Selected Hồ Chí Minh

First paperback published by LeftWord Books in April 2022
First eBook published by LeftWord Books in April 2022
LeftWord Books
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LeftWord Books and Vaam Prakashan are imprints of
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ISBN 978-93-92018-03-9 (ebook)
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© 2022, Vijay Prashad

For our teacher
Aijaz Ahmad
(1941–2022)

Victor Jara
El derecho de vivir en paz | 1971 | The Right to Live in Peace
Poeta Ho Chi Minh Que golpea de
Poet Ho Chi Minh, who punches
Vietnam A toda la humanidad
from Vietnam to all humanity. No
Ningún cañón borrará El surco de
cannon will erase the furrow of your
tu arrozal El derecho de vivir en
rice field. The right to live in peace.
paz
Indochina es el lugar Más allá del
ancho mar Donde revientan la flor
Con genocidio y napalm La luna es
una explosión Que funde todo el
clamor El derecho de vivir en paz
Indochina es el lugar Más allá del
ancho mar Donde revientan la flor
Con genocidio y napalm La luna es
una explosión Que funde todo el
clamor El derecho de vivir en paz
Tío Ho, nuestra canción Es fuego de
puro amor Es palomo palomar
Olivo del olivar Es el canto
universal Cadena que hará triunfar
El derecho de vivir en paz Es el
canto universal Cadena que hará
triunfar El derecho de vivir en paz
El derecho de vivir en paz

Indochina is the place beyond the
wide sea where they burst the flower
with genocide and napalm. The
moon is an explosion that melts all
the clamour. The right to live in
peace. Indochina is the place
beyond the wide sea where they
burst the flower with genocide and
napalm. The moon is an explosion
that melts all the clamour. The right
to live in peace. Uncle Ho, our song
Is fire of pure love It's dove dovecote.
It's olive tree olive grove. It is the
universal chant. Bonds that will
triumph. The right to live in peace.
It is the universal chant. Bonds that
will triumph. The right to live in
peace. The right to live in peace.
Translated by
Taroa Zúñiga Silva

Contents
Introduction: Hồ Chí Minh's Pen
Vijay Prashad
PART I
COLONIALISM

1. An Open Letter to M. Albert Sarraut, Minister of Colonies
2. Annamese Women and French Domination
3. Report on the National and Colonial Questions at the Fifth Congress of
the Communist International
4. The USSR and the Colonial Peoples
PART II
REVOLUTION

5. The Revolutionary Path
6. The Path That Led Me to Leninism
PART III
INDEPENDENCE AND WAR

7. Appeal Made on the Occasion of the Founding of the Indochinese
Communist Party
8. The Party's Line in the Period of the Democratic Front
9. Women
10. Prison Diary

11. Vietnamese Declaration of Independence
12. Letter to Pupils on the School Re-Opening Day
13. Letter to Old People
14. To the People's Executive Committees at All Levels (Bos, Provinces,
Districts and Villages)
15. Address to the Frenchmen in Indochina
16. Appeal to the Entire People to Wage the War of Resistance
17. Letter to Comrades in North Vietnam
18. Twelve Recommendations
19. Appeal for Patriotic Emulation
20. Message to Peasant Cadres
21. On Training Work and Study
22. Answers to Questions Put by the Press Regarding US Intervention in
Indochina
23. Political Report Read at the Second National Congress of the Vietnam
Workers' Party
24. Message Sent to the Artists on the Occasion of the 1951 Painting
Exhibition.
25. To Practise Thrift and Oppose Corruption, Waste, and Bureaucracy
26. Eight-Point Order Issued by the Government of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam
27. Report to the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
28. Appeal Made After the Successful Conclusion of the Geneva Agreements
29. Addressing the Conference Reviewing the First Land Reform Drive at
Thái Nguyên
30. Talk at the Opening of the People's University

31. Letter to the Conference of Healthcare Cadres
32. Excerpt from a Speech Delivered at the National Congress of Mutual Aid
Teams
33. Tenth Anniversary of National Day of the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam
34. Letter to the Vietnamese People Throughout the Country
35. Instructions Given at the Conference Reviewing Mass Education in the
First Half of 1956
36. Consolidation and Development of Ideological Unity Among MarxistLeninist Parties
37. Letter to the Peasants and Cadres on the Successful Completion of Land
Reform in the North
38. Speech at the Opening of the First Theoretical Course of Nguyễn Ái
Quốc School
39. Speech at a Mass Rally in New Delhi
40. Speech at the Congress of Cultural Workers
41. New Situation and Immediate Tasks of the Army
42. Excerpt from a Talk at a Cadres' Meeting Debating the Draft Law on
Marriage and the Family
43. Excerpt from a Speech Delivered at the Meeting Reviewing the
Managerial Work of Agricultural Producers' Co-Operatives
44. Message to Women Throughout the Country on the Occasion of the
50th Anniversary of International Women's Day
45. Speech Opening the Third National Congress of the Vietnam Workers'
Party
46. A Call to the Comrades and Fighters Throughout the Country
47. Exchange of Letters with US Presidents

