Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), born Nguyen Sinh Cung, was a Vietnamese revolutionary, nationalist and statesman who led the struggle for Vietnamese independence from French colonial rule and later became the first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He founded the Indochinese Communist Party and the Viet Minh, and he remains the central figure of modern Vietnamese history, honoured in his country as Uncle Ho.

Early Life and the Search for Independence

Ho Chi Minh was born on 19 May 1890 in Kim Lien, in the province of Nghe An in central Vietnam, then part of French Indochina. His father was a scholar and local official who was dismissed for refusing to serve the colonial administration, and the family's poverty and patriotic traditions shaped the boy's outlook. He received a classical education before leaving home as a young man.

In 1911 he took work as a cook's assistant on a French steamer and spent the next year travelling the world. He lived in the United States, in Britain and in France, working at various jobs, and he studied the societies he saw and the suffering of colonial peoples. This experience convinced him that Vietnamese independence was a part of a wider struggle against imperialism.

Settling in Paris, he adopted the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, meaning Nguyen the Patriot, and joined the French socialist movement. When the Versailles peace conference met in 1919, he presented a petition on behalf of the Vietnamese people demanding civil rights and self-government; it was ignored. His turn to revolutionary socialism followed, and he became a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920.

Revolutionary Career and the Viet Minh

During the 1920s Ho travelled widely for the Communist International, at first in Moscow and then in China and Southeast Asia. He organised Vietnamese exiles, wrote articles and pamphlets, and founded the Revolutionary Youth League, which trained a generation of cadres. In 1930 he helped to unite the rival Vietnamese communist groups into a single party, which later became the Indochinese Communist Party.

He spent years under various aliases and was imprisoned and exiled repeatedly, sometimes believed dead. When France fell to Germany in 1940 and Japanese forces occupied Indochina, he returned to Vietnam after a thirty-year absence and organised the Viet Minh, a broad nationalist front committed to independence from both France and Japan. With the help of the American Office of Strategic Services he and his men fought the Japanese in the northern mountains.

In August 1945, following the Japanese surrender, the Viet Minh seized power in Hanoi in the August Revolution. On 2 September 1945 Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in a speech in Ba Dinh Square, quoting the American Declaration of Independence. He became president of the new state, though France refused to recognise it and war soon followed.

War, Diplomacy and Leadership

The First Indochina War lasted from 1946 to 1954. Ho Chi Minh combined military resistance with patient diplomacy, seeking support from the Soviet Union and the newly established People's Republic of China and appealing to world opinion. The decisive Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 forced France to negotiate, and the Geneva Accords of that year provisionally divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, pending elections that were never held.

After 1954 Ho served as president of North Vietnam and, though he relinquished some formal party posts, remained the unifying symbol and strategic guide of the Vietnamese revolution. He pursued a mixed policy of socialist construction in the north and support for the insurgency in the south, and he balanced relations with the Soviet Union and China during the Sino-Soviet split. He also carried out land reform, though with considerable controversy and local excesses that were later acknowledged.

His leadership style was austere and personal. He dressed simply, lived in a modest wooden house on stilts in Hanoi, and cultivated the image of a national father figure rather than a distant ruler. His writings and speeches, including the famous declaration that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, expressed a determined nationalism that transcended ideological differences and won him the loyalty of millions.

Death and Legacy

Ho Chi Minh died on 2 September 1969 in Hanoi, at the age of seventy-nine, six years before the war ended with the reunification of Vietnam under a communist government. He did not live to see the fall of Saigon in 1975, when the south was finally incorporated into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. His embalmed body is preserved in a mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi.

In Vietnam he is venerated as the founder of the nation and the father of independence. The country's largest city, formerly Saigon, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 in his honour. Statues, portraits and poems memorialise him throughout the country, and his thought is officially studied as a guide to policy. The cult of personality that surrounds him is unusual even by the standards of the communist world.

Outside Vietnam his reputation is more contested. Supporters see a nationalist hero who defeated two great powers and achieved the independence of his country; critics point to the human costs of the wars and the repression that followed reunification. Whatever the judgement, his role in the twentieth-century decolonisation of Asia and in the history of the Cold War is beyond dispute, and his name is inseparable from the making of modern Vietnam.

See also

• Vietnam War
• First Indochina War
• Viet Minh
• Battle of Dien Bien Phu