Ho Chi Minh - in The Soviet Union and China

In The Soviet Union and China

Part of a series on
Marxism–Leninism
Core tenets
  • Communism
  • Vanguard party
  • Democratic centralism
  • Marxist–Leninist atheism
  • Central planning
  • Proletarian internationalism
  • Single-party state
  • Socialist patriotism
Topics
  • Marxism
  • Leninism
  • Stalinism
  • Trotskyism
  • Maoism
  • Hoxhaism
  • De-Stalinization
  • Anti-Revisionism
  • Khrushchevism
People
  • Karl Marx
  • Vladimir Lenin
  • Joseph Stalin
  • Ernst Thälmann
  • Earl Browder
  • Gonchigiin Bumtsend
  • Josip Broz Tito
  • Fidel Castro
  • Che Guevara
  • Mao Zedong
  • Ho Chi Minh
  • Enver Hoxha
  • Mathieu Kérékou
  • Agostinho Neto
  • Samora Machel
  • Thomas Sankara
  • Alfonso Cano
Literature
  • Wage Labor and Capital
  • Materialism and Empirio-criticism
  • Imperialism
  • What Is to Be Done?
  • The State and Revolution
  • Dialectical and Historical Materialism
  • On Contradiction
  • Guerrilla Warfare
  • Fundamentals of Marxism–Leninism
History
  • Great October Socialist Revolution
  • Soviet Union
  • Comintern
  • Hungarian Soviet Republic
  • Spanish Civil War
  • World War II
  • Warsaw Pact
  • Greek Civil War
  • Chinese Revolution (1949)
  • Korean War
  • Cuban Revolution
  • De-Stalinization
  • Non-Aligned Movement
  • Sino-Soviet Split
  • Vietnam War
  • Portuguese Colonial War
  • Nicaraguan Revolution
  • Nepalese Civil War
  • Naxalite-Maoist insurgency
Related topics
  • Bolshevism
  • Leninism
  • Maoism
  • Marxism
  • Stalinism
  • Anti-Revisionism
  • Titoism
  • Trotskyism
  • Communism portal
  • Politics portal

In 1923, Nguyễn (Ho) left Paris for Moscow, where he was employed by the Comintern, studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and participated in the Fifth Comintern Congress in June 1924, before arriving in Canton (present-day Guangzhou), China, in November 1924. In June 1925, Hoang Van Chi claimed Nguyễn (Ho) betrayed Phan Boi Chau, the head of a rival revolutionary faction, to French police in Shanghai for 100,000 piastres. Nguyễn (Ho) later claimed he did it because he expected Chau's trial to stir up anti-French resentment, and because he needed the money to establish a communist organization. In Ho Chi Minh: A Life, William Duiker repudiated this hypothesis. Other sources claim that Nguyen Thuong Hien was responsible for Chau's capture. Chau never denounced Nguyễn.

In 1925-26 he organized "Youth Education Classes" and occasionally gave lectures at the Whampoa Military Academy on the revolutionary movement in Indochina. According to Duiker, he lived with and married a Chinese woman, Tang Tuyet Minh (Zeng Xueming), on 18 October 1926. When his comrades objected to the match, he told them, “I will get married despite your disapproval because I need a woman to teach me the language and keep house.” She was 21 and he was 36. They married in the same place where Zhou Enlai had married earlier and then lived together at the residence of a Comintern agent, Mikhail Borodin.

Chiang Kai-shek's anti-communist 1927 coup triggered a new round of exile for Nguyễn. He left Canton again in April 1927 and returned to Moscow, spending some of the summer of 1927 recuperating from tuberculosis in the Crimea, before returning to Paris once more in November. He then returned to Asia by way of Brussels, Berlin, Switzerland, and Italy, from where he sailed to Bangkok, Thailand, where he arrived in July 1928. “Although we have been separated for almost a year, our feelings for each other do not have to be said in order to be felt”, he reassured Minh in an intercepted letter.

He remained in Thailand, staying in the Thai village of Nachok, until late 1929 when he moved on to India, and Shanghai. In June 1931, he was arrested in Hong Kong. To reduce French pressure for extradition, it was (falsely) announced in 1932 that Nguyễn Ái Quốc had died. The British quietly released him in January 1933. He made his way back to Milan, Italy, where he served in a restaurant. The restaurant now serves traditional Lombard-cuisine and harbors a portrait of Ho Chi Minh on the wall of its main dining hall. He moved to the Soviet Union, where he spent several more years recovering from tuberculosis.

In 1938, he returned to China and served as an adviser with Chinese Communist armed forces, which later forced China's government to the island of Taiwan. Around 1940, Quốc began regularly using the name "Hồ Chí Minh", a Vietnamese name combining a common Vietnamese surname (Hồ, 胡) with a given name meaning "He Who enlightens" (from Sino-Vietnamese 志 明; Chí meaning 'will' (or spirit), and Minh meaning "light").

Read more about this topic:  Ho Chi Minh

Famous quotes containing the words soviet, union and/or china:

    One difference between Nazi and Soviet camps was that in the latter dying was a slower process.
    Terrence Des Pres (1939–1987)

    What should concern Massachusetts is not the Nebraska Bill, nor the Fugitive Slave Bill, but her own slaveholding and servility. Let the State dissolve her union with the slaveholder.... Let each inhabitant of the State dissolve his union with her, as long as she delays to do her duty.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve, I’ve dreamed of havin’ my own things about me. My spinet over there and a table here. My own chairs to rest upon and a dresser over there in that corner, and my own china and pewter shinin’ about me.
    Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)