48. The Last Testament of Ho Chi Minh

Introduction:
Hồ Chí Minh's Pen
by Vijay Prashad
VENERABLE HỒ

In early September 1969, a black lacquered wooden plaque was placed
on the door of an old and abandoned temple in Saigon.1 In vermillion, the
residents of the neighbouring hutments of the poor read, 'Temple of the
Venerable One' (Đền thờ Chủ). People from the locality marched into the
temple carrying flowers, incense, and fruit, bowing before the lamps and
candles that had been placed on the alter. Thousands of people began to
appear at the temple: workers and students, housewives and teachers,
soldiers and journalists. Mother Seven, who lived next door, took charge of
the temple as its priest.
Not long after, the local police superintendent sent along his policemen
who stood before the temple with their guns and bayonets at the ready.
When a police officer tried to remove the plaque, Mother Seven shouted that
the police were destroying the Temple of the Venerable One. Her alert
summoned a crowd of neighbours; they approached the police, whose
officer ordered them to charge. Mother Seven, at the front of the crowd,
removed her head scarf and said,
My boys! When I started life as a worker, my hair was jet black, and I
wore it in a big chignon. As you see, it is now white and thin. Never in
my life have I eaten my fill. Year in and year out, Mr Diệm and Mr Thiệu
have clamoured about independence and freedom, but we have never
been able to live in independence and freedom. On the contrary, we
watch the heaps of garbage grow higher in Saigon. We must look for
independence and freedom in another world. We believe there is a world
in which our aspirations can be realised. We believe in those who can
help our dreams come true. It is all quite simple. The gentlemen who rule

over us order you to come to kill us. We have only joss sticks in our
hands and no weapons at all.
Mother Seven referred to two presidents of South Vietnam, Ngô Đình
Diệm (1955-1963) and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (19671975), both subordinate to
the United States and the remains of the Vietnamese oligarchy. Mother
Seven understood that neither of these men – puppets of imperialism, as
they were often called – moved an agenda that benefitted her. The police
lowered their guns. Other women came and stood beside Mother Seven,
joining her in challenging the officers. The officer claimed he was just
following orders; he asked Mother Seven and other leaders to come and talk
to the district chief.
The next day, Mother Seven and a few others went to the home of the
district chief, who was guarded by men with machine guns. The district
chief was furious. 'Your excellency', said Mother Seven, 'Have you set foot in
the temple to see what is in there?'. 'Come and visit our temple', she said to
him. 'We practice the cult of the Venerable, that is a person who has
dedicated his life to the happiness of the people and to the independence of
the country'.
Mother Seven's sincerity irked the police chief. 'Who are you
worshipping if not the Venerable Hò? Who else in the country apart from
Mr Hồ Chí Minh could be called “Venerable”? There never used to be
anyone saying prayers in that deserted temple, but as soon as Mr Hò died,
the decrepit old temple suddenly attracted everyone imaginable! You watch
out! Don't go too far. And if you do, don't complain about my being too
severe!'
Hồ Chí Minh died on 2 September 1969 in Hanoi. The Democratic
Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) declared a week of mourning. The Republic of
Vietnam – south of the 17th parallel – banned any commemoration. The
police chief had been tasked to prevent any kind of celebration of his life,
including the conversion of an abandoned temple. Even the police chief had
to admit: this man was venerable, and none other seemed to match him. The
confounded superintendent was one more functionary of a defunct system,

whose working-class creatively found a way to exercise their sorrow at the
loss of the man that they knew as Bác Hò or Uncle Hò.
VIETNAM HAS A RIGHT TO BE FREE

