Amiral Latouche-Treville working as assistant cook. For the next three years he would ply the seas from Asia and Africa to America and Europe; would settle in New York, then London where he maintained contacts with the Overseas Workers’ Association. Arriving in Paris in 1917, Hô met leading French radical and intellectual fgures and founded the Associ- ation de Patriotes Annamites (Association of Annamite Patriots) along with Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Van Truong. It was during the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference that he became notorious as Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot) as he delivered personally a petition to the delega- tions in the hope of applying US President Woodrow Wilson’s idea of self-determination to colonial peoples to French Indochina. Te DOI: 10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0709.pub3