Nguyễn Sinh Cung was born in Hoang Tru in Nghệ An Province on 19
May 1890.2 Although his father – Nguyễn Sinh Sắc – was a Confucian
scholar, and although he studied at a Confucian school, the overwhelming
influence on his life was the feeling of patriotism. France had conquered
Vietnam in 1885, only five years before Nguyễn Sinh Cung was born.
During his youth, sections of the older declining elite tried to eject the
French – through insurrections such as the Cần Vương movement – but
then took their entire Confucian heritage to the door of the colonial
administrators and became their compradors. The exhaustion of the older
regime in the face of the brutal dynamism of French colonial power
disturbed men like Nguyễn Sinh Sắc. That is why he sent his son – who
would later become Ho Chi Minh3 – to French schools, hoping that he
would learn about modernity from the French and then free his country. In
1946, Ho Chi Minh told the US journalist David Schoenbrun, 'Our parents
give us a name and tell us about where we come from. That doesn't matter.
What really matters is where we are going'.4 In his schools, including the
prestigious Quốc Học Academy in Huế, the old imperial capital, Ho Chi
Minh propagated his instinctual patriotic and nationalist ideas. In May
1910, Ho Chi Minh offered to interpret for some agricultural workers and
peasants from the village of Công Lương, who came to Huế to protest
French colonial taxes. For this act, Ho Chi Minh was expelled from his
school.
Ho Chi Minh's earliest writings – written a decade after this expulsion –
are suffused with great hatred of the cruelty of French colonialism, which –
in 1922 – he called 'colonial sadism' [Documents 1 and 2]. These early
writings from La Paria are filled with stories of brutality: a man beaten and
shot to death for looking into the house of a French colonial-settler; a man
hung from the rafters by a missionary and beaten to death for being
suspected of theft; high taxes leaving the peasants starving, their bowls filled
with opium rather than food. Words like 'duty', 'humanity', and 'civilisation',

he wrote in 1923, are not what they seem: 'What is this duty? You showed
what it is throughout your speech. It is markets, competition, interests,
privileges. Trade and finance are things that express your “humanity”. Taxes,
forced labour, excessive exploitation, that is the summing up of your
civilisation'.5
The politics available in Indochina did not draw in this young man since
they largely appealed to the elite. Many years ago, the communist historian
Nguyễn Khắc Viện reflected on this elite strain of politics with clarity, saying
that the men who advanced the anti-colonial agenda were 'totally incapable
of organising a strike, working for years on end in mines or on plantations,
waging guerilla warfare for decades, or plodding through the mud of rice
paddies' (the first directive of the Communist Party, however, asked its
members to do just these things 'to build a base of support among the
people').6 The most powerful strand of this elite-facing politics was led by
Phan Châu Trinh (1872-1926), who promoted the view that his country's
future would emerge out of French civilisation, and that colonialism was the
instrument for the introduction of these higher forms of life into Indochina.
French liberals, Phan Châu Trinh argued, would hand over the key to
modernity for the Vietnamese. Given the surrender of the old aristocratic
elite to the French and its retreat into a fantasy version of Confucianism, at
least Phan Châu Trinh hoped to revive the progressive trends in Vietnamese
culture and modernise Vietnamese society. The other political tendency was
led by Phan Bội Châu (1867-1940), who – inspired by Japan's defeat of
Tsarist Russia in 1904-05 – sought the future not in Paris but in Tokyo, not
in French civilisation but in pan-Asianism. It tells us something about Ho
Chi Minh's orientation at the time that he boarded the Admiral LatoucheTreville in 1911 for France and not the Hokuto Maru bound for Nagasaki.
From 1911 to 1941, Ho Chi Minh remained outside his homeland, but
his thought was focused on it. He travelled around the Atlantic Ocean,
working on a ship, discovering the width and breath of the world, learning
from the sailors about their deep histories of radicalism. When he settled in
France, he contacted the Vietnamese exiles, throwing himself into their
activity, finding his way into the socialist movement, trying to convince
them to take a stronger position against colonial sadism. In 1960, writing for
a Soviet magazine on his first brush with Leninism, Ho Chi Minh described

how a comrade gave him Lenin's thesis on the national and colonial
questions that had been published in L'Humanité on 16-17 July 1920. 'There
were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis', Ho Chi Minh
recalled, 'but by reading it again and again, finally, I could grasp the main
part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness, and confidence it
instilled in me! I was overjoyed to tears' [Documents 6]. Ho Chi Minh then
went to his comrades and said, 'This is what we need; this is the path to our
liberation!'
What is this path?
1. That national liberation is a key part of the world revolution, and
therefore that anti-colonial national movements had to be supported by
revolutionaries.
2. That national liberation itself was not possible without the social
revolution so that a bourgeois nationalist project would be incomplete
without the emancipation of the workers and the peasants.
Freedom for the Vietnamese people was not going to come through
French colonialism or through pan-Asianism. It required a national
liberation project that was rooted in the liberation of the Vietnamese people
from French imperialism, from the wretched side of their social and cultural
inheritance, from the rigor mortis of landlordism, and from capitalist
exploitation. This realisation did not come whole-cloth to Ho Chi Minh
from Lenin's texts on the colonial and national question; elements of such
clarity had been with him since his time as a young student, but the various
elements came together in France, where he made a life-time commitment
to the twin movements of national liberation and communism. Fragments
of these ideas had been available to Ho Chi Minh in the Group of Annamese
Patriots – created by Phan Châu Trinh in 1911 – and in the French socialist
and communist parties, where Ho Chi Minh had his first experience
amongst Vietnamese communists. In July 1923, Ho Chi Minh decamped for
Moscow, hoping to develop further his ideas of Leninism in the USSR and to
find a way to return to Vietnam to put those ideas into practice.
In Moscow, Ho Chi Minh met radicals from other colonised countries
and communists from Soviet Republics in Central Asia. These interactions

and his study amongst the Communist International officials showed Ho
Chi Minh the validity of Lenin's unity of communist and national liberation
struggles. He watched his comrades from Vietnam and elsewhere imbibe the
ambitious air of the world revolution, singing the Internationale in the
Opera House.7 He studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the
East and worked at the Comintern secretariat, rubbing shoulders with
Bolsheviks and radicals from across the world.8 In December 1923, the
Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam interviewed Ho Chi Minh, who recounted the
story of colonial sadism, 'a spasm of almost physical revulsion' going
through his body as he spoke of French colonialism.9 Mandelstam asked Ho
Chi Minh about the movement led by Mahatma Gandhi in India and if there
was a reflection of such a movement in Vietnam. 'No. The Annamese people
– peasants – live, burned in the most profound night, with no newspapers,
no conception of what's happening in the world. It's night, actual night'. 'In
conversation', Mandelstam wrote, Ho Chi Minh 'often uses the word
“brothers”. His “brothers” are Negroes, Hindus, Syrians, Chinese'.10 It is wellworth acknowledging the fact that Ho Chi Minh, as part of this
internationalism, was one of the founders of the Communist Party of
Malaya (1930) and the Communist Party of Siam (1942).
In 1924, Ho Chi Minh wrote in a report for the Fifth Comintern
meeting, 'The revolt of the colonial peasants is imminent. They have already
risen in several colonies, but each time their rebellions have been drowned
in blood. If they now seem resigned, that is solely for lack of organisation
and leadership. It is the duty of the Communist International to work
toward that union' [Document 3]. It was to conduct this task that Ho Chi
Minh left Moscow in the autumn of 1924 for Guangzhou (Canton), where
he formed the Thanh nién, the Vietnam Revolutionary Young Comrades
League or RYCL (Hội Việt Nam Cách mạng Thanh niên). This group
emerged as the first major front of Vietnamese revolutionaries to work both
outside Vietnam and behind the lines of the French colony. Ho Chi Minh
taught at the Special Political Institute for the Vietnamese Revolution, where
his lectures on the history and necessity of revolution would later be
published as The Revolutionary Path [Document 5]. The spinal cord of
communism began to grow inside the Vietnamese revolution.

In Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh and his comrades trained a generation of
communists, many of them returning to Vietnam to strengthen the
organisations of the peasantry, the working-class, and the oppressed
sections. A strike in August 1925 at Saigon Arsenal showed that the
Vietnamese working-class – still relatively small in numbers – had a high
level of political consciousness; the workers struck to block the passage of a
French warship that was en route to China as part of an imperialist
adventure. One of the leaders of that strike – Ton Duc Thang – had cut his
teeth in the great mutiny of three French warships in the Black Sea in 1919;
led by communists such as André Marty and others, who protested – among
other things – against the imperialist attack on the new Soviet Republic.
Vietnam was wracked by a wave of strikes in the last years of the 1920s,
culminating in the establishment in July 1929 of the Tonkin Red Federation
of Trade Unions, which eventually became the Vietnam General
Confederation of Labour. In parts of northern Vietnam, the peasants formed
associations (xã bộ nông), which drew in tens of thousands of agricultural
workers and farmers. Hoàng Quốc Việt, later a leader of the Vietnamese
trade union movement, recalled how an RYCL cadre met him in Haiphong
and taught him the elements of Marxism. 'He talked to me about labour,
about workers and capitalists, about surplus value. Every word of his
penetrated my mind like water in a piece of dry chalk'.11 A Women's Labour
Study Association (Nữ công Học hội) was set up in Huế in 1926; this was a
sign of broader politicisation of women and youth that would eventually
lead into the anti-colonial and socialist movement.12
In China, meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist
(Kuomintang) cracked down on the Communist Party of China, which had
hosted Ho Chi Minh and the RYCL. Ho Chi Minh fled to Moscow,
regrouped, and then arrived in Hong Kong to try and repair the sectarian
splits that had torn apart the RYCL and other anti-colonial Vietnamese
forces. In a village near Kowloon, Hong Kong, in February 1930, Ho Chi
Minh gathered the three main communist forces together. At the meeting,
the delegates began to argue with each other. Ho Chi Minh later recalled
that he stopped the bickering. 'We won't discuss the story', he said. 'I come
here with the responsibility of unifying Communist forces. The line of the
Communists is as follows: first make the bourgeois-democratic revolution,

later make the socialist revolution'.13 They founded the Communist Party of
Vietnam (CPV), which at the time only had 211 members [Document 7]. In
October 1930, the party was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (to
organise left forces in Vietnam, Kampuchea, and Laos); in 1951, that party
was dissolved, and the Workers' Party of Vietnam was formed (alongside left
parties in Kampuchea and Laos). In 1976, after the unification of North and
South Vietnam, the Workers' Party of Vietnam joined with the People's
Revolutionary Party of South Vietnam to create the Communist Party of
Vietnam, which now governs the country. The CPV is a direct heir of the
party founded in February 1930.
While the communists met in Kowloon, a mutiny of colonial troops
broke out in Yen Bai, near the Vietnam-China border. It was put down in
hours. Then, in Tonkin, the Vietnamese nationalists – Việt Nam Quốc Dân
Đảng (VNQDD) – initiated a failed insurrection. The French rolled out the
guillotine and decapitated the VNQDD, which meant that space opened for
the communists to wrest leadership of the patriotic sections of the country.
But the mutiny and the insurrection came alongside a range of workers'
strikes, from the seizure of the Phú Riềng Đỏ rubber plantation (February
1930) to the revolt at the Nam Định textile mill (March 1930) to the protest
of workers at the match factory and sawmill in Bắc Kỳ (April 1930).14 This
rumble was a consequence of the deterioration of living standards
occasioned by French colonial attempts to export the crisis of capitalism,
spurred by the Depression of 1929, to the colonies.15 Building on these
stirrings, the CPV called for Vietnam-wide demonstrations on 1 May 1930.
These protests escalated into the Nghệ-Tĩnh Soviet (the name taken from
the two districts of Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh, where 2,011 of the 2,400 CPV
party members lived). In these Soviets, which were focused on the NghệTĩnh Soviet, the enthusiastic peasantry seized grain stores and fought to
overthrow landlordism, whereas the workers struck in the name of Lenin
and Rosa Luxemburg, a direct nod to the internationalism that had entered
these struggles.16 The French crushed this uprising, arresting and murdering
hundreds of CPV members and other leaders of the uprising. The weakness
of the CPV was clear to its leadership, which in October 1930 discussed the
importance of the creation of a democratic front and of the enhancement of
the 'independent character' of the workers and peasants struggles. These

debates – with Ho Chi Minh and Trần Phú at their core – opened
discussions about the dialectic between the democratic national revolution
and the necessity of building the power of the working-class, the peasantry,
and the masses (dan-chung).
Between 1931 and 1941, the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) built
up the party apparatus against terrible repression from the French colonial
authorities, who arrested the ICP leaders at various moments. About 10,000
communists and nationalists sat in French colonial prisons in this period, a
school for these militants who – if they survived – had their steel tempered
by the ruthlessness of the colonial authorities. Ho Chi Minh was arrested in
Hong Kong in June 1931 and held there until he was able to leave in January
1933. Ho Chi Minh arrived in Moscow in July 1934. In the Soviet Union, Ho
Chi Minh taught at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute and in the Indochinese
section of the Stalin School and the Scientific Institute for the Study of
National and Colonial Problems, maintained contact with the core
leadership of the ICP (especially Hà Huy Tập, with whom he had some
disagreements over the arrests of party members in 1931), and sent his key
inputs to the party (some of it published in the party's mass paper in Saigon,
La Lutte). At the Seventh Comintern meeting in 1935, Nguyễn Thị Minh
Khai made the argument that the ICP 'mobilise all its forces to create a
broad front to struggle for peace'. This was the view that had been put by Ho
Chi Minh to the Comintern Executive Committee the previous year when
he argued that party members did not grasp the united front implications of
the 'bourgeois-democratic revolution' phase of the time.17
From 1935 onwards, the ICP toned down the rhetoric of social
revolution and strengthened its role in Vietnamese political culture as the
spear of patriotism and national liberation. In September 1936, the party
cadre was told that the main task was the 'emancipation of nations'.18 The
arrival of the Popular Front government in France, which included Socialists
in the cabinet, enabled the pressure to be lifted from the ICP, whose
members were released from prison; this springtime for the ICP lasted until
September 1939. In this period, the ICP emerged as the major anti-colonial
force, with Hà Huy Tập and Lê Hồng Phong working together – under the
Comintern principles agreed upon by Ho Chi Minh – to establish first a
United Anti-Imperialist Popular Front (1935) and then Việt Nam độc lập

đồng minh or the Vietminh (1941). The general orientation of these fronts
was against French imperialism and against Vietnamese feudal forces, who
had allied themselves with the French. Despite debates in the ICP, the tenor
was to advance the national democratic agenda while building the
independent organisations of the masses. As part of the struggle, the ICP
initiated an insurrection in Bắc Sơn, in northeast Vietnam, which was
crushed by the French. The bulk of the ICP leadership was shot to death in
August 1941 (including Hà Huy Tập and Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai), with
others imprisoned for long periods (Lê Hồng Phong died in prison). Despite
this debacle, the base of the ICP remained intact, now the bulwark of anticolonialism and anti-feudalism.
Ho Chi Minh returned to China in late 1938 and went to work with the
Eighth Army of the Chinese Communists, although through Nguyễn Thị
Minh Khai, Phạm Văn Đồng, and Võ Nguyên Giáp he was in direct touch
with the ICP inside Vietnam. In Notre Voix, a Saigon newspaper, Ho Chi
Minh wrote about the war effort and the need for a united front. In 1939, Ho
Chi Minh sent a report to the Communist International, in which he wrote
– in precis – about the situation in Vietnam and of the importance for the
ICP to strengthen its grip on the popular mood against French colonialism
[Document 8]. In 1940, several elements of the international situation
confirmed Ho Chi Minh's view that the ICP had to drive a national
liberation strategy: the Japanese military had made considerable gains in
southern China (in Guangxi and Yunnan); the Nazi German army defeated
the French in May 1940; by June the French capitulated to the Nazi project
with the Vichy regime, and Japan – which had an alliance with Nazi
Germany – now moved into Vietnam as an ally of the Vichy French. Ho Chi
Minh realised that only the ICP could lead the resistance against the Vichy
French and the Japanese imperial army, which is why by October, he moved
with a core group to Kunming, closer to Vietnam; it was from here that the
Vietminh was organised.
It was during this travel closer and closer to Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh
adopted the name by which we know him, Ho Chi Minh – He Who
Enlightens. As the communists set up their camps, they would produce
pamphlets, and they would conduct classes. One of these was called The
Road to Liberation (con duong giai phong), while their newspaper was called

Independent Vietnam (Vietnam Doc Lap). Eventually, the Party members
arrived inside Vietnam, setting up their camp at Pác Bó. This was the first
time that Ho Chi Minh had been home in thirty years.
On 10 May 1941, the ICP held its Eight Plenum in Pác Bó, with Ho Chi
Minh as chair. The Party decided that their focus had to be to defeat
imperialism, although it was clear that the social revolution had to remain as
their strategic goal. Due to the intensification of imperialist pressure, 'the
landlords, rich peasants, and a segment of the native bourgeois class have
greatly changed their attitude', the leaders wrote. If earlier these classes were
the 'reserve army of the antirevolutionary imperialists, they have now
become the reserve army of the revolution'. What does this mean for the
social revolution?
This does not mean that our Party is ignoring the problems of class
struggle in the Indochinese revolution. No, the problem of class struggle
will continue to exist. But at the present time, the nation has prime
importance, and all demands that are of benefit to a specific class, but are
harmful to the national interest, must be subordinated to the survival of
the nation and the race. At this moment, if we do not resolve the
problem of national liberation, and do not demand independence and
freedom for the entire people, then not only will the entire people of our
nation continue to live the life of beasts, but also the particular interests
of individual social classes will not be achieved for thousands of years.19
Party leaders left Pác Bó to spread out across the country and build the
Vietminh as well as to strengthen the Party itself. Ho Chi Minh held classes
on Marxism-Leninism in the area, conti...